September 2020 by Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Bay Beekeepers Build Better Hives & Gardens

Docking and Dining— Take Your Boat to Dinner

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ANNAPOLIS

Volume 50

Number 5

PUBLISHER

John Stefancik

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Meg Walburn Viviano

MANAGING EDITOR Chris Landers

Cruising Editor: Jody Argo Schroath Multimedia Journalist: Cheryl Costello Contributing Editor: Susan Moynihan Editors at Large: Wendy Mitman Clarke, Chris D. Dollar, Ann Levelle, John Page Williams Contributing Writers: Rafael Alvarez, Laura Boycourt, Larry Chowning, Ann Eichenmuller, Henry Hong, Marty LeGrand, Emmy Nicklin, Nancy Taylor Robson, Karen Soule

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jill BeVier Allen

Contributing Photographers: Andy Anderson, Mark L. Atwater, Skip Brown, André Chung, Dan Duffy, Jay Fleming, Austin Green, Jameson Harrington, Mark Hergan, Jill Jasuta, Vince Lupo, K.B. Moore, Will Parson, Tamzin B. Smith, Chris Witzgall

PRODUCTION MANAGER Patrick Loughrey

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER Mike Ogar

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Publisher Emeritus Richard J. Royer

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CHESAPEAKE BAY MEDIA, LLC Chief Executive Officer, John Martino Executive Vice President, Tara Davis 601 Sixth Street, Annapolis, MD 21403 410-263-2662 • fax 410-267-6924 ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com Editorial: editor@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com Circulation: circ@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com Billing: billing@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

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Chesapeake Bay Magazine (ISSN0045-656X) (USPS 531-470) is published by Chesapeake Bay Media, LLC, 601 Sixth Street, Annapolis, MD 21403. $25.95 per year, 12 issues annually. $7.99 per copy. Periodical postage paid at Annapolis, MD 21403 and additional offices. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes or corrections for Chesapeake Bay Magazine to 601 Sixth Street, Annapolis, MD 21403. Copyright 2020 by Chesapeake Bay Media, LLC— Printed in the U.S.A.

Beyond

Expectations.

Canyon 326

Uniquely Grady-White. gradywhite.com

contents On the Cover: The bow of a Simmons Sea Skiff built by Jim Scoggins of Talbot

CBM

September 2020—Volume 50 Number 5

County, Md., reflected in calm water on Eastern Bay. Photo by Jay Fleming

Features

Bees of the Bay

Braving stings, colony collapse, and an ever-expanding hobby with the Chesapeake’s beekeepers—Nancy Taylor Robson.

Where We’re Headed

16 24 62

54 A Few Good Women Virginia’s female game officers face filched fish, diseased deer, and sexist pigs—Ann Eichenmueller.

Science to 62 Speaking Power

Tim Junkin interviews longtime Bay scientist Don Boesch about science, politics, and the future of the Bay.

Susquehanna Flats

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contents

September 2020

Columns

Talk of the Bay

16 22 24 26

Chesapeake Chef: She-Crab Soup How do you cook a sook? Susan

Moyhnihan investigates.

Chesapeake Almanac: Exploring the Lower Susquehanna John Page

On Boats: Boston Whaler Vantage 280 A true 21st-century

Wild Chesapeake: Rail Birds of the Marshes Can’t tell a clapper from

Stern Lines: Fair to Midden

Williams goes back to the source.

family boat—Capt. John Page Williams.

30 36

a king? Capt. Chris D. Dollar on the rail’s ways.

Relaxing by the beach, Deal Island style— Carlin Stiehl.

Star-Spangled Tour Steamship Saviors Zombie Crabs Old Curtis Bay

Departments

12 14

From the Publisher Online

Bay Partners

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P L A N YO U R S TAY AT V I S I TA N N A P O L I S . O R G

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from the publisher

Reshaping the Landscape Chesapeake Bay Magazine Nears 50 Years by John Stefancik

s I write this letter, Tropical Storm Isaias bears down on the Chesapeake, driving northward almost up the center of the Bay. This rare, once-in-a-decade (or so) event reminds me of the will of Mother Nature and how she can change the landscape of things. I am 50 years old now, just one year older than Chesapeake Bay Magazine, and I have seen storms that have completely cleared things out and reshaped the landscape. It’s remarkable to think about all the changes the Bay has experienced in the past half-century, along with dramatic changes in communication and media. When Dick and Dixie Goertemiller launched Bay Magazine in 1971, they surely envisioned a bright future, but I doubt anybody contemplated the speed of the shift from a print to a digital environment. I joined Chesapeake Bay Magazine in 2000 and after 14 years as an employee, I teamed up with John Martino, founder of Annapolis School of Seamanship, and his father, Rocco Martino, to acquire Chesapeake Bay Magazine from owner and publisher Dick Royer. Together we launched Chesapeake Bay Media to bring the magazine’s award-winning editorial content to its dedicated and loyal readership and to a larger digital audience that shares the same passion for the Chesapeake Bay lifestyle. Our vision for CBM from the beginning has been to build a regional media company that focuses on all things Chesapeake, grows our community, and engages them to celebrate why we live here. Over the past six years, our growth has included

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an expansive mix of digital media to accompany this flagship print magazine. The red “CBM” on our cover stands for Chesapeake Bay Media, and we include it because we now help tens of thousands stay informed through our Bay Bulletin digital news, our social media channels, and the local newspaper Bay Weekly, which we acquired this past January. Our social media alone now reaches over a million people. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit this spring, demand for information exploded and we were ready. We immediately attracted tens of thousands of more people to our digital products. This fully intertwined the digital channel and the magazine. We decided that one person should oversee all of this content. It is now under the editorial direction of Meg Viviano, creator of Bay Bulletin, a trusted source for Chesapeake news built from the ground up. Sadly, this June we lost one of the founders, Dr. Rocco Martino, who passed away at the age of 91 just six months after retiring as CFO. Rocky, as we affectionately knew him, was a rocket scientist, entrepreneur, inventor, author, and technology pioneer. He helped launch CBM after a lifetime in science and business. In the 1950s, he solved the complex heat calculations for the re-entry of space vehicles that made manned space missions possible. Among a great many other accomplishments, Dr. Martino founded a company called XRT in 1972. It created software for financial, business, and medical systems, growing its worldwide footprint so

September 2020

much that by the mid-1990s, approximately three trillion dollars per day were processed through systems designed and created by Dr. Martino. Rocky’s business sense and world of experience established a stable footing for the tremendous growth of Chesapeake Bay Media’s products. We are also sad to say goodbye to Joe Evans. The magazine expanded during his tenure, and there’s no doubt why. Joe came to us after serving as a public information officer at Maryland DNR, and before that, he founded a boating magazine, made films for National Geographic, and even produced boats in his own shop. As editor in chief, Joe guided Chesapeake Bay Magazine from a quaint, respected publication to a bolder, broader, ongoing conversation about the fabric of the entire region. We’ll always owe him a debt of gratitude for these advancements. In 2021 we will commemorate 50 years of Chesapeake Bay Magazine with a retrospective of the last five decades, highlighting Bay people, businesses, organizations, and events that have shaped our community and region. To readers old and new, we say thank you for your loyalty and support. The entire staff loves to read your letters and messages. We look forward to serving all of you for another 50 years.

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VIDEO: How to Serve Snakehead for Dinner The fish with the unappealing name makes a darn good fillet. A Maryland executive chef shows Cheryl Costello how to serve up gourmet snakehead. Watch the video at chesapeakebaymagazine.com/snakehead. u Read more and sign up for the Bay Bulletin, CBM’s free weekly e-news blast, online at chesapeakebaymagazine.com/baybulletin.

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talk of the bay

A Star-Spangled Day Trip story & photos by Tim Grove

Follow this guide to the see the main sites associated with the Battle of Baltimore (September 12-14, 1814) in one day. Clustered in and around Baltimore, many are well-preserved, so it requires only a little imagination to travel back in time to an important event in America’s history. September 12 was for a long time celebrated in the city and surroundings as Defender’s Day in honor of the event, though the celebrations have dimmed in recent decades. If you’re looking for an appropriate soundtrack for your tour (or need to interest a bored teenager in the outing), local artists recorded 1814! The War of 1812 Rock Opera, all about Baltimore’s defense.

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altimore knew it had a target on its back. On August 24, 1814, British troops set fire to the White House, Capitol, and other buildings in the burgeoning city of Washington, D.C. Baltimore residents stared from their rooftops in horror at the fiery glow on the southwest horizon. Was this their future? British sailors had been seen taking depth measurements and assessing the Baltimore harbor and Fort McHenry: research for a possible attack. Baltimore was America’s third largest city and its bustling shipyards churned out fast schooners—sailing ships called privateers that captured and disrupted British shipping to the tune of millions of dollars. The day after the British burned Washington, Baltimore’s city council called an emergency meeting. If the

September 2020

British showed up, should they surrender without a fight or defend the city? Would the British occupy it or burn it? What action would preserve their community and livelihoods? Those calling for defense won the argument. They asked General Samuel Smith (also a U.S. Senator) to take command of the defense operations. He had been leading Baltimore’s preparations for several years, and predicted a twopronged British attack, by land and by sea.

North Point State Park The obvious starting point for a land attack was North Point, 15 miles by road from Baltimore. It allowed large ships close access and was out of range of Fort McHenry’s guns. You can begin

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NORTH POINT STATE PARK NPS BATTLEFIELD & BATTLE ACRE PARK PATTERSON PARK FELLS POINT FLAG HOUSE & MUSEUM BATTLE MONUMENT WELLS & MCCOMAS MONUMENT SAMUEL SMITH GRAVE FORT MCHENRY FEDERAL HILL

your own campaign at North Point State Park. Walk out on the 1,000-foot long Crystal Pier to see a splendid view of the broad expanse of the Chesapeake, close to the spot where the attack began. Shortly after noon on Sunday, September 11, 1814, a white flag appeared over the Ridgely house (no longer standing) nearby. Lookouts on Federal Hill in Baltimore knew this meant that observers on the Bay had spotted British ships heading toward Baltimore. They went into action. Three cannon booms pierced the silence and the streets filled with chaos. Soon, an armada of 50 Royal Navy ships filled the water around North Point. At around 3 a.m. on September 12, the still night erupted with activity. About 4,700 British soldiers disembarked from warships onto the sandy soil at North Point. The invasion had begun. (The closest you can get to the unloading point is the adjacent Fort Howard Park at the point extending into the Patapsco River). Follow Old North Point Road toward Baltimore as it curves over tidal creeks and through farmland. Watch for several interpretive markers along the way. Soon, commercial development crowds into the bucolic landscape, requiring more of your imagination.

North Point State Battlefield & Battle Acre Park The Patapsco Neck peninsula you’re standing on varied in width from a few hundred yards to 2 or 3 miles. Its narrowest point, a half-mile stretch of land between waterways, acted as a funnel. It was a strategic location and the site of the opening battle to take Baltimore. This park preserves nine acres where much of the fighting occurred, and is meant to evoke the terrain as it was when the British met with Baltimore’s defenders. On the land nearby, British General Robert Ross had suddenly slumped over in his saddle, the victim of American sharpshooters. While the truth is uncertain, local lore credits the shot to either Daniel Wells or Henry G. McComas, two teenage leather-working apprentices and Army privates, both of whom are alleged to have taken the shot, and both of whom died in the subsequent skirmish. There is a monument to Baltimore’s “boy heroes” in the city’s Old Town neighborhood. The Americans held their ground, but eventually retreated, pulling the British to the main American defenses on Hampstead Hill.

