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Volume 51
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PUBLISHER John Stefancik
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Chris D. Dollar, Ann Levelle, John Page Williams CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Rafael Alvarez, Ann Eichenmuller, Robert Gustafson, Mark Hendricks, Marty LeGrand, Kate Livie, Nancy Taylor Robson, Charlie Youngmann
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CONTENTS
Columns 20 Chesapeake Almanac Looking back at 60 years of eagle surveys on Virginia’s rivers—Capt. John Page Williams
28 Chesapeake Chef A seafaring tale of a turkey that flew the coop—Rafael Alvarez
32 On Boats: Nimbus T11
Capt. John Page Williams reviews a distinctive family boat for three-season Bay boating.
BAY PARTNERS
DEPARTMENTS
ISLAND LIFE 50
56 58
6 From the Editor 64 Stern Lines
Real Estate Boat Brokerage
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 Volume 51 Number 7
Features 38 Carving Out a Legacy
The McNairs of Virginia’s Eastern Shore make decoys a family tradition—Kate Livie
8 Wingate, Md.
BALTIMORE 28
WASHINGTON D.C. 64
14 Easton, Md.
MD
ANNAPOLIS
DE
ST. MICHAELS 14
44 Topping, Va.
Chesapeake oyster farms find their merroir—Kristina Gaddy
14 Cultivating Change
A new nonprofit seeks inclusivity in aquaculture on the Bay and beyond—Kate Livie
64 National Harbor, Md.
50
VA 44 DELTAVILLE
8 Ghost Story
Vanishing forests tell a tale of rising water—John Upton
50 Smith Island, Md.
8
50 Island Life Jay Fleming shares his photographic discovery
Talk of the Bay
28 Baltimore 38 Craddockville, Va.
44 Bay to Table
of Chesapeake’s treasured islands.
20 Williamsburg, VA.
20
38
VA
CAPE CHARLES
On the Cover by Caroline Phillips November/December 2021
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
5
FROM THE EDITOR
What’s Your Chesapeake Bay Tradition? by Meg Walburn Viviano
“H
eritage” is a word we hear a lot this time of year, so close to Thanksgiving. On the dinner table, there’s the heritage turkey—organic, free-range, and four times the cost of a grocery storebought bird. Martha Stewart says we all need a heritage turkey; these rare, old breeds are part of our nation’s history. She raises and butchers her own, of course. Then there’s the heritage we each claim as our inherited identity. The nonprofit genealogy site FamilySearch defines it as “the values, traditions, culture, and artifacts handed down by previous generations.” To natives of the Chesapeake Bay THE ULTIMATE OYSTER OPENER! region, heritage is especially Like important. The Bay comes with a strong sense of place, whether you’re a descendant of Virginia’s seven A to Algonquin-speaking, federally open ‘em? recognized tribes; a third-generation 1waterman;2or you simply grew up on Over 1 MILLION oysters opened without injury! FAST, EASY!have returned to raise the SAFE, Bay and horizontally,oysters keeps juices in the shell. Over 1 Opens MILLION your own family here. Now ANYONE can open oysters! opened without injury! 207-592-4775 • www.awshucksoysteropener.com Often it’s the childhood memories and stories handed down that stick with us—and that’s certainly true for the McNair family of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The patriarch, a gifted decoy carver, has passed his art down to his two sons and, in turn, their children— even the youngest grandchildren have held carving tools. As you’ll see on page 38, the Eastern Shore is what ties this family together. Across the Bay on the Opens horizontally, keeps juices ters opened without injury! FAST, SAFE, EASY! in the shell - Now ANYONE Rappahannock River, two cousins zontally, keeps juices in theopen shell. can SAFELY oysters! were inspired to preserve their ANYONE can open oysters! 207-592–4775 heritage by reviving their family’s 5 • www.awshucksoysteropener.com
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November/December 2021
200-year-old oyster lease … and couldn’t have guessed it would become one of the region’s bestknown oyster farms, complete with a beautiful onsite tasting experience. I dare say November is a great time to look at the heritage of oyster aquaculture (page 44). Yum! Along with these thriving legacies, there are also Bay legacies just fighting to survive. Some of these reside on Smith and Tangier islands, isolated places where the greatest risk (aside from sea level rise) is the exodus of the younger generations to the mainland. Photographer Jay Fleming has made it his mission to capture the islands’ cultural heritage before it fades, and he shares his poignant photos—which often speak louder than words (page 50). Yes, heritage is important on the Chesapeake, informing how we eat, work, spend time with our families, and fill our summers. And every passing season is a chance to carry on the special traditions of the Bay. As this issue went to press, we learned of the death of Smith Island waterman Dwight Marshall, who is featured in Fleming’s photos. All of us at CBM send our condolences to his family and friends.
Meg Walburn Viviano grew up boating on the Magothy River. She started as a Chesapeake Bay Magazine intern, launched the Bay Bulletin online news site in 2017, and now leads all of CBM’s media content. Reach her at meg@chesapeakebaymagazine.com.
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P L A N YO U R S TAY AT V I S ITA N N A P O LI S .O RG
TALK OF THE BAY
Ghost Story
Vanishing forests tell a tale of rising water by John Upton
JAY FLEMING
W
hen North Carolina residents Susan McGuirk and her husband bought a holiday house on a large waterfront plot in Wingate, in Maryland’s Dorchester County, the stately old home hadn’t been occupied for more than a decade. “We pulled into the driveway and it was love at first sight,” she said. “Once inside, it was obvious just how well built the house was.” Since then, they’ve sealed up the original wavy glass windows, fixed walls, installed insulation and new plumbing and wiring, and raised the entire waterfront property to protect against regular flooding. And as they’ve rehabilitated what McGuirk called a
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 8
“gem,” they’ve watched the coastal landscape around it change as well. “The point that we can see when we look out there is called Crab Point, and when we bought the place in 2010 there were 80 trees on that point,” McGuirk said. “Now there’s one. They’ve fallen and gone.” The Chesapeake has become a global hotspot for the emergence of ghost forests—stands of dead and leafless trees before they topple into piles of logs. Within the Chesapeake, Dorchester County may be the greatest hotspot of all. Throughout the rural and forested land that surrounds their house, Susan points out “acres and acres” of dead
November/December 2021
Left: The McGuirks’ home in Wingate, raised to prevent flooding. Right: Ghost trees in Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge
November/December 2021
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
9
trees. “There’s a little church called Emmanuel Episcopal Church, and it is surrounded by all those dead trees.” The culprit of arboreal mortality tends to be environmental change. In Colorado, ghost forests are being created by beetles attacking pines at higher altitudes as temperatures warm. In California, forest overcrowding from a century of wildfire suppression
aligned—a full moon, easterly winds, high tide—it gets pretty dicey,” McGuirk said. The appearance of these assemblages of towering deadwood along the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf coasts have captured the fascination of national media outlets, which point to them in photo essays as flamboyant evidence of the grim reality of climate change.
JAY FLEMING
Remains of trees show the damage from saltwater intrusion.
followed by severe drought left more than 100 million trees dead. Here, the key culprit is salt, which can kill a tree outright or make it more susceptible to attacks by pests. Global sea rise caused by heattrapping pollution and a gradual sinking of the land around the Chesapeake have combined to create some of the world’s fastest local rates of sea rise. That’s been pushing saltwater higher up shorelines, where it’s seeping into sweeping stretches of intact forest and killing them off. McGuirk hasn’t been able to figure out the exact age of the house, but she said local oral history suggests it was built well over a century ago. Data gathered by scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) indicate the property would have been dry back then, most likely covered with forest or farmland. Now, the house is surrounded by lawn, mud and marsh, and the land is regularly covered by water spilling up from an estuary. “When everything is
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 10
The natural sinking of the land following the prehistoric retreat of glaciers from North America is also driving up water levels throughout the region, compounding the briny impacts of climate change. And as the forests die back, their roots decompose, lowering the ground further still. As coastal woodlands die, birds and other wildlife that had depended upon them for food and habitat are forced inland. The changes are also affecting parcels of land that in some instances have been owned by the same families for hundreds of years. “As we start to lose forests, these landowners are losing their identity— they’re losing how they can use the land,” said Matthew Hurd, a forester with the Maryland Forest Service. “For me there’s a huge mental shift between someone who owns a forest and manages it versus someone who has marsh.” Coastal timberlands and farmlands are losing value as salt continues its upward march. Rising sea
November/December 2021
levels can have corrosive effects on the fertility of coastal lands, with knockout punches often delivered by storm surges that leave large doses of salt behind as they subside. Coastal ecologists point out that the ghost forests of the Chesapeake don’t represent local ecological carnage, so much as a transformation from one ecosystem to another. Beneath the desiccating branches of dead trees, marshland is seizing the soggy land from forests that can’t abide the soil’s new chemistry. To survive as seas rise, marshes can grow vertically—though only up to a point before they get swamped. They can also migrate inland, conquering areas that formerly harbored forests, farms, and yards. Experts point to ghost forests as visually arresting indicators of marsh migration. Marshes provide critical habitat for fish and ducks. They also offer powerful natural protections for coastal communities and infrastructure from flooding during storms. More than half of wetlands nationwide are estimated to have been destroyed by development and other forces, though they remain widespread in relatively undeveloped places like Dorchester County. With few roads or buildings blocking their migration, research by Climate Central’s sea level scientists has indicated marshes could expand their territory in Dorchester County by more than a third from 2000 to 2050. Other Eastern Shore counties are projected to see even bigger expansions of marshland. The new marshes aren’t perfect replicas of the old ones. An invasive variety of Phragmites (aka reeds) tends to beat native marshland species into new areas as trees start to die back and the forest canopy opens up. The reeds’ feathery plumes can tower on rigid stems over a dozen feet. Native wildlife struggle to use the Phragmites for nesting and foraging, compared with native plants.