Patterson Park When the British troops reached the base of the hill, they stopped. Today, Patterson Park preserves some of Hampstead Hill, site of the American defensive line guarding the eastern approach by road to the city. Here, the Americans built an extensive system of trenches and gun batteries, part of a ring which surrounded much of the city. The hill and defenses proved daunting to British generals and stopped the land attack. The park was founded in 1827, the first land given for public recreation and the oldest park in Baltimore. Look for the iconic pagoda, which dates to 1891 and is flanked by a row of historic cannons. The cannons—of the sort, if not the actual guns that were used to repel the British—are a mishmash of countries and dates of origin; one made by the Dutch East India Company dates to the 1680s, another was cast in England under George I.

Fells Point Baltimore’s reputation as a center for privateering earned it scorn from the British and was the primary reason for their attack. Though its shipyards are long gone, Fells Point retains a maritime September 2020

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Fells Point

flavor, with streets made of old Belgian block ships’ ballast and lined with narrow rowhouses. Visiting tall ships often dock at the foot of Broadway, which is also a Baltimore Water Taxi stop. (As of this writing, the taxi’s operations are changeable due to COVID-19, but normally you can catch a boat out to Fort McHenry from here.) A park at the end of Thames Street, which runs along the water, celebrates Isaac Myers, who set up a collective, Blackowned shipyard in the area, and Frederick Douglass, who worked as a ship caulker while enslaved here. The most famous ship made at Fells Point was Chasseur, dubbed “the Pride of Baltimore,” which became famous during the War of 1812 for taking the fight to the British. Today, a reproduction of that ship, Pride of Baltimore II, in most years offers tours and cruises and serves as a worldwide ambassador for the Port of Baltimore. It is sometimes docked in Fells Point. Restaurant openings are in flux due to the pandemic and quickly changing regulations, but if you’re looking for a thematically appropriate lunch stop, The Horse You Came In On Saloon (thehorsebaltimore.com) has been in continuous operation since 1775, and offers burgers and pub fare.

Star Spangled Banner Flag House A few blocks away, in today’s Little Italy neighborhood, sits a narrow brick house. The star-spangled story really begins one year earlier, in 1813, when officials from Fort McHenry stopped by the shop of flagmaker Mary Pickersgill and placed an order for two large flags to fly over the fort. A savvy businesswoman, Mary completed the order with the help of her daughter, nieces, mother, an indentured servant, and an enslaved girl. Step inside the small house and you immediately see why the large flag, with its 42-foot-long stripes, had to be completed in the larger space of a nearby brewery. The original receipt on display in the museum shows Pickersgill earned $574.44 (roughly $8,800 today). She never dreamed her flag would one day be a national treasure, preserved in the Smithsonian and the focus of the US national anthem.

Battle Monument Less than a mile away stands America’s first significant war memorial. The 39-foot-tall column supports a female figure representing the city of Baltimore. It honors all 39 men who died during the battle. The cornerstone was laid less

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than a year after the attack, though the monument was not completed until 1825. An image of the monument appears on the city’s flag. It’s a few blocks out of the way, but consider including a visit to the Wells and McComas Monument and waving hello to the boy heroes, apocryphal or not, as you pass.

exploration. It’s easy to imagine the incoming bombs, and on calm days, you might see a massive flag flying on the fort’s flag pole. If you’re there at day’s end, you might be invited to help take down the flag.

Samuel Smith Grave

Backtracking a bit from the Fort, Federal Hill overlooks the Inner Harbor, and takes its name from being the site of a 1789 celebration of the signing of the Constitution. Joshua Barney, a Revolutionary War hero who would go on to command the Chesapeake Flotilla in the War of 1812, came up with the celebration’s centerpiece, a 15-foot, square-rigged ship named Federalist, which Barney then sailed to Mount Vernon and presented to George Washington. A statue of Samuel Smith, the defender of Baltimore, gazes out over the city. It was here that lookouts saw the white flag at North Point in the distance and swung into action. Nervous residents watched the bombardment unfold from the surrounding rooftops. And here cannons boomed to celebrate the treaty of peace that came the following February. You can’t access them, but the hill is riddled with tunnels, some used for quarrying clay, others for Civil War storage, and one allegedly dug for Barney himself to store ammunition for privateers during the War of 1812. It was also the site of a gun battery to protect against the British which, for reasons discovered at Fort McHenry, went unused. The neighborhood of Federal Hill, just to the west of the hill itself, is young, vibrant, and full of restaurants and bars. It’s a great place to end your journey with a meal.

If you have a few extra minutes, visit General (and Senator and Mayor and Congressman—he did it all) Samuel Smith’s grave in Westminster Hall and Burying Ground (near Edgar Allen Poe’s grave). His funeral procession was the largest Baltimore had ever seen and included all the nation’s top leaders, even the president. The burying ground opened in 1787, and is resting place to many prominent early Baltimoreans and heroes of the Revolutionary and 1812 wars. The gothic revival church came later, in 1852, and was built over some of the existing graves, raised on brick and stone piers to preserve them.

Fort McHenry At the crack of dawn on September 13, five British bomb ships and one rocket ship moved into position just out of range of Fort McHenry’s guns. The star-shaped brick fort was the focus of the British sea attack. In a ferocious 26-hour bombardment, the British navy lobbed roughly 1,500 rockets, shells, and cannonballs at the structure (some estimates are much higher). Early on September 14, the sight of Mary Pickersgill’s huge flag waving over the fort proved the British had not succeeded in their attack and inspired Francis Scott Key to pen the words of what would become America’s national anthem. Owned by the American people and maintained by the National Park Service, Fort McHenry features a visitor center with excellent exhibitions and a film. The well-preserved fort offers all ages an adventure of

Federal Hill

Author Tim Grove lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and strives to tell the stories of America’s forgotten voices. His new book for young adults, Star-Spangled: The Story of a Flag, a Battle, and the American Anthem, is now available (timgrove.net).

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An old steamship pilothouse in its new home at the Steamboat Era Museum.

The Long, Strange Journey of the Steamship Potomac A working steamship becomes a room with a view of history by Ann Eichenmuller

STEAMBOAT ERA MUSEUM

t plied the waters of the Chesapeake, Potomac, and Rappahannock; spent a half-century disguised as a beach cottage; and for a few brief moments, even hung in the sky. This is the tale of the steamship Potomac, and of the little museum that finally brought it home. Launched in 1894 by the Maryland and Virginia Steamboat Company, the Potomac was the picture of gracious water travel. White-coated stewards strolled the decks, and linen-covered dining tables were set with roses and gleaming silver. Passengers dined on fresh fish and oysters, served in sophisticated style by a waiter with a napkin draped over his arm. After a turn on the decks to watch the scenery go by, guests retired to one of the ship’s thirty-seven staterooms, where they slept on white-enameled wrought iron beds under candlewick spreads. But the Potomac was more than upscale transportation—it was also the lifeline for small towns in Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck, carrying everything from livestock to watermelons to shoes between big port cities and secluded farming communities. That all ended suddenly on February 27, 1936, when the Potomac was rammed by a freighter in heavy fog. The wooden superstructure and steel hull pierced above the water line, it was towed to port, then salvaged to become a pulpwood barge. That might have been the last anyone heard of the Potomac but for Ben and Willoughby Colonna. The brothers, whose Norfolk shipyard was in charge of the

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September 2020

refit, were so impressed by the steamship’s elegant pilothouse that they had it transported to their family’s Taft Beach fish factory in White Stone, Virginia. There it was hauled onto land and transformed into a guest cottage. Years passed, the factory changed hands, and the cottage was remodeled again to reflect its steamship origins. Of this restoration, Chesapeake Bay historian Richard H. Burgess, wrote, “It was as if the structure was still on the steamer…complete with steering wheel, binnacle, gong pulls, searchlights, name boards, and carved eagle on its top as decoration.” Eventually the fish factory closed, and the property passed to relatives of Meredith Robbins, a menhaden fishing captain. He agreed to watch over the cottage, but while he was reassigned to a vessel in the Gulf, the Potomac pilothouse fell into disrepair. Paint peeled, vandals broke windows, and the last vestige of the once proud steamship became a popular spot for late night lovers’ trysts. “From what our visitors tell us, you’d think everyone in the Northern

Bald is beautiful. Neck made out in the pilothouse,” jokes Barbara Brecher, Executive Director of the Steamboat Era Museum in Irvington. After a fire destroyed the abandoned fish factory, the property owners donated the structure to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News in hopes it could be saved. The pilothouse sat in storage for 13 years before the Collections Committee voted to donate her to the Colonial Beach Historical Society, returning the Potomac to the river for which it was named. But the Historical Society soon found the cost of renovation exceeded their budget. As fate would have it, a new museum dedicated to steamships was being founded in the little town of Irvington (population 404). Colonial Beach Historical Society offered the Potomac to the fledgling Steamboat Era Museum in 2001. “For us, the pilothouse was like a dream come true,” recalled Jimmy Lee Crockett, one of the Museum’s early supporters. As the largest remaining piece of an authentic Chesapeake steamboat, the pilothouse would be the Museum’s focal point—but making that dream a reality was a tremendous challenge. The cost to restore the pilothouse and redesign the Museum footprint to accommodate it was estimated at $350,000. Generous grants were

awarded from the Wiley Foundation, the Carter C. Chinnis Charitable Trust, and the Mary Morton Parsons Foundation, and the community of the lower Northern Neck opened their hearts and wallets. Their commitment to the project can be found in the four-inch binder Brecher keeps in her office. “It’s filled to capacity, and each page represents a donation,” she explains proudly. Through a mix of grants and fundraisers, the Museum was able to raise nearly $400,000. Meanwhile, in December 2015, the pilothouse was transported to John Morgenthaler’s shop in Ophelia to begin work. Three-and-a-half years later, the Potomac’s long odyssey ended. On a Wednesday morning in May 2019, a crowd watched as a 155-ton crane lifted the pilothouse high in the sky and then gently lowered her to the rear of the museum, where it is the centerpiece for a wide-ranging collection of artifacts and exhibitions detailing the role of the steamboat in Chesapeake history. The Potomac had finally found her way home. h Ann Eichenmuller is a freelance writer and the author of two nautical mystery novels. She lives along Virginia’s Rappahannock River where she and husband Eric sail Avalon, a Morgan Out Island.

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Black-fingered mud crabs infected with the parasite Loxothylacus panopaei

Attack of the Zombie Mud Crabs

WILL PARSON/CHESAPEAKE BAY PROGRAM

Battling brain-eating invaders. For science!

by Jeff Holland

t’s right out of a 1950s Hollywood horror film: An evil alien, loxo, invades the bodies of unsuspecting victims, takes control of their minds, and implants their bodies with its larvae. The victims, unable to resist, turn into zombies whose insides throb with alien spawn. Before loxo can take over the world, scientists come to the rescue. Wild as it seems, this is really happening right here on the Chesapeake Bay. The zombified victims in this case are tiny mud crabs and the evil invader is a parasitic barnacle from the Gulf Coast called loxothylacus panopaei—known to researchers as “loxo.” ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

Mud crabs, of course, are not the blue ones that turn red in the steam pot and wind up on top of your picnic table covered with Old Bay. Mud crabs are bitty critters the size of your thumbnail. They’re one of the many species that consider oyster reefs the perfect habitat, along with small fish, shrimp, and eels. We have two kinds of mud crabs here on the Chesapeake: those with black fingertips, and those whose tips are white. Both have been infected with the parasite at a rate as high as 50 percent. The science heroes in this story are mainly connected with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). Located on the Rhode River, SERC’s 2,650-acre campus encompasses forests, wetlands, marshes, and 15 miles of protected shoreline that the staff use as a natural laboratory for long-term and cutting-edge ecological research on the issues impacting the confluence of land and water. Many of SERC’s studies on water quality, land use, and global warming have been going on since the center’s founding in 1965. SERC researchers have been studying the prevalence of loxo in populations of the white-fingered mud crab since the 1990s. The current Mud Crab Team comprises 15 dock owners and collaborators, 19 staff and interns, and, up until this year when the coronavirus pandemic struck, 156 volunteers. It’s led by Monaca Noble, a biologist at SERC’s Marine Invasions Laboratory. Over the past decade, Dr. Noble has studied invasive organisms hitch-hiking across oceans in the ballast tanks of commercial freighters as well as the ones that infect the mud crabs here on the Bay. Noble explained the situation in a 2015 article she published on Discovermagazine.com. “Loxo females inject themselves into the shell of recently molted crabs and take control of major functions like molting and reproduction,” she wrote. “Loxo’s control over the crab is so complete that

the crab essentially becomes a zombie working to raise the parasite’s young before dying an untimely death.” It affects both male and female crabs, sterilizing them and changing the behavior and even the physical structure of the males to force them to care for the parasitic eggs. One study found it makes them up to twice as fast; more 28 Days Later than Night of the Living Dead. The research project’s success depends on a corps of citizen-scientist volunteers who collect mud crabs from sites located all around Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake. Volunteers set habitat collectors, which are small plastic crates filled with dead oyster shells. There might as well be a little “VACANCY” sign flashing to attract mud crabs looking for a new home. After the habitats have been on the bottom for two months, researchers gather and bring them to the laboratory, measuring the resident crabs, determining their sex, and checking for outward signs of the loxo parasite. “We haven’t found many parasitized crabs this year, since the parasite doesn’t do too well in low salinity,” Noble explained in a recent phone interview with CBM. “There are more down at Oxford and Solomons,” where the Bay water is saltier. The current viral pandemic has curtailed the participation of citizenscientists. Without those volunteers, only a subset of the planned sampling will be completed. But they’ve come up with another solution: tapping into local schools. “I still have two interns who are doing remote internships,” she said. “We’re working on a new citizenscience program that will be more high-school oriented.” The two interns are from nearby South River High School. They’re doing their lab work at home, taking measurements and pictures to capture data on the crab under the supervision of two of their

teachers. “Since we can’t have volunteers in the lab like we used to, we are investigating whether or not we can get accurate crab measurements using photographs,” she said. Noble and her staff interact with teachers and interns through an online platform called “Zooniverse” that allows volunteers from around the world to contribute data to research. “The Zooniverse platform has some good measurement tools that we are testing,” she said. “If we can indeed get good measurements with the photos, we can have high-school students measure the crabs for us.” The high-school teachers have been working to develop the project and writing curriculum to use in their classrooms (or virtual classrooms, as will likely be the case for this coming school year). “I’m excited about the educational component we’re developing,” Noble said. “We’re going to engage more high-school classes so the students there can collect and analyze the data. It gives us the data we need, but it gives them the experience of gathering the data and

it can be done 100 percent remotely.” Part of the researchers’ goal is to figure out why the infection rate varies from sample to sample, assessing salinity and temperature at the sites and whether mud crab populations themselves vary depending on the parasite. Mud crabs may go largely unnoticed and unsung, but their presence contributes to healthy oyster reefs and ecosystems, and their loss would reverberate. There’s another reason for concern, according to SERC. A similar parasite in the Gulf of Mexico does affect blue crabs, and if it managed to make its way to the Bay, it could wipe out the crabbing industry here. Now that’s a scary thought. Jefferson Holland is a singer, songwriter, poet, and story-teller. He has served as the director of the Annapolis Maritime Museum, as the Riverkeeper for the West and Rhode Rivers and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. He founded “Them Eastport Oyster Boys” with partner Kevin Brooks in 1995.

Loxo in the lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

September 2020

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talk of the bay

An ornate water tank, built in 1932, is Curtis Bay’s most dramatic landmark.

Old Curtis Bay A Family Album by Rafael Alvarez

JEROME GRAY

urtis Bay is an enduring industrial colossus at the far southern tip of Baltimore, just a chemical cloud away from the Anne Arundel County line. You won’t find a lot of sailboats there, but many a wreck lies along the waterfront shoals where ships were sent to die. Settled high upon a hill that slopes down to Curtis Creek, the area was once the nearly-hundred-acre farm of a prosperous, formerly enslaved man named William Hall. The early homes—on streets named alphabetically for trees—were surrounded by woods with soil rich enough to harvest mushrooms. The Coast Guard yard, synonymous with the neighborhood for more than a century, was established on Hawkins Point Road in 1899 on 36 acres sold by Hall to the government. With the American Century came heavy industry: shipyards, chemical plants, mountains of coal serviced by the B&O Railroad, foundries, and jobs, jobs, jobs— the deep water to which the neighborhood owed its prosperity becoming thick enough with oil and grease to catch fire. Patriotism was unquestioned and the athletic club fielded baseball and football teams that held their own against other ethnic villages throughout the city. For some time now—who knows when the good old days cross over to ain’t it a shame?—the fabled community has been an object of nostalgia and mourning by

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September 2020

those born there between the Great Depression and the New Frontier. “Some parts aren’t so good anymore, but I live at the end of a dead-end street behind the church and I have good neighbors,” said Jeanne Stumpf Zaruba, born in October 1933, the month the Coast Guard was auctioning patrol boats—relics of the First World War—to the public. The year before Mrs. Zaruba was born, the neighborhood’s most dramatic landmark went up: a water tank at Filbert and Prudence, skirted with colored gravel and bricks of 20 different colors that fade to a herringbone of light tan around the top. The work of a Baltimore architect and bibliophile named Frank O. Heyder (who also worked on Memorial Stadium before it opened for the 1954 baseball season), it is spectacular. At 86, Jeanne is the last survivor of her generation of Zarubas, an esteemed family of old Curtis Bay who for years have held a reunion each fall at the Coast Guard Yard. She is the only member who still lives in the neighborhood despite having to move in with her daughter outside of the city during the 2020 pandemic. Jeanne’s husband, Edward J. Zaruba Sr., was a naval architect, one of seven siblings born to immigrant Czechs Karel and Anastasia Zaruba and “descended from a long line of Curtis Bay shipbuilders,” according to his 1996 obituary. His career began at the Coast Guard Yard in 1943 as an apprentice shipbuilder. In Curtis Bay, if you were related to the right people—or had someone from the neighborhood or its many churches put in a good word for you—a job at one of the three-shifts-a-day plants was within reach. And if you were a Zaruba or a Hajek—the old names ring out like a jumping wedding polka: Obalinsky, Konopik, Chermak and a score of others who lived on the hill high above the

“From Pennington Avenue to Curtis Avenue was nothing but woods… all around everywhere were string beans and strawberries and everybody raising chickens …” —a Curtis Bay oldtimer, long dead … harbor—you shopped at Curtis Bay Variety. The emphasis was on variety. There, once upon a Christmas, a gleaming red metal fire truck waited for Santa to deliver it to a lucky kid in the everybody-knew-everybody enclave of Czechs/Bohemians, Ukranians, Lithuanians, and Poles, with a few “American” families sprinkled in. While the neighborhood firehouse (Engine No 57, built in 1923) remains a few blocks away at Pennington and Filbert, Curtis Bay Variety at Pennington and Church is long gone.

“My mother’s parents owned the store and we lived over top of it for many years. I remember we’d all make breakfast together and I remember when we had to empty the place of everything but the shelves,” said Jeanne’s niece, Joan Zaruba White, 71 and now living in Pasadena. Joan hated leaving Curtis Bay around the 7th grade when her parents, William G. Zaruba and the former Norma Hajek, both now deceased, moved to Linthicum in the 1960s. The lure of the postwar suburbs, then as fresh as the rye bread baked by

a petite, wiry Ukranian woman named “Miss Ann,” began to empty Curtis Bay of its legacy families. “I stopped driving through the neighborhood,” said Joan. “It’s too sad.” The store, owned by Norma’s father Frank and his wife, the former Cecilia Puncochar, stocked everything but groceries—knitting yarn, garden hoses, candy, dry goods, what-nots and seven kinds of what-have-you. The family kept house next door and the number to call to see if your vegetable seeds had come in was Elgin 5-8892.

September 2020

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Frank C. Hajek, Jr., who died in 1980 a few years after his wife, is remembered as a kind and dignified man who wore a white shirt, tie, and black dress shoes even on vacation. While Cecilia minded the store, Frank was usually in the basement of the family home next door, running off calendars, church bulletins, fliers for bull roasts, and marriage announcements on an old press beneath the staircase. “We would help him hang the [printed] paper to dry; it was all over the house and we loved helping,” said Joan. “He had all his type lined up on a little table next to the press.” “Good years,” she said, as only a senior citizen remembering her grandparents can. “Happy times.” How much has changed in Curtis Bay since Frank Hajek was running off posters for a crab feast at the Polish Home Hall high upon the corner Fairhaven and Filbert? Since 2015, the century-old Polish Home has been the sanctuary of Fair Havens A.M.E. Church, a vibrant African-American congregation in what was once an almost monolithically white neighborhood. Near the corner of Pennington and Church is a nonprofit, female-run organization called “The Well,” which ministers to women—some of them sex workers, many of them addicts—who want another chance. The mission of the Well, according to its website, is to offer practical guidance and healing to “women who have survived lives of abuse, generational poverty, sexual exploitation and addiction [and] know what it is to be broken.” The Well has been in business for about 15 years. St. Athanasius, where Mass was once said in Polish, pre-dates the Coast Guard Yard by nearly a decade. According to the gospels, they are in the same business.

September 2020

“Saint Athanasius remains a steady jewel in the midst of a community that has seen a constant flow of change over the years,” said the Rev. Rob DiMattei, pastor. “Our parishioners are very generous in their outreach,” including donations to the Well.

hough it wasn’t a toy store, if Curtis Bay Variety stocked a fire engine at Christmas, surely one might find a novelty ship or boat there when the holidays came around. And while everyone knows that the Coast Guard has boats, the average person might be surprised that the Army also has vessels and kept tugboats at their depot near the U.S. Gypsum pier on Hawkins Point Road. “I was a deckhand down there during Vietnam, ’69 to ’75,” said George Viehmeyer, Jr., 70, a Linthicum native now living in Pennsylvania. “We’d tow a barge to Edgewood Arsenal [in Aberdeen] to pick up a load of whatever and take it down the East Coast to Panama. Then we’d sail back to Baltimore.” The tug was the LT-1971 and carried a crew of seventeen. It is believed to now be in private service in Alaska. Asked what it was like to work on an ocean-going Army tug during wartime, Viehmeyer said, “When we weren’t on duty, we’d sail over to Pratt Street, tie up at Connolly’s and carouse there for an afternoon. It sure beat being in the infantry.” Of Curtis Bay in the mid-1970s, when one of George’s relatives was making a good living at Pennington and Plum selling thousands of used and blemished tires, Viehmeyer said, “It was already becoming a rough area.” “I guess the last time I was there was maybe 10 or 12 years ago for a funeral.” Rafael Alvarez can be reached via patreon. com/rafaelalvarezbaltimore.

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Each chef puts a subtle twist on the classic she-crab soup.