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JOHN UPTON
restore forests that are doomed to die. “This was our transition zone plot, which was supposed to have 50 percent living and 50 percent dead trees,” he said, pointing around at an abundance of dead snags. “We established it last year and I would say
there’s nowhere close to 50 percent living trees right now.” A few hundred feet further inland, while talking in the cool shade of a large pine, Kirwan said the tree overhead might look healthy, but that it was already destined to be killed by the rising concentrations of salt in the soil beneath it. “The little stuff dies before the big stuff,” Kirwan said. “You’ll see lots of healthy-looking pine trees but then you look below you and there’s nothing in the understory to take their place. So the forest, even though it looks healthy, it’s already effectively dead. Whenever those large trees die, it’ll only be marsh.” John Upton is the Partnership Journalism Editor at Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group that collaborated with Chesapeake Bay Magazine on this story.
Above: VIMS researcher Yaping Chen extracts a sediment core at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Below: The McGuirks’ house was raised to avoid rising water.
JAY FLEMING
“We’re seeing a real expansion of that species as the forest retreats,” said Keryn Gedan, a biologist at George Washington University. “We think it just does better in the shady conditions than the native grass marshes. It’s the first one to take advantage of the increasing light availability.” Matt Kirwan, a marsh scientist at VIMS, began investigating the emergence of ghost forests in 2000 as an undergraduate student. His research has found that 80,000 acres of forestland and 20,000 acres of farmland have transformed to marshland since the 1850s across the Chesapeake Bay. “We’re right at the edge of a live forest and a dead forest,” he said on a hot late morning in early June as he bushwhacked through dying coastal forest near the Moneystump Swamp in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, about 20 miles north of McGuirk’s vacation home. Kirwan was there leading a team of scientists from his lab on a weeklong fieldwork campaign as they gathered data from sites from Virginia to Delaware. The fieldwork was part of a multiyear effort to monitor physical and chemical changes as coastal forestland succumbs to marshland. Research by Kirwan’s and other labs is helping to predict the emergence of ghost forests. This could help avoid costly efforts to protect and
November/December 2021
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
13
TALK OF THE BAY
Cultivating Change
A new nonprofit seeks inclusivity in aquaculture by Kate Livie
CAROLINE PHILLIPS
I
n the summer of 2020, as the pandemic surged across the country, many of us watched from lockdown isolation at the horror of George Floyd’s killing and the BLM protests that followed in its wake. In the months that followed, the aftermath hit home as individuals, companies, and organizations began to acknowledge the system of racism in our own communities and workplaces.
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 14
Imani Black’s maritime roots go back for generations on the Eastern Shore.
Watching the scenes unfold from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Imani Black was struck by the implications for her industry. Then an oyster hatchery manager at Hoopers Island Oyster Company, she’d long accepted that she would be the only woman working in
November/December 2021
the crews and labs on oyster farms. As a recent graduate of Old Dominion University who’d played on their Division 1 women’s lacrosse team, Black often had to lift cages of oysters from the hands of well-meaning male coworkers that had taken them away from her for being “too heavy.” Black quickly learned to stand her ground as the lone female presence on all-male oyster farms. But as the Black
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Lives Matter movement grew and pushed for change, Black realized her gender wasn’t the only thing that set her apart. In all of those grow-out locations, in all of those hatcheries, she hadn’t just been the only woman, but also the only woman of color. This was, she felt, deeply problematic. She decided to do something about it. Black spent the rest of that long, hot summer of unrest figuring out a way to make aquaculture an equitable and welcoming place. She came away with two big takeaways. Addressing the lack of diversity in her industry came down to education and community. Like a lot of sciencedominated fields, oyster farming and seed hatcheries were almost entirely white and male, with the only people of color working in the manual labor force rather than the leadership. Change on that front needed to start early in schools, Black felt, helping students of color— particularly girls—to connect with marine biology in meaningful, deep ways. Black herself had been deeply impacted by a summer camp she’d attended at age seven at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences at Horn Point, an experience she credits with setting her on her life’s path. “We were catching striped bass, we were planting submerged aquatic vegetation, we were planting oysters. I loved it. When my mom came to pick me up, I did not stop talking. From Cambridge to Chestertown, I just couldn’t stop sharing how excited I was about all the things I learned.” Black is a Chestertown native whose maritime roots go back for generations on the Eastern Shore. Feeling buoyed and supported by those ties (“working on the water is in my
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 16
blood”), she felt strongly that to bring more people of color into aquaculture, there needed to be a supportive, knowledgeable family welcoming them to the industry. To date, the only Black-owned oyster farm she had ever seen was on an episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, and that singularity was troubling. It would be critical to circle the wagons within the current
Black wants to welcome more women of color to aquaculture.
aquaculture field as much as possible, seeking out people already working in oyster farming and bringing them together as a community. Black wasn’t quite sure yet how best to accomplish these two goals, but one thing was for sure: Her initiative needed to go further than ticking the diversity box, something she’d seen over and over as corporations and businesses tried to acknowledge the new “equity and inclusion” climate through plans and statements. Words were cheap. Black was interested in action. She felt the call. “I sat at my kitchen table, and I thought, I haven’t
November/December 2021
seen any other women of color in aquaculture, and this is an industry that I love. I have to get over my impostor syndrome, because this is a lot bigger than me. Maybe it’s time that I step up and try to figure it out. I didn’t know how to start, or how to launch a nonprofit. But I just knew that I needed to—I had to do it.” On her own, with some encouragement from her former aquaculture professors at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Black decided the way to provide on-the-ground solutions was by creating a new nonprofit. Called Minorities in Aquaculture, the mission would be focused on education and community. By educating minority women about the restorative benefits provided by local and global aquaculture through workshops, mentorships, and other career cultivation opportunities, Minorities in Aquaculture (MIA) sought to create a more diverse, inclusive aquaculture industry. In September of 2020, Minorities in Aquaculture was officially launched. It’s been more than a year, and today, MIA is going gangbusters. Black’s timing was perfect—MIA was created to address a serious diversity deficit in the aquaculture industry at the very moment the aquaculture industry became aware that something needed to change. Almost immediately, MIA attracted media coverage, with profiles in Conde Nast Traveler, Cooking Light, and Chesapeake Bay Journal. The organizations followed, and to date, Black has launched partnerships with the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative, OysterSouth, and the United States Aquaculture Association, with
As seen at the
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more in the pipeline. MIA has big projects in the works post-pandemic, and Black is excited to jump into the boots-on-the-ground phase after months of planning. The intense response to MIA’s launch initially caught Black by surprise. “I didn’t have a transition period. I went from being frustrated and unsure of what to do to create a nonprofit to what is a now-global organization. There’s no way of getting prepared for that, I just let my blind passion take the wheel. I am unapologetic about what I want to do and the things, the action, that needs to happen now for aquaculture.” Unsurprisingly for a woman who saw no reason not to start her own nonprofit, Black continues to charge ahead. While running a thriving new organization, she is working toward her master’s degree from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at Horn Point, where it all began with summer camp. She hopes to focus her studies on an innovative approach to eliminating barriers to aquaculture for different communities of color, using MIA as a case study. For Black, all the attention and support MIA has drawn is fine as long as it gets the aquaculture industry to a place where it feels welcoming for women oyster farmers, hatchery managers, and biologists of color. “At the end of the day, the basis of everything I do is active minority engagement. When I can count six minority women that are active in aquaculture, I’ll know I did something. My goal isn’t just strong women of color—it’s women of color who are strong in aquaculture.” Kate Livie is a Chesapeake writer, educator, and historian. An Eastern Shore native and current faculty at Washington College’s Center for Environment and Society, Livie’s award-winning book Chesapeake Oysters was published in 2015.