The Secrets of She-Crab Soup What makes this Virginia classic award-worthy? We traveled to Tidewater to find out. VIRGINIA BEACH CVB

by Susan Moynihan

ew people love she-crab soup more than Sean Brickell, founder of the East Coast She-Crab Soup Classic, a tasting competition that takes over the Virginia Beach boardwalk every April. “I happen to think it’s one of the finest culinary delicacies on the planet,” he says. ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

Almost every restaurant in Virginia’s Tidewater region serves some version of the bisque-like soup, he says. “What is curious is that each chef has a slight variation on the recipe—and each is certain that his or her recipe is the ultimate recipe.” That’s what led Brickell to dream up the She-Crab Soup Classic. As president of an events marketing company in Virginia Beach, he was looking for ways to get people to come out and enjoy the boardwalk. A soup-off would not only celebrate his favorite dish, but it would give bragging rights to winning restaurants, just in time for the summer season. The event has been a sell-out since it began in 2008. A ticket gets you 1-ounce tastes from up to 20 local restaurants and a ballot to vote for the People’s Choice awards. A panel of experts, from chefs to food critics, does the same for the Critics’ Choice category. At the end of the day, six soups in each category are awarded First Place through three Honorable Mentions for the best she-crab soup. There’s just one minor issue. South Carolina, not Virginia, takes credit for the invention of she-crab soup. Food lore has it that back in 1909, President Taft was visiting his friend R. Goodwyn Rhett, then mayor of Charleston. In an attempt to dress up the meal being served to their honored guest, Rhett’s butler William Deas added orangehued roe to the crab bisque, and thus she-crab soup was born. But food experts along the Chesapeake don’t necessarily buy that origin story. Chef John Shields has spent his career researching Bay culinary traditions, which he showcases in multiple cookbooks, a Maryland Public Television series, and on the menu at his restaurant Gertrude’s, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. “When we’re talking about she-crab soup, we’re talking about an old-timey, traditional Americana

recipe,” he says. “You’ll find a lot of these, first in Maryland and Virginia and then down into the Carolinas.” He traces the soup’s origins to European chefs working in the New World at the time of our country’s founding. “There were French chefs in Annapolis,” he says. “Thomas Jefferson sent all of his cooks to train with them, so you had African chefs training with French chefs. Cream of crab, or she-crab soup, is very French in origin, with the roux and the way it’s thickened.” As for the addition of roe, “even in wealthy households, you had people cooking who were not wealthy. They were always looking to use absolutely everything that was in the crab. Roe would often get tossed out, but this is a vehicle for using it. You get a bit of texture, you get a bit of brininess and additional flavoring.” Today, it’s rare to find actual roe in she-crab soup, due to conservation restrictions on catching female crabs. In Virginia, egg-bearing female, or “sponge,” crabs must be thrown back if the eggs are dark, indicating that they’re close to hatching. In Maryland, female crabs are off the table entirely for recreational crabbers and limited for commercial watermen. Most chefs substitute egg yolk for roe, which is easier on the chef and the environment — and it’s not a new idea. “In waterside communities, it was just common sense [to practice conservation],” says Shields. “I’ve found recipes going back 100 years or more that recommend using egg yolk.” Roe may not be a requirement for She-Crab Classic contenders, but there is one non-negotiable. “We don’t accept tomato-based crab soup,” says Brickell. “It needs to be cream-based. It needs to be crab soup.” Patrick Evans Hylton is a classically trained chef and food journalist based in Virginia Beach, and a repeat judge on the Critic’s Choice

panel. He cites a few differences between Virginia she-crab soup and Maryland cream of crab soup. “In Virginia, we’re not so worried about jumbo lump; we’re satisfied with lump or backfin or even claw meat. Our taste buds are made for something rich, so having a lot of cream is more of our style here. And we do have a taste for sherry; just a touch, but sherry is a real essential element.” Many restaurants enter the She-Crab Classic year after year. If an entrant wins five First Place awards (spanning People’s and Critics’ Choice awards), they are taken out of the competition and placed in the SheCrab Soup Hall of Fame. As of 2020, the Hall has three members: Mannino’s, of Virginia Beach; Passion The Restaurant, in Chesapeake; and Freemason’s Abbey, located in Norfolk. When we asked Freemason’s about their soup, they were friendly but tight-lipped; soup recipes are a closely-held secret in these parts. “I think it’s the right amount of sherry, the right spices, as well as the consistency of the soup,” says executive manager Lori Maddux about their secret to success. “And of course,

the crab. I won’t tell you where we get it.” Hylton seconds the need for the right consistency. “It’s got to be velvety, it’s got to be rich,” he says. “The richness shouldn’t come from the appearance, it should come from the mouth feel.” He also likes simplicity. “Something that’s not too homey, something with too many ingredients or toppings—that’s just not what you think of when you think of she-crab soup.” But besides that, anything goes, and that’s part of the fun. “There are so many variations on this thing; there are no two alike,” says Brickell. “Some people put onions in it, some people put celery in it, some people put a small crab claw in it.” Ever politic, Brickell refuses to name a favorite soup vendor. “Some are better than others, but there’s no such thing as a bad one. It’s like going to a Van Morrison concert. Even if he’s not totally ‘on’ that night, it’s still a Van Morrison concert.” Susan Moynihan prefers her crab soup with extra sherry, and is the author of 100 Things to Do in Annapolis and the Eastern Shore Before You Die.

She-Crab Soup Classic

September 2020

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CBM

chesapeake almanac The Susquehanna Flats is home to the Bay's largest underwater grass bed.

Exploring the Lower Susquehanna by John Page Williams

t was Capt. John Smith who started the confusion. He and his crew aboard the Discovery Barge thought that at the top end of the Bay they “might see the bay to divide in two heads, and arriving there we found it divided in four, all of which we searched so far as we could sail them,” according to his General History. Those four headwaters are what we know today as the six-mile-wide Susquehanna Flats, comprised of the half-mile mouth of the largest river, which he named for the upriver Susquehannock tribe, and the smaller Northeast, Elk and Sassafras rivers (the last of which Smith came to know by its Native tribe, the Tockwogh). To Smith and his crew, the change certainly looked like a dividing point, with all four rivers deserving of names. The explorers could not have known then that the Bay is actually the tidal lower reach of a waterway that extends hundreds of miles to the North. The unintended result of Smith’s naming process is four centuries of thinking about the Chesapeake and the Susquehanna as two different entities, when they are, ecologically speaking, two sides of the same coin. Fortunately, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Clean Water Blueprint firmly integrates them in its multi-year restoration partnership.

ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

It’s easy enough to appreciate the relationship with modern mapping systems, but the best way to absorb it is to explore this remarkable transition point by boat. The Susquehanna Flats have caught several millennia of rich sediment from central Pennsylvania and south-central New York. No wonder the area now grows one of the lushest, most diverse beds of underwater grass in the entire Chesapeake system. If you’re thinking of visiting by boat, there’s a marked channel around it. If you’re in an outboard skiff, kayak, or canoe, feel free to carefully explore it. There are actually multiple “shad ditches” cutting through the Flats. The combination of shallow grassbeds and ditches makes the Flats prime habitat for fish such as largemouth bass and yellow perch in warm weather, and migratory waterfowl including canvasbacks and Canada geese in the cold. Meanwhile, the powerful currents of the Susquehanna running through Smith’s Falls, where the river bed drops to sea level, and the deep-though-short tidal river below have formed a conduit for multiple springtime spawning fish, including river herring (both alewives and bluebacks), hickory shad, American shad, white perch, and rockfish. Worldwide, river fall lines and the navigable tidal water below have always drawn commerce, and the Susquehanna is no exception. Smith’s parley with the Susquehannock chiefs took place on the island because that was where their tribe had traditionally come to trade with the Tockwogh. In 1622, Edwin Palmer received a grant for the island from King James I and named it for himself. In 1637, Virginia’s William Claiborne set up an English trading post there, but after the Maryland Colony established its claim

to land north of the Potomac, they evicted Claiborne and built a fort (a practice they continued further south at Kent Island). Onshore, a settlement called Lower Ferry developed where Perryville is today, helping people cross to Harmer’s Town (now Havre de Grace). Upriver, just below the Falls, Upper Ferry (now Port Deposit) connected with Lapidum. Though the Susquehanna is shallow and rocky, the 17th- and 18th-century colonists who settled in Pennsylvania found ways to transport natural resources, especially timber, to connect with sailing ships. Naturally, shipyards developed on the town waterfronts to build, repair, and service both local and long-range watercraft, as well as ferries (which served the southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention in

Philadelphia). Meanwhile, a strong culture dependent on subsistence harvest of fish and waterfowl developed between the Falls and the Flats. The 19th century brought steam power and a connection between Havre de Grace and Pennsylvania’s canal system. Soon, there was steamboat service (along with sailing packets) for the run to Baltimore, with overland travel continuing by coach to Wilmington and Philadelphia. The War of 1812 came to Havre de Grace when British Admiral George Cockburn shelled and plundered the town in 1813, in spite of a valiant local defense. After the war, commerce returned to the region, along with produce farming, orchards and, of course, waterfowl hunting and fishing for the river’s then-massive American shad run in the spring. (With no dams

to obstruct them, some of these amazing fish ran upstream all the way to Binghamton, New York to spawn.) The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad reached Havre de Grace by the 1850s, and in the 1880s the railroad bought Palmer’s Island to help build a bridge across the Susquehanna, re-naming it Garrett Island for the company’s president. The late 19th century brought a riverside quarry just above Havre de Grace, which lies beside a channel deep enough at 13 to 30 feet to float large barges full of the quarry’s rock (some of which is used to build the substrate of restoration oyster reefs further south). That little channel may have been a creek that Capt. Smith and his crew explored in 1608. It lies inside a shallow bar about three feet deep, in the middle of the big river. Check a

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chart or your depth sounder if you’re out there; if you’re in a kayak or a canoe, you’ll be able to touch the hard, gravelly bottom of the bar with a paddle. It extends all the way up to today’s Lapidum Landing, part of Susquehannah State Park. Today, this area has become a boating center for Lancaster, Philadelphia and Wilmington. Several old marinas and other businesses on the Havre de Grace waterfront have turned into condominiums, as has the former Owens Fish Company in Perryville (a remnant of the glory days of the shad runs). Tidewater Marina in Havre de Grace offers an important center for both sailing and powerboating, with a full set of repair services and a ship’s store. The other large marina there is the city-owned Millard Tydings Memorial Yacht Basin. There are smaller marinas and repair yards along the waterfront there, as well as in Perryville and Port Deposit. Havre de Grace is well worth a longer stay. The waterfront includes a boardwalk along the riverfront, with paths leading to the Concord Point Lighthouse, the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum, and the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum. All are well worth visiting. A short distance upriver lies the Lockhouse Museum, located in the old stone lock keeper’s cottage beside the excavated terminus of the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, where barges transferred cargo to ships. Further upriver is Susquehanna State Park, which offers trails, river access at Lapidum Landing, and a number of cultural resources that give the flavor of this unique part of the Chesapeake. CBM Editor at Large John Page Williams is a fishing guide, educator, author, and naturalist, saving the Bay since 1973. In 2013, the state of Maryland proclaimed him an Admiral of the Bay.

ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

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on boats

Boston Whaler Vantage 280 This new day-cruiser provides comfort and action for everybody. by Capt. John Page Williams

oston Whaler’s new Vantage 280 is a true 21st-century family boat. Thanks to Chesapeake Whalertowne, Chesapeake Bay Magazine was able to catch a ride on hull #2 on a windy day above the Bay Bridge, with the new boat’s enthusiastic owner aboard. He and his Boston Whaler active family (water-loving Vantage 280 wife and sons aged 8 and 10) had put enough hours on her LOA: 29' 1" to give us a broad sense of Beam: 9' 6" her capabilities, and a brisk Draft: 21" southerly wind pushing Weight: 6,700 lbs. against an ebb current gave Max HP: 800 us enough sea to let her Fuel Capacity: 185 gal. show off her performance. Water Capacity: 20 gal.

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September 2020

The 280 is a completely new model, not a refresh of the existing and perfectly competent Vantage 270. The 280 runs on a 21-degree planing surface, with a sharp bow and broad chines to cleave seas open and throw them well to the side, as we saw while running in two- to three-footers. A pair of Mercury’s new silkysmooth, 300-hp V-8 Verados allowed the boat to loaf along comfortably at 27 knots (3,500 rpm) in that sharp chop. Top speed is right on 50 knots, which is more than is usually practical. More to the point is comfortable cruising at 25-35 knots, depending on conditions, with a range of 275-235 nautical miles and plenty of power and space to carry up to a dozen people. Mercury’s Joystick

u Learn more about the Vantage 280 at bostonwhaler.com.

Piloting made close-quarter handling a piece of cake, as did the electronic steering, Skyhook electronic position keeping, and an integrated autopilot. Another new feature of the 280 is a frame and windshield for the hardtop, incorporated into the hull and deck around the helm and cockpit. It’s a result of the Whaler design team’s integrated approach to structural engineering, combined with excellent sightlines, minimal wind noise, and weather protection. Our test boat’s hardtop carried an optional sunshade for the aft cockpit that’s ideal in summer, and the owners have fitted it with a full set of weather curtains that will make fall boating on the Bay comfortable, right up to the Christmas lights parades. The Vantage 280’s mission is day cruises. The Whaler design team, all boaters themselves, listened carefully to customers and dealers, including the folks at Whalertowne, and then thought long and hard about how to incorporate what they heard. Safety came first, with Whaler’s trademark foam-filled, unsinkable hull, followed by the able hull design and performance we saw in our sea trial. The interior details show the depth of the design team’s thinking. Look at how this test boat fits the needs of its family. First mission, with two active boys, is swimming and tubing. The owner reported that while his sons and their friends love the way outboards make the boat perform, they don’t like being on the transom or in the water around the propellers, even if the engines are tilted all the way up. On the other hand, they love getting into the water

from the portside dive door, which has its own stowable ladder for climbing out after a dip. The freshwater shower wand in the port stern quarter is good to wash off salt (and the cockpit is self-bailing). There is plenty of space around the boat, especially in the helm (starboard) console for storage of ski vests and water toys, and the towline ties to a bit in the center aft edge of the hardtop. Meanwhile, the three-way port settee and the comfortable aft-facing seat to starboard offer comfortable perches for observers during tow sessions. The three-way can work as a back-to-back seat, a forwardfacing lounge with angled back, or a flat lounge. Our test boat’s family members happily use it all three ways, depending on what they are up to. Active families need food and drink, and places to sit while eating. The aft-facing starboard seat holds an 11-gallon cooler beneath, and built into its forward side, just behind the helm, is a sink with counter and space below for storage. Our test boat had an optional “summer kitchen” there, with a 12-volt refrigerator, 2,000-watt inverter, Corian counter top, electric grill, and shore power connection with battery charger. For carry-on coolers, the owner reported that his two soft-side Yetis fit neatly under the transom seat even when it is folded down. The three-way lounge to port mounts a teak table on its after edge for serving. Whaler designers placed multiple cup holders in strategic places. Food and drink on an all-day trip lead to the need for a head. It’s built into the port console, which is a few inches wider than the September 2020

Plenty of seating, a portside entry, and lots of storage space were a hit wth the owner's active family.

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on boats

starboard one, though the difference is generally not noticeable. The result, though, is a roomy, well-lit, ventilated, comfortable space for a Vacu-Flush toilet with a holding tank and washbasin. Our boat’s owner expressed initial skepticism but reports that his family actually likes using it. Headroom is 54”, comfortable for anyone sitting, even one “linebacker” friend who found he could adjust to doing all business that way. For the pure joy of a boat ride, whether headed to a waterside restaurant or a celebration, the main cockpit comfortably seats six to eight, depending on size. The V-shaped bow cockpit provides either a pair of forward-facing lounges or seating for six leaning back against the cushioned bolsters, under the watchful eye of the skipper. The bow deck holds a pair of essential tools. One is a windlass controlling an anchor mounted through the stem head. The owners appreciate the ease of deploying the system. Beside it, for visits to islands and sandbars, is a sturdy telescopic ladder. For those visits, a Fusion stereo and Sirius satellite radio are optional. One footnote to boat rides on the Vantage 280: The owners found themselves one evening idling back into the narrow mouth of their home river at six knots because of boat traffic and decided they liked it so much they continued at that peaceful speed all the way home. Now they often enjoy slipping along, exploring creeks. Fishing? “We’re going to learn,” said the owners, who are working their way through their boat’s Raymarine Axiom electronics, which include multiple sonar options, electronics charts, and radar. The dual-console with hardtop layout lends itself to trolling, with rod holders and attachment points for several ways of rigging lines and planer boards. The

bow and stern cockpits certainly accommodate bottom fishing with bait for panfish. They would also serve for light tackle jigging and run-and-gun chasing breaking fish, or a couple of wire-line trollers carefully working bottom-bouncers around structures like the Bay Bridge or the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Lockable rod storage is optional for the starboard console. The cockpit sole holds a pair of 25-gallon fishboxes, and the port stern quarter holds a lighted 19-gallon livewell. This Vantage’s able hull and weather curtains would suit it especially well to fishing through the late fall season. Finally, here’s another use for a long-legged day boat that’s competent anywhere from Baltimore to the Virginia Capes: Why not cruise it, overnighting at shoreside facilities? Chesapeake Bay Media guides and county tourism offices provide plenty of resources for finding anything from luxury hotels with marinas to town wharves with nearby B&Bs. On the upper Bay, consider a Whalertowne/ Annapolis-to-Chestertown-to-Havre de Grace-to-Baltimore-to-home circuit. How about a run from Chesapeake Boat Basin in Kilmarnock across the Middle Bay to Tangier, Smith Island, Crisfield, Onancock, and back home? Or from Lynnhaven Marine up the James River to Smithfield, then over into the Chickahominy to Holdcroft, back up the James to Richmond, and down to Kingsmill on the way home? What Chesapeake adventures could you perpetrate with Boston Whaler’s new Vantage 280? The biggest limit may be your imagination. CBM Editor at Large, educator, guide, and author of three quintessential Chesapeake Bay books, John Page Williams was proclaimed a Maryland Admiral of the Bay in 2013.

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eptember is arguably the best time to boat on the Bay, with steamy summer behind us. On these cooler evenings, plenty of restaurants invite you to pull the boat right up and grab a meal. Catch incredible views of the sunset and the Bay Bridge at Hemingway’s in Stevensville, Md. Try their Maryland vegetable crab

soup, which took first prize at the Maryland Seafood Festival. “Our tiki bar and patio are casual,” says General Manager Stephanie Dudding. “Come off your boat and bring your pooch with you. Up north in Havre de Grace, Md., at the mouth of the Susquehanna River is Coakley’s Pub, famous for its chicken

wings—coated in your choice of seasoning from Old Bay to Sweet Thai Chili. It’s a short walk from the waterfront: dock at Havre de Grace Yacht Basin. If you need supplies for the boat, Coakley’s operates a packaged goods store selling ice, beer, wine, spirits, snacks and more. Heading south, Pirate’s Cove Restaurant and Dock Bar on the

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West River in Galesville, Md. is the place to be on Wednesday evening to catch a glimpse of the sailboats competing in the Wednesday Night Races. “We have open slips right at the Dock Bar and deck,” says co-owner Anthony Clarke. “If they’re full, the Dockmaster answers calls for approaching boats and will find the best slip

on the main pier.” The restaurant also offers dining in the privacy of your boat. “You can order a meal or beverage and we will deliver it to your boat,” Clarke says. Try the award-winning crab cake. Over in Tilghman, Md., Tickler’s at the Wylder Hotel serves up Chesapeake regional cuisine with classic French technique. “Our chefs put a focus on

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supporting local growers, harvesters and foragers,” says executive chef Jordan Llyod. On the menu is the Maryland crab dip-stuffed pretzel bun. Tickler’s has boat slips available and offers the option to stay in the adjacent Wylder Hotel overnight. In Virginia, history buffs can pull up to The Deadrise in Hampton and eat on historic Fort Monroe — built in 1834 and the site of the first anti-submarine net installed during World War I. “People love our seafood burrito — stuffed with shrimp, scallops, rice and beans and finished with pico de gallo and creme fraiche,” says owner Joe Illes. “We have safe, sheltered docks for our diners with quick access to the restaurant.”

A short distance south, on Sunset Creek in Hampton, Va., you’ll find Surfrider Restaurant serving up seafood, steamers and casual cuisine including the Tommy Boy, a fried flounder filet topped with cheese and half a crabcake. In fact, you can visit Surfrider by boat at four different Hampton Roads locations: At Bluewater Yachting Center in Hampton, Whitehouse Cove Marina in Poquoson, Marina Shores in Virginia Beach, and, opening in September, at Bay Point Marina in Norfolk. Don’t worry if you’re not arriving to these eateries by water. All will happily welcome you however you get there—by car, motorcycle and at Hemingway’s, even by helicopter. Just be sure to radio ahead.

USGS BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB

Just 80,000 or so of these and you've got yourself a hive.

ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

“Beware any enterprise that requires new clothes,” warned Henry David Thoreau. I think he meant getting married or becoming a stockbroker or undertaker, but it could also apply to beekeeping. “There’s an outlay to start,” says Kim Mehalick, President of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association. “It will run you about $1,000 for two hives, and after the second year, you have the hope of honey.” The outlay will include new clothes—veil, gauntlets, bee jacket or full bee suit—as well as the cost of hive boxes, frames, tools, and two packages of bees that you pour-bop-sweep into your new hives. (It’s worth seeing; there are videos.) Many people who haven’t actually kept bees think of it as a benign, set-it-and-forget-it enterprise. It’s not. It’s animal husbandry and, just like farming, exempt from some stay-at-home rules during the COVID-19 quarantine. As with virtually every other land animal, honeybees need food, water, protection from weather extremes, and periodic health checks.