November/December 2021 rack_card_2018.indd 1
11/18/2019 10:26:53 AM
CHESAPEAKE ALMANAC
The End of an Era
Looking back at 60 years of eagle surveys on Virginia’s rivers by Capt. John Page Williams
BART PAXTON/CCB
BRYAN WATTS/CCB
A
bout now, as November begins, the Chesapeake’s mature bald eagles are beginning to court and pair up for the winter’s breeding season. 2022 will be the first year since 1962 that there has been no aerial survey of the nests along Virginia’s rivers. For the past 30 years, the survey’s “A-Team” has consisted of Dr. Mitchell Byrd, director emeritus at The Center for Conservation Biology, College of William & Mary; Capt. Fuzzzo Schermer, pilot; and Dr. Brian Watts, current director of The Center for Conservation Biology. But time has caught up with them: Byrd, who has
repeatedly failed retirement from an iconic career, is now 93 years old; Schermer (ditto, from both military and commercial aviation) is 80; and Watts, giving all indication of retirement failure to come, is 60.
The 2021 survey, completed in April, was their last. It’s a bittersweet moment, and not a bad time to reflect on the meaning of all of the observations compiled, the value of this survey to Virginia’s bald eagle population, and what comes next. Over a long period that began in the 1930s, a wide-ranging group of research biologists and dedicated volunteer ornithologists have chronicled a horrifying crash in the regional population of our national bird and then—amazingly—a meteoric recovery, to the point that the Chesapeake’s stock now shows signs of stabilizing at its maximum carrying capacity.
The eagle-counting A-Team: Capt. Fuzzo Schermer, Dr. Bryan Watts, and Dr. Mitchell Byrd.
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 20
November/December 2021
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Pesticide Poison Takes Hold
BRYAN WATTS/CCB
By 1955, DDT was clearly showing its effects on nesting success. The Audubon Society organized a Bald Eagle Survey Committee for the Chesapeake region, using volunteers from member birding clubs. They found only 17 active nests. Jackson Abbott, a civil engineer based at Northern Virginia’s Fort Belvoir, led the effort for the next 20 years. In 1962, the Chesapeake survey became part of a broader Audubon Society effort, with larger-scale aerial surveys by pilots from Bay-region military bases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bay state natural resource agencies. That survey located 54 active nests (20 in Maryland, 34 in Virginia). Based on those observations, Abbott later estimated that the Chesapeake’s total was about 150 breeding pairs. However, when the flight crews revisited 28 nests, they found only three young. Studies of Chesapeake-region eagle eggs and carcasses from the 1970s
Virginia Bald Eagle Breeding Population (1977-2009)
700
Breeding pairs (N)
600
BARBARA HOUSTON/CCB
In 1936, the National Audubon Society hired Bryant Tyrell to survey the Chesapeake’s bald eagle population. By automobile and on foot, he found 57 nesting pairs (40 in Maryland, 17 in Virginia), though he covered only a small percentage of the Bay. The most valuable aspect of his work was his record of nesting success and productivity, which offered a valuable yardstick of reproductive rates before the introduction of DDT in the mid1940s. In addition, other factors such as land clearing and development likely contributed to declines in the population during the first half of the 20th century.
500 400 300 200 100 0
1977
1981
1985
1989
1997
2001
2005
2009
Survey year © The Center for Conservation Biology, College of William & Mary
revealed some of the highest levels of DDT-related pesticides in the United States. Aerial surveys through the 1960s showed a decline to an estimated low point of 80 to 90 pairs in 1970.
Potomac River and the upper Bay. Late in that decade, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries (now the Department of Wildlife Resources) took over the surveys. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT in 1972, and its effects slowly began to wane. Meanwhile, protections from the 1973 Endangered Species Act also began to reduce the pressures Schermer and Byrd at work on eagles from the Chesapeake’s growing human populations. Then, wonder of wonders, the The Slow Rebuild Abbott/Byrd/Scott surveys began to During the ’70s, Dr. Mitchell Byrd, show a slow increase in the breeding a biology professor at the College population through the late ’70s and of William and Mary, and Frederic the ’80s. Scott, a dedicated but modest superWhere Eagles Flourish volunteer from the Virginia Society of Ornithology, continued the aerial In 1974, the Commonwealth of survey and other research in Virginia, Virginia received donation of an oldwhile Jackson Abbott covered the growth timber tract on the Potomac in
November/December 2021
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
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BRYAN WATTS/CCB
King George County, named Caledon. It was originally intended to become a state park. Based on previous surveys by Jackson Abbott and others, Dr. Byrd and Fred Scott surveyed it and found it to be a major eagle stronghold for both locals nesting and transients roosting in summer. They worked closely with Virginia State Parks director Dennis Baker and other members of a governor-appointed Caledon Task Force. The challenge was to develop a management plan that protected the eagles from human intrusion while still allowing nature trails. The solution was limiting public access to eagle-sensitive areas via buffer zones. The task force also created a
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 24
The Chesapeake’s eagle population is the highest on the East Coast.
no-boating zone along that section of the Potomac shoreline, though the researchers discovered that Caledon’s eagles were much less concerned with crabbers regularly working their pots than people walking near their roosts. Based on the task force’s research, the Virginia State Parks opened Caledon as a Natural Area in 1984. (In 2012, with the bald eagle’s recovery, Virginia finally did reclassify it as a state park.) In 1987, Capt. Bill Portlock, a senior field educator with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, found a large concentration of eagles on the
November/December 2021
Rappahannock above Tappahannock around Fones Cliffs during a summer teacher-training seminar. A longtime ornithologist himself, Portlock knew Mitchell Byrd through work with peregrines and contacted him. Byrd toured the area with Portlock in an outboard skiff. Portlock then volunteered under the auspices of the Virginia Society of Ornithology to develop a survey protocol for the river, looking especially at the population of adults and subadults roosting there in the winter. He continued contributing that survey to VSO and the Center for Conservation Biology every year through 2017, logging an average of 175 birds in the 35-mile stretch between Tappahannock and Rappahannock Academy, just above Port Royal. That survey played a valuable role in the justification for and development of the Rappahannock Valley National Wildlife Refuge. By 1992, the Bay’s eagles were rebounding steadily. Caledon had provided a careful, practical, “winwin” problem-solving exercise that truly recognized and respected the needs of wildlife while designing appropriate public access. In that year, Dr. Byrd and one of his former students, Dr. Bryan Watts, founded the Center for Conservation Biology (CCB), housed at William & Mary, as “a place where a community of dedicated professional scientists, students, and citizens could be brought together to focus not on patents or profits but on developing lasting solutions to environmental problems.” The Center’s tagline is “Information that enables conservation.” “In the case of eagles,” Dr. Watts tells Chesapeake Bay Magazine, “there has been a public regulatory mandate to protect them that goes along with basic research. We have lots of objectives.” From a practical standpoint, CCB looks to “find ways to shift management for the benefit of declining species without impacting
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BARBARA HOUSTON/CCB
Eagle populations have taken off over the years of the study. Bottom: Capt. Fuzzo Schermer has flown the eagle count for three decades.
BARBARA HOUSTON/CCB
core programs, [providing] the type of win-win solutions that lead to longterm conservation benefits.” The eagle survey has been part of a larger body of eagle research, which in itself is part of a broader approach to the Center’s listed Species of Concern. In addition to bald eagles, CCB concentrates on peregrine falcons, black rails, and shorebirds. Early that same year, Byrd and Watts began their 30-year “A-Team” survey run with Capt. Fuzzzo Schermer. As Dr. Byrd flew into his 90s and Schermer up to age 80, they waited on daily standby for favorable conditions in the unsettled weather of late winter and early spring, in a small plane able to fly close to treetops. Byrd acted as primary strategist and recorder, with a sheaf of topographic maps on his lap beside Schermer, who was exercising flying skills that an Alaskan bush pilot would envy. Watts, in the aft seat, acted as the spotter. The survey, covering all the rivers on Virginia’s coastal plain, was a major time commitment and, sometimes, a physical thumping as well.
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 26
Why a Survey Like This is Valuable In 2007, thanks in part to the work of the Center for Conservation Biology, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service removed the bald eagle from the endangered species list, recognizing the species’ remarkable recovery. That year, CCB initiated a widescale EagleTrak study, following the movements of eagles throughout the Chesapeake Bay and beyond. Scientists trapped eagles from three source populations and tagged them with GPS transmitters. This kind of study pinpoints important shoreline habitats, communal roosts, and areas of eagle mortality from electrical power installations. With the birds’ 15- to 25-year life span, this long-term study has
November/December 2021
already revealed that the Chesapeake is an epicenter for eagles along the entire Atlantic coast. In particular, it has highlighted major eagle concentrations for both mature birds and subadults on the Potomac around Caledon State Park; along the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge, especially Fones Cliffs; and in the James River National Wildlife Refuge, especially Powell’s Creek and Presqu’ile. These reservoirs of protected eagle habitat appear vital to the birds, but there are indications, too, that as the population has increased, some of them are adjusting more to humans. The James River between Osborne Landing/Dutch Gap and Hopewell, for example, is busy with both residential development and industrial activity, but there are numerous nests along that stretch. There are now, in fact, bald eagles along all of Virginia’s tidal rivers and beyond. The research done at CCB (now shared by William & Mary and Virginia Commonwealth University, and based at VCU’s Rice Rivers Center) helps us all better understand the ecology of this eagle
and the details of how we can coexist with our iconic national bird. You can learn more about the EagleTrak Project and read its blog at ccbbirds.org.
What Comes Next It’s time now for CCB’s team of scientists to sift through those 60 years of observations from all of the surveys. That’s an extraordinary body of data that tracks the Chesapeake’s bald eagles from their crash to their reproductive peak and what now appears to be a leveling off. In the first decade of this century, the Chesapeake’s eagles were reproducing at the highest rate in country, higher even than Alaska’s. Now there may be a feedback loop operating to slow that reproductive rate. The elevated number of eagles may now be a better index of population health. Limits on space and food may be beginning to produce behavioral effects on reproduction, especially on the part of males, as it appears to do in Alaska. The next shoreline surveys will look at locations of suitable eagle nesting and roosting sites, specifically as they relate to those of ospreys and great blue herons. In addition, as Bryan Watts puts it, “The Chesapeake eagle population is now 3,000 pairs, the largest on the East Coast. That big metabolic engine [all of those big birds] needs fuel.” Diet studies indicate that the birds prefer mud (gizzard) shad and blue catfish for most of the year but also river herring and hickory shad during their spring spawning runs. “We continue to fly military bases,” Watts says, “and may continue with periodic updates on Virginia’s rivers, as well as tagging. There are many good things for us to look at. We’re still learning a lot and having fun.”
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CHESAPEAKE CHEF
Cast Your Bird Upon the Waters A Thanksgiving tale of a bouncing bird by Rafael Alvarez
“And since it’s close to Thanksgiving, I’ve got a story I’d like to tell. It may sound like a sea story, but it’s the truth …” —Kai Hansen, Baltimore tugboat captain
I
t was the fourth Thursday in November, back in 1973, maybe ’74, and Kai Hansen was a deckhand on a tug ferrying oil barges from a refinery in the Bahamas to a power plant on Lake Ontario. Things got a bit arduous Oil painting of Kai off the coast of Hatteras, as Hansen by his wife, they do. “The boat would go Biruta Hansen way, way up and shake,” said Hansen. “Then it would [crest and] go down and shake. Then up again. It went on like that.” The son of a shipbuilder, Hansen ran off to sea from the island of Fyn in his native Denmark at 16 and landed in Fells Point in 1958 when the foot of Broadway was still a seaman’s village. Now 81 and retired since 2008, he has hundreds of improbable tales—well polished and borne of truth—tucked into his seabag. As this year’s Thanksgiving holiday approached, he shared one starring a 30-pound turkey that took flight before it could be eaten. Hansen was aboard the 4,200 horsepower Eileen C. (which sank in the Indian Ocean in 1983) when the twin-screw tub was being tossed in rough seas off the Carolinas. The vessel was on a regular run from Freeport on Grand Bahama to the former Niagara Mohawk
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November/December 2021
Power Corporation in Oswego, New York, towing a barge heavy with 100,000 barrels of oil. The November seas were turbulent and getting worse, the tug and barge were covered in ice, and Hansen—reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle on the afternoon watch—had secured himself in a nook of the galley. At the far end near the sink and stove was the cook, a man named Roy who claimed Irish, Jewish, and Cherokee heritage who made no secret of his fate: If it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have any luck at all. “Really a melancholy guy,” said Hansen. Roy was preparing the holiday feast for a crew of 12—peeling potatoes, basting the turkey, throwing away scraps—as Hansen followed young Darwin’s research on evolution along the coast of South America. Deep in his work, the cook was unaware that someone else was present. “He was sitting on this little chair; it was metal with a [cushioned] seat,” said Hansen, who also told the story to Matthew Abbott for a YouTube video filmed a year ago at Bertha’s Restaurant in Fells Point. “There was a big pot boiling on the stove and it was locked in place,” said Hansen. “The way the ship was rolling, he could slide from one side to the other without getting up. “He’d slide to the trash can to dump the potato peels and then slide over to the stove to put the potato in the pot and then slide another way to grab another potato. He’d go back
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and forth like that. The boat would bang into a big sea and go up, up, up and the bow would come crashing down and every once in awhile it looked like Roy was floating in the air.” Across the front of the oven was a steel bar and when the cook pulled it to open, Hansen said, he glimpsed, “the biggest turkey I’ve ever seen. It was in there getting nice and brown.” Until the bird escaped! “All of a sudden, he opens the oven door to baste the turkey, the boat goes up, up and down—BANG!—and here comes the turkey!” And there went the turkey, bouncing all over the galley, spreading grease across the linoleum deck. Roy chased the bird, slipping along with the violent rolls of the Eileen C., and finally managed to corner it. “He gets ahold of it but it’s so hot and he has to let it go,” said Hansen. More catch-me-if-you-can. Now, Hansen recalls, the cook was chasing the butterball
with a big carving fork in each hand. It had become something of a wild goose chase. Finally, Roy speared the turkey, got it back in the oven—which had remained open during his fandango with the fowl—and slammed closed the door. Who would be the wiser? Turning around—mission accomplished—Roy wore a smile of relief and satisfaction before realizing that there’d been a witness to the pursuit. He was crestfallen. “I said, ‘Roy, if you don’t say anything, I won’t say anything,” remembered Hansen. Smiling again, the cook grabbed a mop to swab the turkey grease from the deck and Kai made sure he ate white meat far below the skin at dinner that night. Rafael Alvarez sailed on the tug Athena with Kai Hansen from Baltimore to Wilmington, Del. and back in December 1992. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.
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November/December 2021
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ON BOATS
Nimbus T11 by Capt. John Page Williams
Nimbus T11 LOA: 40'7" Beam: 11'4" Draft: 36" Weight: 12,300 lbs.
Fuel Capacity: 224.5 gal. Water Capacity: 36 gal. Waste Capacity: 21 gal. Max HP: 800 CE Rating: B10, C12 For more information, visit nimbus.se and the Annapolis office of Seattle Yachts at seattleyachts.com/annapolis.
COURTESY PHOTOS
T
he Baltic Sea presents Scandinavian boaters with conditions reminiscent of the Chesapeake Bay and Maine—a winding coastline with coves, islands, and navigable rivers that invite exploration, but also cold water and rocky reefs to avoid. The people are adventurous, and their boats reflect that spirit. Thus, CBM was eager to review a new model from Nimbus, one of Sweden’s oldest recreational boatbuilders.