by nancy taylor robson September 2020

ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

CATHERINE KRIKSTAN/CHESAPEAKE BAY PROGRAM

“Keeper” is an apt term since it’s also sometimes challenging to actually keep them in your hives. When the bees get too crowded—which can happen if the keeper doesn’t add expansion space in spring when they need it—they’ll swarm; i.e., a large portion of the old colony, led by the old queen, will boil out of the hive in preparation for starting a new colony. This is a wonderful show to watch; a bee tornado whirls around overhead, loosely following the queen. Once she lands, all the other bees who have come with her buzz around in diminishing circles until the whole mob is bunched around her on a branch (or junction box, propane tank lid, whatever) in a Big Ball O’ Bees. There are 430-plus species of native bees in Maryland, and approximately 4,000 native to North America. Honeybees (Apis cerana or Apis mellifera, depending whose expertise you’re relying on) aren’t among them. But they have long been highly productive naturalized citizens. “Honeybees have been here for four centuries,” says Mehalick. “Settlers brought them from Europe.” “Our connection to honeybees is ancient,” says Anthony Nearman, PhD candidate in bee physiology and molecular biology at vanEngelsdorp Bee Lab, University of Maryland. “There are cave paintings of honeybees in Egypt.” While their wax and honey (and mead) are treasured, from the beginning it’s been their efficient pollinating for which honeybees are most valued. Virtually all bees pollinate, but not all are as assiduous about it as honeybees, which are responsible for pollinating more than 70 percent of our food crops: apples, almonds, peaches, plums, squash, melons, and much, much more. Over 100 commercial food crops depend on bees for pollination, and it’s estimated that every fourth bite of food we take is thanks to the work of honeybees. “Honeybees and the need for managed hives for crop pollination is huge,” notes Mehalick. “They offer billions of dollars in pollination services,” agrees Nearman. One of the reasons honeybees are such great pollinators is that they tend to return to the same blossom more than once, which is crucial; effective pollination is rarely just a one-and-done deal. “It takes eight visits to an individual bloom to produce a cucumber, for example,” Mehalick says. “The year before we got our bees, we got no cucumbers. But after we got them, I made so many pickles the kids were pleading with me not to do anymore.” The majority of honeybees used in agricultural pollination are commercially raised and trucked around the country to coincide with regional bloom times. But ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

there has been a significant rise in honeybee hobbyists; for instance, there are over 500 registered hives in Washington, D.C. alone. The Maryland State Beekeepers Association now boasts over 800 members, and the Virginia State Beekeepers Association has over 900. Additionally, the face of beekeeping is changing. “I started nine years ago, and the room was filled with men,” says Mehalick, “but now I’m seeing more and more women.” “I have five beekeepers near me and three of them are women,” agrees Ian Henry, treasurer of the Virginia State Beekeepers Association (VSBA). What has helped women (and anyone who wants to save their back) is the option for smaller, lighter equipment. Honey is denser than water. A ‘deep’ box full of honey weighs about 80 pounds, and a ‘medium’ —which is what most women and many men use—weighs about 50 pounds. Mary Laura Fitzgerald, president of Maryland’s Upper Eastern Shore Beekeeping Association (UESBA), who uses medium boxes, got into beekeeping almost by accident.

Apis mellifera, or honeybee, collected in Beltsville, Md.

USGS BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB

After moving to the Eastern Shore from College Park, MD, she went to a talk on pollinator plants and discovered it was filled with beekeepers. Five years later, Fitzgerald has thirteen hives spread around Kent County, including seven at Sassafras Environmental Education Center’s huge vegetable garden at Turner’s Creek. “It mushroomed,” she admits, in part because that’s what it does (there’s an addiction factor to beekeeping) and in part because of the kind of year it has been. “This year was crazy for swarms,” she says. Before swarming, the bees who are leaving gorge on honey to prepare for what they assume will be a challenging journey to find optimal new digs. Once the swarm has formed into a big ball o’ bees, scouts—older, forager bees, who have come up through hive ranks and experienced all the jobs both inside and outside the hive, and as a result are familiar with the full range of colony needs—go out in different directions to search. The prospective new home must be large enough for brood and honey stores so the colony can survive the winter, but small enough that the bees can heat it efficiently. The first

scouts come back and do a waggle dance on the surface of the swarm to let other scouts know where and how far away their favored site is. (Again—video!) Using that information, more scouts go check those sites out personally, then come back to report and vote, encouraging other bee scouts to do the same. Over the course of about three days, the site for the new colony is chosen by a quorum of the scouts in a wonderfully democratic process. “These scouts have gone out. They’ve found various options. They’ve put the options on the table, and then they winnow out all the options except for one,” says Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, PhD, author of Honeybee Democracy (Princeton University Press). “It still amazes me that insects can conduct such a well-organized discussion and come to an agreement. What’s even more remarkable is [that] the consensus site is the best site. They’re not just building an agreement, but they’re building a good choice.” Once the agreement is reached, the swarm takes off in a low-flying wave and travels to their new home. Beekeepers could simply leave swarms alone to choose a hollow tree or church steeple on their own. But many prefer to capture them and set them up, either in a new hive for themselves or as a gift to a fellow beekeeper who needs or wants one and is not yet overwhelmed with the number of hives already under their care. Capturing a swarm is a kind of gathering operation. Despite the fact that the bees can sting, because they filled up on honey pre-swarming, they’re not hangry and tend to be fairly quiescent—though you probably don’t want to go up and capture them without first donning your new clothes. (I’ve seen it done. Some stings ensued.) If the swarm is accessible, the keeper will have a prepared wooden swarm box in tow. The swarm box can be as simple as a lidded cardboard box with a screened opening in top; it just needs to be light and easily

September 2020

ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

CATHERINE KRIKSTAN/CHESAPEAKE BAY PROGRAM

transportable. The keeper then approaches the swarm and gently sweeps them off a branch and into the box with a soft brush, hoping the queen is among them. Or the keeper may just kind of ‘bop’ the laden branch against the box to drop the ball o’ bees into it. Most of them fall in a wad. Given a little time, if the queen is in the box, the rest will follow. The keeper will then close the lid completely, take the swarm to the new hive and install the bees. (Pour, gently bop, sweep—videos abound.) My husband, Gary, who began keeping bees when he retired, has had several swarms from his hives this year. The most recent one balled up at the top of a 25-foot cedar tree. They were his bees and he was reluctant to let them go, but gathering was not an option. Instead, he decided to try to persuade them to choose the empty hive box he set up on the lawn below. He sprayed all of the frames in the box with sugar water laced with lemongrass oil (aka, margaritas for bees), then waited. In a few minutes, some of the scouts descended to check it out, while a small cloud of others zoomed off across the field and disappeared. He thought he’d lost them. But as he stood there by the hive box, the queen—distinguished both by her large size and by the fact that she had been marked previously with a little yellow dot on her thorax— came down, landed on Gary’s shirt sleeve and hung there. Carefully, he took out his queen clip (a little cage like a hair clip), gently enclosed her in it and set it at the entrance to the new hive. Margaritaville plus queen pheromones = irresistible. Bees came down from the treetop and went in. Over the course of the afternoon, the other bees came back across the field. That evening, Gary opened the clip and in went the queen. By the following morning, though a mass of the bees had spent the night clumped (bearded) around the outside of the hive box, thousands had already set up shop inside. (He had suited up, took off the lid and checked to be sure). The rest went in the following evening. Three days later, he and his bee buddy, Dick Crane, moved the new hive to a friend’s farm. The pair now have thirteen hives they maintain around the county, and they also mentor several other beekeepers in what has turned into a semi-full-time job. As Fitzgerald observed, it mushrooms. Mehalick insists that keeping bees is easy. (Then again, she works at NASA, so everything may seem easy by comparison.) Having watched the work up-close-andpersonal, I disagree. Fascinating? Utterly. “I believe I learn something every time I go into a hive,” says Bruce Hamon, first VP of the VSBA. Easy? Not so much. While colony collapse disorder is less an issue now than when it was first brought to the world’s attention in 2007, there are still a number of ongoing potential threats to a colony: varroa mites, hive beetles, poor nutrition, pesticides, and pathogens. ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

Teacher Specialist Sheen Goldberg, suited up to work with the bees at Arlington Echo Outdoor Education Center in Millersville, Md.

the bees depend on nectar flow from native blooming plants for honey manufacture. no nectar ,,no food for them (and therefore us).,, “When I first started forty years ago, I could put out a hive and just make sure it had some food at the end of the summer,” says Hamon. “In August, I’d take off a couple of boxes of honey, and that was life. Now, you’re reading, you’re planning….” “There are so many more pests here,” agrees Ian Henry, who began by keeping bees in his native Australia. “They don’t have varroa in Australia, and the nectar flow there is ten months long. Here, it’s only two months.” The bees depend on nectar flow from native blooming plants for honey manufacture. No nectar, no food for them (and therefore us). While there were once plenty of native trees and plants to provide nectar and pollen from early spring through fall, human development and land management have decimated that food supply, replacing it with what is essentially a food desert—vast swathes of pristine lawn, pavement, hard surface, and exotic plants— and forcing American beekeepers to supplemental feed. “What we’ve lost is really good forage,” Mehalick explains. “Clover is one of the first sources of nectar in spring, in addition to black locust, tulip trees, [and] American holly.” This dearth of available, season-long forage and its impact on pollinators has been a wakeup call on several fronts. “Bees are an intersection between agriculture and ecology,” says Mark Dykes, Bee Squad Extension September 2020

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Coordinator at vanEnglesdorp Bee Lab. “They are not an indicator species, but there is an environmental factor. A lot of the things we do to improve honeybee forage also helps the native bees.” To find nectar, honeybees generally forage as far as two miles from the hive. They’ve been known to go farther when the pickings are slim, but foraging beyond four miles wears out their wings, shortens the bee’s life expectancy, and weakens the colony. Chemically purging our lawns of dandelion, chickweed, and clover (to the tune of millions of dollars, and subsequent damage to the ground water, tributaries, and Bay) has contributed considerably to the forage scarcity. In addition, community covenants that mandate close-shorn lawns in an effort to produce manicured conformity often also forbid the freer look of native gardens, which prevents the return of native plant corridors. Fortunately, things are beginning to turn around. “People are now recognizing that a green lawn is a desert to a pollinator,” Mehalick says. “They need to have a diverse environment for pollinators, with different plants and food sources, and awareness of not using pesticides for a green lawn.” “In addition, we need to replenish other native plants that bloom later in the season so the bees can collect nectar and pollen until they go into their winter huddle,” says Dykes, who was trained as an environmentalist but fell headlong into beekeeping. “We encourage people when they’re planting gardens to look at bloom time and what happens on July 29th or August 31st.” While there’s a way to go, Dykes says he’s very encouraged by the increasing awareness of the needs of pollinators.

September 2020

“Howard County put in an initiative to become bee-certified and certified for pollinators in general,” he says. “They’re encouraging culinary gardens, and thinking about pollinators when they do public projects. They may cost a little in the front end, but at the back end they will do a lot to help.” “Because gardens are…groups of plants, they have the potential to perform the same essential biological roles fulfilled by healthy plant communities everywhere,” says entomologist Doug Tallamy, PhD, who urges each property owner—private, public and commercial—to devote at least 50 percent of their available landscaping space to native plants, whether or not you ever intend to keep bees. “Maybe the best beekeepers are the bee watchers, planting native species so that bees have nesting grounds and choosing not to spray,” says Zach Lamas, PhD candidate at vanEnglsdorp Bee Lab. This kind of stewardship is a win-win for the bees, the Bay, and us. It offers the bees—and other pollinators like gorgeous Luna moths, dragon flies, cute little blue orchard bees, and many more—forage and habitat, and it produces a beautiful, kaleidoscopic landscape. It benefits the Chesapeake, and it turns your yard into your own personal Nature Channel, a particular solace while we’re staying closer to home for longer stretches. The bees, who assiduously pollinate my citrus trees, cucumbers, squash, raspberries, blueberries, and more, are a captivating addition to our personal neighborhood, and I enjoy an indecent glob of honey in my coffee every single morning. All in all, a very sweet deal. Nancy Taylor Robson is one of the first American women to earn a USCG coastal tug license. When not writing books, the Eastern Shore author gardens, sails, and swats mosquitoes.