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 32
The 40'7" T11 is distinctive. It offers a seat for two and a sun lounge at the bow, a walkaround cabin with enclosed head and berths below, a large hardtop over the helm, flexible seating with a table in the cockpit, and a large, open stern platform with ladder for swimming. Nimbus calls it a tender, theoretically set up for service to a superyacht, but readily adaptable “for all types of daily activities, transportation, water sports, and fun.” This model has two sisters: the W11 Weekender (“for weekends, day trips, and social activities”) and the C11 Commuter with enclosed pilothouse (“for transportation year round”). We came away impressed with the T11 as a thoroughly versatile family boat for at least three seasons on the Chesapeake. This Nimbus hull is distinctivelooking, long and narrow with a stem that drops almost vertically to a double
November/December 2021
row of chines, then cuts away sharply at the forefoot. The result is a slicing prow for head seas that still won’t trip going down the face of a following sea. The double chines dump spray forward and provide extra lift aft, while a pair of steps under the helm and just aft of it “air lubricate” the running surface without making the boat so slippery it slides in hard turns. Between these features, a standard ZipWake leveling system, and the relatively high length-to-beam ratio, our test boat exhibited almost no bow rise climbing onto plane. Thus, it could run efficiently without wallowing even if forced to slow down in nasty seas. With its twin 300-hp Mercury Verado V-8 outboards purring, the T11 cruised most happily between 19 and 28 knots (4000–4500 rpm), burning 21–28 gallons of fuel per hour. Top end at 5900 rpm with two aboard and
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Clockwise from top left: The helm allows seating for three; the forward cabin contains a large double berth; dining space for the whole family (and friends).
three-quarters of a tank of fuel was 42 knots, aided by the “air lubrication” of those twin steps. With those numbers, a T11 could run the length of the Chesapeake, from Havre de Grace to Norfolk, in about six hours on one tank of fuel. This is a boat built for daylong explorations. A full day on the water, though, requires a few amenities: comfortable, secure places to sit, both underway and at rest; passageways wide enough for freedom of movement; shade for at least some of the day; places to keep provisions cold; work surfaces to prepare food; and a comfortable, private head. A double bunk for naps would be nice, as might be a grill or stove. All were standard on our test boat except for the grill/stove, which is optional. For long boat rides, the T11 offers
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 34
forward-facing seats for up to 11 people, well within its European Union C12 rating for coastal bays in strong winds and seas up to seven feet (!). Those seats include two at the bow, three at the helm, and six in two rows in the cockpit. The bow also offers a sunpad, and an awning is available for the space while at anchor. (The bow holds a compartment for a throughthe-stem anchor with windlass and chain rode.) The starboard helm is seamanlike, with Mercury’s SmartCraft Digital Throttle & Shift (joystick optional) and a 12" Simrad electronic display (a second 12" display is optional, as is radar), and a bow thruster. A hardtop on a sturdy four-point mount extends from the windshield aft over the three helm seats and the module on which they
November/December 2021
rest, which includes a galley work surface with sink and a drawer refrigerator beneath. A second fridge or icemaker drawer is optional. A sliding pocket door to port of the helm provides wide access to the cabin, with a bench (storage beneath) to port at the base of the stairs and 73" of headroom. Forward lies a large double berth with shelves along the side and storage under. To starboard is an enclosed head with electric toilet, washbasin, and shower. A second door leads to another double berth (or storage space) under the helm. In dayboat mode, the T11’s cabin provides nap space for little ones. It also enables weekends aboard for a couple or a family. For easy stowing of bulky gear below, there’s a large but secure opening hatch built into the cushioned seat at the bow. The flexible cockpit holds three “sofas” (two of them on pedestal mounts with simple handles), a teak table, and a pad that converts to an aft-facing sunbed. The combinations it can form include forward-facing seats for six while underway, seating for six around the table, and seating for four at the table with space for two to lie on the sunbed. A cockpit awning is available for shade. Sturdy gates on either side of the sunbed close off the stern deck when necessary but open to
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A galley work area featuring sink, stove, and fridge.
allow easy passage for several swimmers. A cockpit shower is readily accessible, and two compartments in the aft gunwales offer plenty of storage space for dock lines and fenders. A towing arch over the engines enables watersports. It would not be difficult to adapt the boat to various Chesapeake fishing techniques. Beneath the cockpit lies a large (60" long x 82" wide x 30" deep) space for storage of anything from cleaning
supplies to watersport toys, as well as access to plumbing and wiring. (It also shows off careful Nimbus workmanship in mechanical spaces.) A hatch offers quick access to this space, but the whole cockpit sole rises on electric rams for moving larger objects. As noted, our test boat was relatively Spartan in its accommodations. Nimbus offers a generator, a SeaKeeper, air conditioning, an icemaker, and other
comfort items as optional equipment on the T11, with attendant increase in price and vessel complexity. The whole point of this boat, though, is to make life on the water easy and uncomplicated. With the exception, perhaps, of a gas stove, our test boat offered plenty of assets for adventures around the Bay, very much including its excellent performance underway. Welcome to the Chesapeake, Nimbus! The MSRP for the Nimbus T11 we tested with twin Mercury V-8 Verado 300s is $447,000.
CBM Editor-at-Large, educator, guide, and author of three quintessential Chesapeake Bay books, Capt. John Page Williams was named a Maryland Admiral of the Bay in 2013.
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ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 38
November/December 2021
Car v ing Out a
by Kate Livie Photos by Caroline Phillips
or decoy carvers, inside every block of wood there is a bird. What kind of bird, its attitude and plumage, a diver or a shorebird, can all be known as the wood is carved away. On the Chesapeake, this act of discovery is an old and traditional one. For over 300 years, sturdy canvasbacks and redheads, mallards and mergansers have revealed themselves to the drawknife as decoy artisans shaped the wood into tools designed to lure waterfowl from the sky to shotgun range. Historically, these are rough-and-ready working decoys, V-bottomed to ride the waves and just lifelike enough to suggest the birds they represent. Arranged by the dozens on the water or in a field and accompanied by a corresponding call, decoys were an essential part of any waterfowler’s rig. Art is not the purpose of a good decoy—though it is sometimes a happy byproduct. Functionality is. All of this is why Mark McNair’s decoys are so
remarkable. Fluid with elements of abstraction, suggestive of the notion of a bird rather than a perfect picture, they are revelations. Like a flashcard, a McNair bird instantly telegraphs information, a story. For almost 50 years, McNair has carved nontraditional decoys that are highly appealing and sought after. And the journey that brought him to decoy carving is as unconventional as his carving style. Whereas most Chesapeake carvers are waterfowlers themselves, informed by the movement and habits of birds in the landscape, McNair was an art-school graduate with a flair for woodworking. He was not taught his methods by a more seasoned carver, echoing their techniques and influence. Instead, he saw an early decoy and was struck by its simplicity and symmetry. Looking at it from above, he thought it looked like an African mask, and he wanted to try it for himself. The next day McNair woke up and started carving. November/December 2021
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
39
Mark (left) and Ian McNair keep a tradition of decoy carving alive.
want to make a wonderful, interesting design, not a copy."
Since then, there have been thousands of decoys crafted in his workshops from Rhode Island to Virginia, each with that stripped-down, sculptural essence. McNair sees no end in sight. “I’ve just been turned onto it, ever since then,” McNair says. “It’s never-ending. I don’t do the same thing, over and over, unless I’m working something out. It’s always different. So here I am, almost 50 years later, and it’s still as interesting and challenging as I want to make it.” McNair has largely focused on what’s known as a mantel bird—a decoy created as art rather than as a working tool. (Early on, he did once carve a full rig of 100 working bluebill decoys for $6.50 apiece. His pricing has changed a bit since then.) Mantel birds often trend towards
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 40
November/December 2021
hyperrealism, with every single feather perfectly distinct and articulated. For carvers working in this art form, no truth is more sublime than to devotedly recreate nature. This is where McNair’s divergent approach truly shines, in work that possesses a bold leap of the imagination that transforms craft to art. “I look for patterns,” McNair says. “When you hold a bird in your hand, you don’t see one black and white feather, you see one on another on another on another, which creates this graphic impression. It’s that impression—a black and white bird—and an action—swimming, preening, diving. I think, how can I interpret that movement? I want to make a wonderful, interesting design, not a copy.”
Clockwise from top left: Ian McNair roughing out a decoy; some of the McNairs' work; Ian McNair catching a crab from the dock; the McNair family.
The singularity of McNair’s work speaks to his inspiration: indigenous art, folk art, and hours spent as a boy wandering around the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But it also draws on a deep sense of place. McNair, his wife Martha, and their family have lived on a farm in Craddockville on Virginia’s Eastern Shore for more than 40 years. Their part of the Chesapeake is so wide you can’t see the Western Shore on the other side, and so salty they grow oysters on a private lease a few yards from their dock. It’s also teeming with birds. An important annual stopover point on the Atlantic Flyway for migrating birds, buffleheads and coots and sanderlings, pelicans and loons and green herons, jinglers and owls and scoters all make an appearance in the big water and salt marshes of the lower Eastern Shore. All have been a source of wonderment and
imagination for McNair, and have been captured in his work, graceful and full of spirit. The swamps and little creeks of his Bayside property speak to McNair’s creativity and serve up an endless source of fresh ideas. And for his two sons, Colin and Ian, dipping up blue crabs off the dock pilings or camping in the loblollies on the little island just across the creek, it was a Huckleberry Finn childhood wonderland. Naturally, the workshop of their father, Mark, was an extension of their free-range habitat. One of Ian’s earliest memories is playing on his father’s workbench in a little old studio on the property, crawling over the tools and pulling out the drawers to look inside. As the boys got older, Mark welcomed each into the workshop, showing them how to use simple tools and work with wood in the same way his own father had. November/December 2021
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he swamps and little creeks of his Bayside property speak to McNair’s creativity and serve up an endless source of fresh ideas.