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FROM BOW TO STERN: Grace (seated), K9 Officer Bonnie Braziel, CPO Sarah Drury, CPO Leslie Wright, Sgt. Jessica Whirley, CPO Katiana Quarles (at helm), CPO Krista Adams, Sr. Officer Beth McGuire, Sr. Officer Beth Garrett, CPO Amanda Nevel

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A FEW GOOD

WOMEN

ANN EICHENMULLER September 2020

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CPO Amanda Nevel on Rappahannock River patrol

For Officer Amanda Nevel, there is no such thing as a typical shift.

ERIC EICHENMULLER

n this cold November morning it starts at sunrise. Nevel is on her way to organize a hunt for disabled sportsmen at the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge, and I am along for the ride. We are only on the road a few minutes when she gets a report of an injured bird, followed by a call from a hunter who has harvested a buck showing signs of disease. Over the next eight hours, Nevel will traverse two counties, cover close to two hundred miles, and end her day deep in the woods, dropping cameras where she suspects illegal baiting. This is crunch time, when hunting and rockfish seasons intersect, and no two shifts are the same. “Normally I start off with a plan, but it doesn’t always work out that way,” she laughs. “You never know what’s going to happen when you go on duty. That’s why I like it.” Nevel is one of only 153 conservation police officers (CPOs) tasked with enforcing Virginia’s hunting, fishing, and boating laws across the Commonwealth’s 42,775 square miles of land and more than 49,000 miles of river. But she is also part of an elite subset because of her gender. The state employs only nine female CPOs (formerly known as game wardens), making up about six percent of the Department of Wildlife Resources force. Nationwide, women currently earn nearly half of all undergraduate degrees in law enforcement and more than half of the degrees awarded in biology, agriculture, and natural resources programs. Any of these majors could easily lead to a career in conservation resource policing, but few women consider it as an option. It just isn’t on their radar, according to

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September 2020

Nevel, because they haven’t grown up seeing women CPOs. She’s working to change that by teaching hunter education classes to women and young girls. She says participants are often surprised to see her there. “They tell me they didn’t know ladies could be game wardens,” Nevel explains. Her experience is echoed by her sister officers. Many say they were the first female CPOs their communities had ever seen. “I remember when I was still in training,” say Senior Officer Beth Garrett, now in her 22nd year. “I was in a 7-11 store in the Northern Neck, and this guy just kept following me around, staring at me. I finally turned asked if I could help him. He said, ‘I heard tell there was a female game warden down here, but I wouldn’t believe it till I laid eyes on you.’” She laughs. “I twirled around in front of him and said ‘Well, you can believe it now.’” I hear her story—and those of the others—at the Osbourne Boat Landing on the James River, thanks to the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources. The agency has orchestrated a rare

“It’s my parents’ fault,” jokes Garrett, who grew up camping and boating. “I got out of school, took an office job, and I hated it.” In addition to a love of the outdoors, these women say it is the fast pace and variety of the work that drew them to conservation policing. “It’s always something different,” explains Senior Officer Beth McGuire, who considered other law enforcement careers before joining the VDWR. “We’re not stuck to the pavement.” “I can be on a boat one minute, and in the woods searching for a lost two-year-old the

Sr. Officer Beth Garrett does a routine boating check on Lake Anna.

MEGAN MARCHETTI/ VDWR

gathering of the state’s nine female CPOs for an interview and photo shoot that quickly takes on the feel of a family reunion. Faces light up as each new vehicle arrives, and soon the parking lot is filled with the sound of excited voices and laughter. Everyone is eager to pet Grace, a Labrador retriever puppy who is also Officer Bonnie Braziel’s new partner. Grace is the only dog paired with a female CPO as part of the canine program. It is just one of many firsts for this group that is changing the face of the VDWR. Though they come from diverse backgrounds—a family history of public service; a stint in the military; two, four, or even six years of college— they share a common bond: They are committed to preserving and protecting nature for future generations, and they hate to sit still.

K9 Officer Bonnie Braziel and Grace, her new partner

September 2020

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CPO Katiana Quarles on the lookout

MEGAN MARCHETTI/ VDWR

CPO Sarah Drury on the water

next,” says Sergeant Jessica Whirley agrees. “You never get tired of it.” All that variety can lead to some memorable moments, from calls about bears trespassing in trailers to naked boaters—the latter of which apparently happens more often than you might think. Everyone who has worked the water seems to have a story about nudity. Officer Katiana (Kat) Quarles recalls a couple boating in the buff on a very crowded Lake Anna. When stopped, they insisted they weren’t doing anything wrong because they were too far out for the walkers to see from the shore. “I couldn’t believe it,” she laughs. “I pointed all around them and said, ‘What about all the other boats?’” There are also more serious calls for boating accidents, missing persons, and recovering the bodies of drowning victims. CPOs often go undercover to track down illegal smuggling of animal parts and even assist local police in murder investigations. They serve as deputy U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers, crossing state lines to investigate violations of federal law. To prepare, every candidate must complete the 26-week Basic Law Enforcement Academy followed by a 15-week field training. CPOs go to

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September 2020

driving school to hone off-road and fast-track pursuit skills, and they take ongoing defensive tactics and weapons training. It is a rigorous program, and one that Officer Krista Adams credits with instilling in CPOs a sense of mutual respect. Because they are all held to the highest standards, she says, “the guys see us as equals.” That is not always the case with the public. The women joke about how often they are called “honey,” “sweetheart,” or “darlin” while on duty. “Sometimes you let it go,” says McGuire. “You understand, especially with older gentlemen, it’s not meant as disrespect, it’s just how they grew up.” But there are also times when the terms are intended to be condescending and demeaning, Adams points out. “That’s when you have to call them on it.”

“I say they need to use ‘Officer’ or ‘Ms.’ because those other names are reserved for my husband,” McGuire says with a smile. “That usually takes care of it.” Learning to maintain professionalism in the face of rude or insulting behavior is an essential skill, according to the VDWR. That is because conservation policing has a higher inherent level of danger. “If you think about it, nearly every person I am in contact with is armed,” observes Nevel. “They either have a loaded gun or a knife, and I’m usually approaching them in an isolated environment.” It is in these challenging circumstances, she says, that being a woman can be an asset. Officer Krista Adams agrees. “Females have a different perspective,” she September 2020

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notes. “We understand how to defuse a situation. Even if we’re not as physically strong, we bring this other skill to the table.” These aren’t just opinions. They are borne out by forty years of research showing women have a less authoritarian style of policing, are better communicators, and are less reliant on physical force than their male counterparts. More importantly, female officers are less likely to escalate volatile confrontations. It is a scenario I watch play out during my ride along with Officer Nevel. We are out at Windmill Point, in the driveway of a hunter who violated regulations by transporting his deer home to process before tagging it. From the front passenger seat of the officer’s SUV, I can hear his voice rising. Nevel continues to talk in a soothing voice, even when he shouts about how much he hates game wardens. When he finally winds down enough to take a breath, she responds sweetly, “Now sir, that’s not nice. I don’t feel that way about you.” His anger evaporates. He even gives Nevel a tip on a poacher after receiving his ticket. The same level of professionalism and heart to serve are apparent in all nine of the female officers. They take enforcing the law seriously, but they strive to execute their duty with both humor and compassion. It is a credo summed up best by Officer Krista Adams. “The goal at the end, regardless of the interaction—even if I’m writing someone a summons—is to leave them with a smile.” h Ann Eichenmuller is a freelance writer and the author of two nautical mystery novels. She lives along Virginia’s Rappahannock River where she and husband Eric sail Avalon, a Morgan Out Island.

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SPEAKING SCIENCE TO POWER Through hurricanes, politicians, and other natural disasters, scientist Don Boesch searches for solutions. By Tim Junkin

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September 2020

on Boesch grew up in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, blocks from the Mississippi River. He experienced flooding from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, long before Hurricane Katrina engulfed the neighborhood. His father, who never graduated high school, let him tag along on fishing trips, stoking a fascination with the creatures of the estuary. Carapace collections and fiddler crabs in jars of alcohol decorated Don’s boyhood room. Inspired by his tenth-grade biology teacher, Don remembers doodling sketches of the marine laboratory he dreamed of building one day. What he probably couldn’t have imagined back then was that eventually he would build and lead not one but two internationally acclaimed marine research centers; that for over 27 years he would serve as the scientific advisor on the Chesapeake Bay Cabinet under five different Maryland governors; that he would advise two U.S. Presidents on issues such as climate change and the Deepwater Horizon BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill; that he would chair the Scientific and Technical Committee of Maryland’s first Commission on Climate Change, which would lead to the state’s first Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act (passed in 2009); and that he would become an ardent champion and leading voice for the concept of integrating and applying science to policy.

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COURTESY PHOTO

Don retired as president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) in 2017. He has reduced his teaching responsibilities, but his research and writing remain robust (he has published two books and nearly 100 papers). This past April was the 10th anniversary of the BP oil spill, and having served as the sole scientist on President Obama’s national commission investigating the spill and its effects on the Gulf, he continues to consult with policymakers, scientists, and the media on its recovery. Don shared some of his recollections with me on a recent visit. “After more than 50 years of doing this,” he tells me, “I am beginning to feel even more unconstrained, able to be even more candid.” Sitting in his home office, surrounded by shelves of books and papers, he seems relaxed and comfortable. He is generous with his time and direct with his thoughts. “Applying science to policy, using science as a tool to find solutions, is something I’ve always believed essential. But scientists have mostly had a ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

Boesch shakes President Obama's hand after presenting the Oil Spill Commission report as former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson looks on.

reluctance to speak out, to rock the boat. And I still feel the need to calibrate just how far I can take it and continue to be trusted, continue to be listened to. I mean, I am telling policy leaders in Louisiana that, simply put, they have to get away from oil and gas or their state is going to wash away. And, yes, I feel I’m having a bit of traction.”

on Boesch began his career studying biology close to home at Tulane University. He confides that most of the biology students at the time were pre-med and grade-driven. Those few that weren’t, that were interested in the science, became faculty favorites. “I was lucky,” he chuckles. “Tulane had a world-class collection of crustaceans gathered from all over the Gulf—all over the world, really—and I was given the opportunity to serve as an intern helping to catalogue and basically curate these specimens. The summer after graduation, I got to intern with a biologist on the estuary, collecting trawl samples of every type and

“After more than 50 years of doing this, I am beginning to feel even more unconstrained. . . But scientists have mostly had a reluctance to speak out, to rock the boat."

VIMS threw a going away party for Boesch (back row, second from left) when he left for Louisiana in 1980.

Shortly after he was hired, funding for the center vanished, forcing him into a new role as head cheerleader and fundraiser. “Until then, I think I may have shaken the hand of the president of William and Mary once at a reception; that was the extent of my experience with politics” he says. “Suddenly, I had to interact with university presidents, state legislators, and officials; learn the art of political schmoozing; cajole and manage architects and marine engineers; and find the means to get the project funded and back on track. Basically, I was thrown into the deep end of an alligator pool.” Don reaches for something from the bookshelf behind him and turns, holding a foot-long, miniature pirogue canoe, carved of teak and complete with seats, oar locks and oars. September 2020

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species. All of this instilled in me an awe over the diversity of life, [and] the evolutionary processes involved in how they adapt.” After Tulane, Don attended graduate school at William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS)—his first experience on the Chesapeake. In just under four years, he obtained a doctorate in oceanography. His dissertation reflected his early research identifying the various saline gradients from saltwater to freshwater that comprise the Chesapeake and which define the communities that thrive in each respective area. After a year at the University of Queensland in Australia as a Fulbright-Hayes Postdoctoral Fellow, in 1972 he returned to VIMS as a professor and research scientist. In June of that year, Hurricane Agnes swept through, battering the Bay and causing catastrophic damage to its underwater grasses and marine communities. Maryland’s Senator Mac Mathias called on the Environmental Protection Agency for a five-year study of the Bay. Others sounded the alarm about a great estuary on life support and wanted answers. Don was at the forefront of this new Chesapeake Bay study, measuring the impact of Agnes, looking into the reasons for the disappearance of the submerged vegetation, and starting to uncover the profound effects of nutrient overload. Don had been at VIMS for eight years when a visiting colleague from Louisiana State University told him about a director position available at a new coastal research center being constructed by a consortium of universities there, and suggested he apply. “I was surprised,” Don recalls. “I was only 34 and felt way too young for such a position. But I thought about it.”