One of Ian’s first words was “spokeshave” (a woodsmoothing tool pronounced “puptave”). Colin and Ian would become carvers too, although unlike Mark, their inspiration was not solely cerebral or visual—it was also practical. The McNair sons had grown up in the vibrant winter marshes of the ESVA, where fishing and waterfowling was practically a birthright. Early on, they started carving little wooden fish figurines. (Ian was admittedly obsessed by fish and fishing as a kid, drawing pictures of one fish eating another eating another to infinity.) Later on, as a teenager, Ian wanted a rig of his own decoys, and in true McNair fashion it never occurred to him to buy them. “I was fifteen years old when I first started duck hunting,” Ian said, “but I didn’t have any duck decoys to hunt with. So we just made them. Papa helped me make them out of cork, and they looked great on the water. For me, it was a totally natural transition from duck hunting into carving ducks.”
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Sharing workshop space, over the next 20 years the three McNairs each produced a wide spectrum of carved decoys, from waterfowl to whales (as Mark McNair’s website puts it, “more than ducks”). Mark continued to refine his signature gestural style in full-sized bird decoys, miniatures, and fish carvings, while Ian focused on working decoys and mantel birds. Colin almost solely worked on smooth, stylized wooden fish carvings. As the McNair sons went on to college and careers afterwards, they continued to carve, sometimes exhibiting their work alongside their father’s in decoy shows and art galleries along the East Coast. Colin would go on to become a decoy expert and historian, working today for Copley Fine Art Auctions, while Ian was drawn into carving again as he married and settled down in Virginia with his wife, Becca, and eldest daughter, Esme. But it wasn’t long before the Eastern Shore started to call him back. “I love to travel, but the Eastern Shore has always felt like
home base to me—it’s kind of hard to beat. So it was something we always knew we wanted to do, and once Becca and I had Esme, it felt like the timing was right.” In his 30s, Ian had doubled down on his love of waterfowling and working on the water by launching a wader business, High ’N Dry, and saw the potential in basing his operations out of the most inspirational place he could think of, Virginia’s Eastern Shore. It would mean bringing together his great loves: his family (which has grown to include daughter Imogen), his carving, his business, and his passion for the Shore. A no-brainer. They moved two years ago and haven’t looked back since. There’s a circle of time on the Eastern Shore, one that feels immutable, transparent, and driven by the seasons. It’s what drew Mark McNair here on a trip in the ’70s, brought him back with his family in the ’80s to work and carve, what shaped his sons in the ’90s, and now, in the 21st century, what has brought the next generation home. Ian and Mark now welcome Ian’s two little girls into their shop, offering them a try at the spokeshave and words of encouragement. Soon, they might be roughing out heads or bodies. Mark never set out to create a legacy, but here he is,
surrounded by a family of carvers. “Carving just seemed like a natural thing to do. I had no idea that Colin would be interested in it, or Ian would be interested in it. Looking back, I feel so thankful that I started, all those years ago.” “And I’m still enthusiastic about it, Mark says. "I’m watching the teals and osprey in our marsh all the time, always seeing new behaviors and things I never noticed before. I’m a pretty lucky guy, to be doing something for 50 years and waking up feeling like I still haven’t made my last bird.”
or me, it was a totally natural transition from duck hunting into carving ducks.”
Kate Livie is a Chesapeake writer, educator, and historian. An Eastern Shore native and current faculty at Washington College’s Center for Environment and Society, Livie’s award-winning book Chesapeake Oysters was published in 2015.
To see more of Mark’s work, visit mcnairart.com. You can see Ian’s decoys and carvings at ian-mcnair.com or explore more from his business, High ’N Dry, at hndoutdoors.com. Colin’s fish carvings are at colinmcnair.com.
Above: Decoys on the workbench; Right: Imogen McNair helping out.
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B AY T O TA B L E
Chesapeake
Oyster Farms Find their Merroir
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by Kristina Gaddy
JAY FLEMING
T
he temperature was than a building, workers canned tons of oysters for export, hovering around and the Chesapeake Bay was supplying nearly half of the freezing as the oysters eaten around the world. While someone like Stant Commodore Maury set out into could pull up a lot of oysters in one go with his dredge, the the James River near the metal rake also damaged the oyster reef. Chesapeake Bay on December 19, 1907. This type of harvesting was not sustainable, and not The rain from earlier in the day had abated and it healthy for the Bay. Between 1878 and 1879, U.S. Naval was clear enough that the men aboard the Maury could Officer Francis Winslow led a survey of oyster beds on the see the Jack Powhatan as she moved in the water. The Tangier and Pocomoke sounds and stated plainly, “The moon might have been a number of oysters on the beds benefit for both ships. The had been very much Powhatan needed the high tide diminished since the the full moon provided to commencement of the fishery, dredge oysters, and the Maury or during the last thirty years.” needed the light to see the The huge piles of oyster shells Powhatan dredging. The were being used in limekilns Powhatan’s captain William B. or for fertilizer, which meant Stant had been called “the most that spat (baby oysters) didn’t daring oyster pirate in Virginia,” have the old oyster shells they and State Fisheries Chairman needed to grow on. The McDonald Lee, aboard the continued heavy harvesting Maury, was eager to catch him without replenishing the in the illegal act. population would mean a Stant had apparently collapse of the oyster industry. “boasted that he would not be In 1879, Virginia passed Oyster pirates in 1884 (Harper's Magazine illustration). arrested alive for unlawful an anti-dredging law to try to dredging,” according to the protect the vast oyster reefs in Baltimore Sun, so when Lee heard Stant was going to be out the Bay and tributaries. But try as they might, the Oyster on the water that night, he got his Oyster Navy together and Navy and Oyster Police couldn’t seem to get the dredgers to the hunt was on. As the Maury approached the Powhatan, stop. Stant only faced an hour in jail and had to relinquish Stant cut the large metal rake and net that comprised the his boat when he was found guilty of dredging. dredge from his boat and tried to get away. The Maury The Maryland and Virginia governments realized there steamed ahead, spotlight on the target, and eventually was a way to incentivize sustainable growth: Treat oystering caught and arrested Stant for illegal dredging. This wasn’t not like hunting and gathering, but like farming. Have the first or last battle in the Oyster Wars. oystermen invest in not just this year’s harvest, but harvests In the 19th century, oystermen were pulling tens of for years to come. Maryland and Virginia began allowing millions of barrels of oysters out of the Bay each year. Piles people who were interested in growing oysters to lease of shucked shells around packing houses could stand taller barren waters of the Bay, sounds and rivers. Two hundred November/December 2021
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Oyster reefs once stuck up above the waterline during low tide, but the way oysters had been overharvested was anything but sustainable.
JAY FLEMING
years later, oyster farms are still the best hope for sustainable growth— and delicious Bay bivalves. On a clear, hot summer day on an unmarked one-lane road in Topping, Va., Ryan Croxton revs the engine of his truck, hauling a boat out of the water. Tanks for raising baby oysters and a machine that sorts the grown oysters sit on a dock that juts out over the creek. In between those two stages, the oysters grow in cages on the Rappahannock River—oysters that Rappahannock Oyster Company will serve across the world. It’s a tradition that goes back to 1899, when Ryan’s grandfather James Croxton took advantage of Virginia's new oyster leases and began farming oysters. “We adored our grandfather,” says Ryan, and so when his father and uncle asked if anyone wanted to take over the family’s 200-year-old leases, Ryan and his cousin Travis Croxton said yes, seeing it as a way to dig into and reconnect with their family history. But neither of them actually had any experience growing oysters. Ryan says they started by studying “dirt farmers,” and with that, they knew they had “to think about farming from a sustainability standpoint.”
Oyster reefs once stuck up above the waterline during low tide, but the way oysters had been overharvested was anything but sustainable. One problem was that without oyster shells, spat had nowhere to grow; oysters want to grow on other oysters, which is how they build reefs. Fewer oysters also meant less habitat for crabs and fish, and without the filtration oysters provide, dirtier water. Luckily, Ryan says, “the fishing in the Chesapeake had never gotten so bad that we’ve had to bring in a nonnative species.” We still eat Crassostrea virginica, as many generations have. Although their grandfather was an oyster farmer, James would go to nearby areas to get wild spat and then raise those oysters on his plot. While this was better than dredging, Ryan points out, taking wild spat that would eventually end up on a plate still meant taking oysters out of the ecosystem and never replacing them, and never replacing the shells the spat needed to grow on. When Ryan and Travis started Rappahannock Oyster Company in 2001, they wanted to create a farming operation that was truly sustainable. This meant spawning and breeding oysters
Oyster farms are still the best hope for sustainable growth —and delicious Bay bivalves.
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DANIELLE VISCO/LUV LENS PHOTOGRAPHY
Oyster farming
without depleting natural populations. Ryan explains you can do this by taking oysters inside and raising the water temperature to around 75 degrees Fahrenheit (or what it would be in the water during the normal spawning months), tricking the oysters into spawning and then capturing the larvae to grow. Today, a number of hatcheries and nurseries grow oyster seed and sell them to commercial farmers and individuals who want to grow their own baskets of oysters. In the early years, Ryan and Travis bred oysters and cultivated them, then began selling them to restaurants. Then, says Ryan, chefs wanted to come see the farm and try the oysters. They set up a small place for tastings right next to where Ryan was pulling boats out of the water, with just raw oysters and a grill. “Then the business exploded,” says Ryan. We were gaining our taste for oysters back, and the Croxtons responded by building a restaurant in Topping, called Merroir, a portmanteau combining mer, the French word for sea, with the winemaker's concept of terroir. Soon after came eponymous restaurants in Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Va.; Charleston, S.C.; and Los Angeles, where yes, they fly in oysters and the chef meets the plane on the tarmac. When Patrick Hudson got the idea to start oyster farming in the late 2010s, he visited farms across the region, including Rappahannock Oyster. Like the Croxtons, he didn’t have experience with aquaculture, but the love of
oysters drew him in. At the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Company in Virginia, he went out on boats and learned about the equipment needed for a farm, while at Island Creek Oysters in Massachusetts, seeing their farm, farm tours, and restaurants, he “saw the big picture and was inspired by it.” Hudson began farming part-time in 2011, working as a paralegal to pay the bills. Even 10 years after the Croxtons began farming, Hudson says he saw how big the market was for local oysters, and so he got help from investors to buy the leases he had been farming on and expand his operation. Oyster farming is an investment, in both time and money. The tiniest, millimeter-sized oysters grow in large tubs, and every day you have to give them clean water and sort them by size. Once they are large enough, the farmers put them in cages in the water where they grow for two years before they are ready to be harvested. Those two years are hard: Croxton estimates that 50 percent of their oyster seed dies before maturity and Hudson says that when he first started farming, he was killing more oysters than he was growing. They’ve also taken the time to figure out the best water for their oysters' merroir. All the oysters are the same species, but it’s where and how they grow that gives them distinct flavors. Add to that time the money it costs to start a farm, including buying the oyster seed, the cages, and the complex sorting machines. “Purchasing seed is a huge
is an investment, in both time and money.
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“The beauty of
oysters has always been simplicity; you pick it up out of the water and eat it.”
cost—hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at our scale,” and yet that’s what makes what they do sustainable, says Hudson. Another challenge, adds Hudson, is that “we don’t have control over our product overall, in the grand scheme of things.” They depend on the ecosystem to feed the oysters, and that ecosystem can easily be damaged by factors completely out of their control. “Sometimes you feel like a victim; between global warming and fertilizer runoff, you are completely helpless,” says Croxton. And yet, farms like these are helping the Chesapeake Bay and tributaries to become healthier. “Oysters on aquaculture leases are performing the same functions as wild oysters,” says Allison Colden, Maryland senior fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “They contribute to filtration [and] nitrogen removal, and some of the aquaculture gear can also be serving as habitat in absence of natural oyster beds.” Which means some fish and crabs might find homes among oyster cages that float in the river or sit on the bottom of the Bay. After the advent of oyster leases in the 1890s, oyster farming's next breakthrough development didn’t come until the 1990s, with the triploid oyster. Although the biology behind these oysters is somewhat complicated, Hudson compares them to seedless watermelons. Triploids have been bred so that they can’t reproduce, which benefits oyster farmers in two ways. First, because the oysters are
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not spending energy trying to reproduce, they grow quickly and are generally larger than wild oysters. You can also harvest and eat them year-round, unlike wild oysters, which develop an off flavor during the summer spawning months (No more waiting for months with the letter “R”.) Around 90 percent of farmed oysters in the Bay are triploid oysters. Although oyster farming seems complex, Croxton counters that it’s not high science. “The beauty of oysters has always been simplicity; you pick it up out of the water and eat it,” he says. That simplicity seems to be something that appeals to many oyster farmers and oyster restaurant proprietors. After Hudson sold his first farmed oysters during Preakness in 2013, he met Nick Schauman, who had been shucking oysters at food festivals. They teamed up to open The Local Oyster at Mount Vernon Marketplace in Baltimore, which would highlight the Skinny Dipper, True Chesapeake’s signature oyster. Like the Croxtons, Hudson and Schauman found that the people wanted oysters, and felt good about eating fresh, local seafood. They soon opened a second Local Oyster in Arlington, Va., and then a flagship restaurant named True Chesapeake, located in the newly renovated Whitehall Mill in Baltimore. “Doing a big, fine-dining
COVID pandemic, it meant that farms were unable to sell to restaurants, and they couldn’t even serve oysters at their own places. Since oysters only live for about three years, they have to be harvested. Colden, who works with oyster farmers through the Maryland Shellfish Growers Network, says farmers took a huge hit during COVIDrelated closures, and many pivoted to direct-to-customer sales through pop-ups and partnerships with grocery stores. True Chesapeake began selling pre-ordered oysters through MOM’s Organic Market and increased their sales through Whole Foods’ fish counter, which they’ll continue to do this winter. Colden adds that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation “hopes…that those people [who] have tried and enjoyed local Maryland and Virginia oysters” will continue to support their local oyster farmers. Oyster cellars and saloons were once ubiquitous across the Chesapeake region, with shop owners shucking shells and carts selling door-to-door. The enthusiasm for oysters is growing again and hopefully the aquaculture industry can grow with it, bringing new restaurants and pop-ups, and new opportunities to eat oysters. Kristina Gaddy writes about history and culture. Her nonfiction book Flowers in the Gutter came out in January.
DANIELLE VISCO/LUV LENS PHOTOGRAPHY
JAY FLEMING
restaurant would be a capstone to the whole adventure and take everything to the next level,” says Hudson. But the adventure continues: They are currently working on another The Local Oyster restaurant in South Baltimore; a New Orleans-style oyster bar in Baltimore’s Remington neighborhood; and Hudson says he wants to double their oyster farm production. The last two years have not been simple or easy for Rappahannock Oyster Company, True Chesapeake Oyster Company, or any other oyster farmers. Hudson estimates that 95 percent of oyster sales go to restaurants while only 5 percent go directly to consumers. When restaurants shut down in March 2020 because of the
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ISLAND LIFE BY JAY FLEMING
A
fter my first book, Working the Water, went to print in 2016, I felt compelled to begin work on my next project—a focus on two special Chesapeake Bay islands, Smith and Tangier. I had dedicated an entire chapter to “Island Life” in my first book, but I knew the story didn’t end there. As I grew to know the islanders, I felt compelled to learn more about their incredible history and traditions. At the same time, I was struck by the vulnerability of their isolated home. I witnessed severe weather events, like tidal flooding from hurricanes and Tangier’s January 2018 freeze-up. I documented the construction of massive erosion-control projects that aimed to protect the islands’ fragile shorelines.
Above: A blue crab sheds its exoskeleton in a shallow grass bed; Inset: Island Life Cover; Late Smith Island waterman Dwight Marshall fishing crab pots out of his skiff; Right: Great Egret chicks at one of Smith Island's nesting rookeries. Opposite page, top to bottom: Smith Island waterman Jesse Brimer crab scraping; The bow of a sinking Smith Island workboat in rough seas; Bottom right: A summer storm moves east across the Chesapeake Bay towards Tylerton, Md.
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But it wasn’t just the land that seemed vulnerable. I came to know the few kids left on the islands, who were mature beyond their years from a life shaped by the harsh realities of island living. I met young adults who struggled with the choice between following in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, and leaving the island for college and a new career. I met watermen who feared for the longevity of the industries that had sustained them for so many years.
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I traveled to the islands during all times of the year to document the seasonal fisheries and capture a sense of place even during the harshest conditions. I made the trip so many times that these islands started to feel like my second home. Of course, getting there was no easy task. The process of packing my gear, towing the boat down to Crisfield, Md., and running across Tangier Sound took the better part of a day, and was a clear reminder of the challenges that come with living in an isolated island community.