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE/CHERYL NEMAZIE

“I stayed in Louisiana 10 years before returning to the Chesapeake,” he tells me. “When I left, these Cajun guys in the maintenance department got together and built this for me. I like to think it reflects the kind of relationships I was able to build down there.” Recruited to head the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in 1990, Don returned to Maryland and took charge of a consolidated state system of laboratories: Horn Point, the Chesapeake Bay Biological Lab at Solomons Island, the Appalachian Lab in Frostburg, and Maryland’s Sea Grant Program. Part of his new position at the university was to sit on the governor’s Chesapeake Bay Cabinet, an academic ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

September 2020

Don Boesch on R/V Rachel Carson, the flagship of the UMCES research fleet.

position on a board filled with political appointees. “The idea was to have a person in the room whose job was to explain what the science says. And this person, unlike all of the others, was the one person who didn’t serve at the governor’s pleasure. I knew well, of course, what the science was telling us, what the Bay needed. And I was always cognizant of my responsibilities representing the university.” Serving under a succession of governors, both Democrats and Republicans, meant learning as he went how to serve the science while avoiding political landmines. “I can tell you, when I was in school there was not a science program in the country that offered courses in how to effectively but diplomatically work with governors, cabinet heads, people in power who have political agendas, so as to communicate the truth, advocate for policies that the science calls for, advance the objectives of conservation. It is a job of such importance but fraught with such difficulty. And so I learned on the cuff. I developed two priorities. First, to always state the truth, the science, and to use my skills to ensure that it was heard and understood. And second, within the parameters of the first, to do everything I could to ensure that the governor would be successful in advancing his vision. These two rules served me well for 27 years. “I always remained wedded to articulating the truth, but I didn’t want be thrown out of the room! That’s the balance. We have seen this excruciating dance play out with Trump and the coronavirus, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for the doctors and scientists working to keep the federal government on the right track.”

ne of his early priorities at UMCES was the creation of a group that could bring the work of center scientists to the public sphere, by not just studying problems but offering solutions to them. The Integration and Application Network (IAN) became a model for others in academia and beyond. “IAN has not only become an integral and valuable part of our institution, but it has gestated to other universities, and I believe

solutions, as opposed to just crying ‘mayday.’ Some of the areas of the Mississippi Delta are similar to what we have here: low-lying wetlands. These are ideal, for example, for solar farms which then can be integrated with wave buffers, oyster restoration, a variety of symbiotic solutions.” Progress in the Chesapeake Bay, his main focus, has been frustratingly slow and prone to backsliding, but he says it pales in comparison to the larger problem of climate change. “The truth is that we have time to restore the Chesapeake. Not so with climate change. We no longer have the luxury of time. If we fail in confronting this global threat, if we don’t immediately and consistently engage in profound changes over how we live, the entire world will be unalterably changed. “My hope is that as we get a grip on addressing the coronavirus, that we will rebuild our economies in a more thoughtful way—in ways that will reduce air travel, car travel, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. This is a mandate essential for all of us.” h

on’s political and advocacy experience came in handy when he was tapped by the Clinton administration in 2000 to participate in the first National Climate Assessment. “I immersed myself in climate science, reading and digesting everything, conducting my own risk assessments, eventually publishing articles of my own.” He stayed involved in climate science, appointed in 2007 to Maryland’s first Commission on Climate Change, and in 2010 to a commission advising on gulf restoration following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “Such work,” he says, “can’t intelligently go forward anymore without taking climate change into account. No matter how much remedial or restorative work we do, if we don’t de-carbonize in the next 30 years, it will all be wiped out. “My efforts in the climate arena are focused now on finding

Don Boesch speaks at the release of an annual Chesapeake Bay Report Card.

Tim Junkin was a trial lawyer for 30 years, and is an award-winning writer, teacher, and environmentalist.

September 2020

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influenced how scientists behave around the globe.” He points to the example of a recent Supreme Court opinion on groundwater discharge in Hawaii. Written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the opinion cites an amicus brief submitted by a consortium of scientific societies laying out what was and was not supported by research. The court’s majority sided with the scientists and environmentalists. “This probably wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago,” Don says. “It was gratifying to see.”

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A Virginia rail forages underneath black needlerush at Deal Island Wildlife Management Area in Somerset County, Md.

Rail Birds of the Marshes by Captain Chris D. Dollar

once hunted waterfowl with a guy who insisted there are basically only two types of birds: ducks and tweety birds. Of the latter group, it was clear he had no interest in discerning one species from another; I’d bet money he couldn’t tell the difference between a plover and a pelican. As to the first category, he also lumped all geese in with the ducks, in an effort to save time I imagine. If you’ve spent any time in the Chesapeake marshes and tidal coastal flats, then you know the diversity of avian species is amazing. For the novice birder, sorting out similar-looking species takes a good deal of effort. For example, a black skimmer and an oyster catcher resemble each other, but you can tell the difference by the head coloration, as well as by the fact that an oyster catcher sports a deep orange bill with a dash of yellow at the tip, whereas a skimmer has a distinctly two-toned bill of orange and black. Most duck hunters can readily tell the difference between a mallard and a pintail. (If they can’t, they ought to put the gun down until they learn.) More challenging for the bird hunter is differentiating the six species of rails that inhabit North America—the clapper, king, Virginia, yellow, black, and sora. Of these, the king, clapper, Virginia and sora are available for wing shooters in the Chesapeake and Mid-Atlantic regions. The hunting of these birds is managed by the respective state natural resource agencies in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife

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Service. Like migratory waterfowl, rails are also protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Clapper rails are the most common of the rails that inhabit the salt marshes on both sides of the Delmarva Peninsula. Virginia rails are similar in appearance, but prefer more brackish marsh habitats. I’ve seen three species of rails in Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area, Blackwater Refuge, and the upper Patuxent River, though I still have my eye out for the region’s fourth species. Rail hunting is another wing shooting tradition rooted in the sport’s long history on the Chesapeake and Atlantic’s coastal bays, albeit one that isn’t much practiced these days. Back in the day, it was a favorite pastime of well-heeled gunners and locals alike, though for markedly different reasons. Included among its fans were Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Teddy Roosevelt. As the 19th century drew to a close, it’s hard to estimate with any certainty how many rails were taken in coastal states, but experts say that number exceeded many hundreds of thousands annually. Sadly, it’s another example in a long list where the rapaciousness of

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September 2020

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bird hunters has left a stain on their legacy. Thankfully, that mindset has largely reversed itself. Most contemporary bird hunters are avid conservationists, contributing millions of dollars to conservation via purchases of shotguns, ammunition, and federal and state duck stamps. Today, as they did more than a century ago, rail hunters either pole a shallow-draft skiff over the flooded marsh, or walk the marsh on foot to flush the birds out. The best hunting almost always takes place during a high tide. Running up on the birds with motors running is not only illegal, it is brazenly unethical. I am intrigued by any salt-marshfueled adventure, so I reached out to Captain Pete Wallace of Chincoteague Hunting and Fishing Center Inc. (duckguide.com) to learn more about hunting seaside rails and to possibly book a trip. He’s an outfitter with

decades of experience hunting rails on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Captain Wallace describes his method of rail hunting this way: Run the boat out into the marsh; find some birdy looking marsh point, preferably near a marsh gut (creek); and beach the skiff. Then, have your gunners approach the birds’ hide on foot, strung out in a line not unlike an upland bird hunt. Once flushed, take the bird in mid-flight. (That’s a very generous description of how a rail flies; they get airborne as easily as a waterlogged beanbag. Lacking webbed feet to assist in a waterborne takeoff, rails sort of flail along.) What rails lack in aerial grace— according to Captain Wallace, they’re one of the easiest targets in all of bird-hunting due to their pedestrian aviation skills—they make up for in their ability to hide in plain sight. “They’ll grasp submerged reeds with their feet and breathe with only

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their beaks out of the water,” he explains. “They can practically sprint across submerged vegetation, and they’ll (also) ease up to the gunwales of a boat and hide at the waterline.” Wallace says rail hunting is best done at or about high tide. The higher the tide, the more successful the hunt. Tag on a Nor’easter or other storm, and odds for success increase. Of course, as is the case with all hunting or fishing excursions, no two days are the same and there are no guarantees of success. What if the tides aren’t cooperative? In that case, Wallace says, the best way to hunt them is to “walk the bank of a 20- to 50-foot-wide creek that ends at a point and try to drive them to the point. Your best shots will be birds trying to fly across the creek. When you get to the end of your drive, work that area hard and wait. There will most often be birds there and they often take minutes to decide to swim or fly.” He adds that

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Don’t wait! Make sure to cast your vote and submit your Bay photos before midnight on September 31st. We’ll tally the votes and select our photo contest winners for the December Special Edition of Chesapeake Bay Magazine.

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rather than ‘stalking’ the birds, you should be driving them. “Walk at a brisk pace in a zigzag pattern. Two to three people will raise more birds than a single hunter,” he adds. And when you can see mud flats exposed by a falling tide, it’s game over. To get another perspective, I talked with avid upland hunter John Culclasure, who hunted with Captain Wallace in fall 2018. A native of North Carolina who now lives in Richmond, he serves as the Southeastern States Assistant Director for the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation. “They’re wily birds that can hide right under your nose. I also didn’t realize how well they flew; I missed plenty of shots,” he says. “While we didn’t hunt with a dog, the concept of finding and shooting flushed birds is similar to upland hunting. They also both involve a good deal of walking through thick vegetation.”

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Because you’ll be trudging through soggy, semi-wet terrain, it’s recommended that your firearm is lightweight. A twenty-gauge shotgun with non-toxic loads (#6 or lighter; federal law prohibits lead shot) are appropriate. The recommended garb reminds me of the get-up I wear when marsh mucking: old tennis shoes laced tightly, long-sleeve shirt, and lightweight pants with long jock socks pulled over them so tiny critters can’t hitchhike on your ankles. Plan on walking a lot; being in decent shape makes the day more enjoyable. When you drop your bird, don’t take your eyes off the spot where it falls. Even a dead rail is extremely hard to find in the marsh. Bring a cooler to preserve your birds for eating. Speaking of table fare, both Wallace and Culclasure said the birds are quite tasty, either fried or on the grill. Wallace adds that the drumsticks are as tasty as the breast meat.

September 2020

For many of us, the charms of salt marshes are innumerable. Adding a slog through a marsh while you hunt for a wily bird only adds to the enjoyment. Captain Chris Dollar is a licensed fishing guide, tackle shop owner, and all-around Chesapeake outdoorsman with more than 25 years experience in avoiding office work.

SEASONS & GEAR Both Virginia and Maryland rail hunting seasons typically open in early September and run through mid-November. As of this writing, both states had submitted their 2020 hunting regulations for final approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Check those states’ respective natural resource agencies for final regulations.

September 2020

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