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Opposite page, top to bottom: Evening light illuminates a sea nettle's bell and tentacles; Bottom left: Tangier Island waterman Donald 'Thornie' Thorne crab scraping; Above: Dusk on Mailboat Harbor, Tangier Island's working waterfront; Left: Putting the final layer on a Smith Island cake, the state dessert of Maryland; Below: Smith Island waterfowl hunter Lee Smith and his golden retriever, Hunter This article is excerpted from contributing photographer Jay Fleming's book, Island Life. The book can be ordered at jayflemingphotography.com
Through it all, I was motivated by a deep desire to capture a moment in time for these incredible islands, as the very forces that sustain them also threaten to take them away. Since my first trip to the islands more than a decade ago, I have witnessed remarkable changes to the landscapes and communities. Though only miles from the mainland by boat, Smith and Tangier seem worlds apart from the life that many of us know. I hope these photographs capture the same sense of awe I had when I first stepped foot on the islands, transporting you to the Island Life.
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TARTAN 395
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65’ 2019 Regency P65 .....................................$2,895,000 60’ 2022 Jeanneau Yachts 60 - September ......... CALL 54’ 2004 Symbol 54 Pilothouse ....................... $450,000 54’ 2015 Riviera - Belize 54 DayBridge ......$1,099,000 51’ 1986 Antigua 51 ............................................ $130,000 51’ 1983 Wasa Atlantic 51 ...................................$57,000 50’ 2004 Viking Princess V50 FLY ................... $350,000 50’ 2014 Jeanneau 509 ...................................... $390,000 50’ 1988 Transworld - Fantail 50 .................... $240,000 49’ 2021 Jeanneau SO 490-147 In Stock ............. CALL 49’ 2020 Jeanneau SO 490 - HAYETTE .......... $525,000 45 2022 Tartan 455 - New Model .......................... CALL 45’ 1983 Bristol 45.5 ............................................ $150,000 44’ 2022 Jeanneau SO 440-321 In Stock ............. CALL 44’ 2004 Tartan 4400 - FL ................................. $335,900 44’ 1993 Pacific Seacraft 44 ............................. $199,000 44’ 1987 C&C 44 C/B ..............................................$79,000 43’ 2008 Tartan 4300 - MD ....................................... CALL 43’ 2005 Jeanneau 43DS ................................... $183,000
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41’ 2022 Jeanneau SO 410-131 In Stock ............. CALL 41’ 2002 Tartan 4100 .......................................... $229,000 40’ 2022 NIMBUS 405 COUPE .................................. CALL 40’ 2006 Pacific Seacraft 40 - Spain .............. $335,000 40’ 1981 Nautilus 40 Pilothouse ........................$79,000 40’ 1998 Catalina 400 ......................................... $120,000 40’ 1977 Gulfstar Hood 40 ...................................$99,000 40’ 1997 Pacific Seacraft 40 ............................. $295,000 40’ 2022 Nimbus T11-80 In Stock .......................... CALL 39’ 2022 Tartan 395 - 6 In Stock ............................. CALL 39’ 2022 Excess 12-29 Cat - In Stock ..................... CALL 39’ 1999 Mainship 390 ...................................... $115,000 38’ 1981 S&S - Fincraft 38 ....................................$80,000 37’ 2022 Excess 11-42 Cat - In Stock ..................... CALL 37’ 2001 Jeanneau SO 37 ....................................$65,000 37’ 2002 Pacific Seacraft 37 ............................. $120,000 37’ 2002 Tartan 3700 - Strider ......................... $185,000 37’ 1998 J Boat J/37 ................................................$65,000 37’ 2003 Tartan 3700 - Spray ................................... CALL
37’ 2005 Beneteau 373 ...................................... $105,000 37’ 2000 TARTAN 3700 - LIBERTY ................... $159,000 37’ 1998 Searay Sundancer 370 ........................$94,900 37’ 2004 Jeanneau SO 37 ................................. $110,000 37’ 2010 Tartan 3700 ccr - VENTURE ............. $259,000 36’ 1979 PEARSON 365 Ketch ............................$44,000 36’ 2006 Hunter 36 .................................................$87,500 36’ 2022 Tartan 365 - SPRING 2022 ........................ CALL 35’ 1986 Baltic 35 ....................................................$59,500 34’ 1990 Pacific Seacraft Crealock 34 ...............$86,000 34’ 2022 Jeanneau SO 349-780 In Stock ............ CALL 34’ 1994 Pacific Seacraft Crealock 34 ............ $110,000 31’ 1986 Island Packet 31 .....................................$59,500 31’ 2007 Pacific Seacraft 31 ............................. $148,500 29’ 2022 NImbus T9 ..................................................... CALL 28’ 2014 Searay 280 SunDeck ............................$69,500 26’ 2019 Fantail 26 .................................................$99,900 26’ 2000 Grady White 26 Powercat ...................$49,000 22’ 1998 Sam L Morse Cutter .............................$45,000
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NEW LISTING ING LISTING NEW NEWLIST NEW LISTING
$124,500 $124,500 $124,500 1995 45’ Morgan Stowaway$124,500 sloop
1995 199545’ 45’Morgan MorganStowaway Stowawaysloop sloop
Located: Kent Island, MD Stowaway sloop 1995 45’ Morgan Located:Kent KentIsland, Island,MD MD Located: Located: Kent Island, MD
NEW LISTING ING LISTING NEW NEWLIST NEW LISTING
$74,900 $74,900 $74,900 2006 30’ Sea Ray Sundancer $74,900
2006 200630’ 30’Sea SeaRay RaySundancer Sundancer 2006 30’ Sea Ray Sundancer
NEW LISTING ING LISTING NEW NEWLIST NEW LISTING
$179,900 $179,900 $179,900 2008 330 Grady-White Express $179,900
2008 2008330 330Grady-White Grady-WhiteExpress Express
$149,900 2008 330 Grady-White Express $69,900 $149,900 $149,900 $69,900 $69,900 $149,900 $69,900 UNDER AGREEMENT UUNN1987 DDEERR42’ AAGGrand GRREEEEM MEENNTT Banks U1987 N1987 D E42’ R42’ AGrand GREE MENT Grand Banks Banks
$169,900
$169,900 1930 48’$169,900 Dawn Corp. 1978 34’ Kaiser Gale Force $169,900 1930 193048’ 48’Dawn DawnCorp. Corp. 1978 197834’ 34’Kaiser KaiserGale GaleForce Force 1930 48’ Dawn Corp. 1978 34’ Kaiser Gale Force
NEW 7% COMISSION NEW NEW7% 7%COMISSION COMISSION NEW 7% COMISSION COMPLIMENTARY ANNAPOLIS DOCKAGE
1987 42’ Grand Banks
COMPLIMENTARY COMPLIMENTARY ANNAPOLIS DOCKAGE Deep Water ANNAPOLIS dockage up toDOCKAGE 80ft COMPLIMENTARY ANNAPOLIS DOCKAGE Deep Deep Water Water dockage dockage up up to to 80ft 80ft in Annapolis for power or sail Deep Water dockage upservices to 80ft in inPersonalized, Annapolis Annapolis for for power power or or sail sail concierge in Annapolis for power or sail Personalized, Personalized, concierge concierge services services Targeted marketing campaigns (print & digital) Personalized, concierge Targeted Targeted marketing marketing campaigns campaigns (print (print &&digital) digital) Wide-angle, high-res photosservices & drone video Targeted marketing campaigns (print & digital) Wide-angle, Wide-angle, high-res high-res photos photos & & drone drone video video Yachtworld.com MLS exposure Wide-angle, high-res photos & drone video Yachtworld.com Yachtworld.com MLS MLSexposure exposure Yachtworld.com MLS exposure
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STERN LINES
The Awakening
Be warned: There is a mighty giant emerging from the sandy shoreline at Washington, D.C.’s National Harbor. J. Seward Johnson’s artwork, “The Awakening,” features five cast-iron sculptures stretching some 70 feet across the beach, turning the heads of approaching boaters and offering children a unique place to climb. Johnson’s giant is part of an art scavenger hunt at National Harbor, along with an 85-foot-tall sculpture called “The Beckoning” and more than a dozen others. You can find the waterfront destination’s full art collection by texting ACNH to 56512.
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 64
November/December 2021
ON BOARD TRAINING Private instruction on your boat Docking Courses Women at the Wheel Course Basic Boat Operation Course
HANDS ON CLASSES Marine Diesel Electrical Weather Safety Navigation
USCG CAPTAINS LICENSE 6 Pack (OUPV) Master Mariner
AnnapolisSchoolofSeamanship.com
Worth the Wait The world never stops turning – and her infinite wonders remain. Now is the time to leave all your worries on the dock, let Mother Nature dazzle you with her beauty once more, and discover a truly unforgettable vacation on the water…
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