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The Bay less traveled.

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Article, The Bay Less Traveled...

(From Sailing Magazine, Photos by Bob Grieser, Article by Baker Putnam)

Here's an article to whet your appetite for sailing in the South end of the bay.
Our intrepid crew takes a brand new, 46' Fountaine Pajot Catamaran that's not quite fully commissioned yet on a quick jaunt to the South end of Chesapeake Bay...

Remember that damned cat?" Bob "Squareman' Grieser said, toweling off his face and glasses as we pounded into a 20 knot headwind, southbound on Chesapeake Bay. "This weather reminds me of that cat, that damned cat."

It had been years since Grieser and I had stood a night watch together, and as the 46 foot catamaran shouldered aside the building seas, a quarter of a century easily washed away.

"Acatus"' he said ruefully, as yet another rain squall began. "Remember what that cat did in our berths, and (chuckle dee, chuckle dee) what it did to your last pair of dry socks?"

That cat, that damned Acatus, had used the darker corners of our berths and the depths of my duffel (where for two weeks had been hidden one last pair of dry wool socks) as litter boxes. Once the cold rains began, the cloying smell of cat quickly disclosed the wanderings of Acatus and his special preference for wool.

But that was years before, when Squareman and I had joined Friends on a 53 foot, German‑built wooden cutter to sail from Nova Scotia to Ireland; a trip on which the nights were drunken with the moon and old sailors' tunes, loud with the breaking backs of graybeards. We had worked on deck with the rail a foot under while pilot whales lit the nights with phosphorescence as they played in the bow wave.

   Still, recollections of Acatus brought smiles and laughter into the dark cockpit of Mayan Mystress, a Y2K era rocket ship being piloted into the historic backwaters of Chesapeake Bay by a pair of middle aged sailors following the dotted line.

   Our attention was focused on commercial shipping and purse seiners in transit rather than pilot whales rol­licking before the bow, and on multiple‑second flashers that marked the depths and shallows of the Chesapeake.

  Hours before, due to operator error (probably the result of Squareman's hunt and peck with pudgy thumbs approach to keyboarding), the laptop computer and its software had ceased to function, and we were running buoy to buoy from Annapolis, Maryland, toward the tiny port of Onancock on Virginia's lower Eastern Shore.

   Through the night, while squalls dropped and raised the curtain on the scenes of a June moon, Squareman, whose news photographs of war and peace, feast and famine have been published around the world, looked into the night, counting the red, green or white flashes of bell buoys and markers, and spoke of what he hoped to come in the next few days.

   "The Chesapeake and its way of life is dying out. I want to see it again before it goes any further," he said, as the curtain raised and the moonlit seascape revealed the surrounding bay traffic: a cargo container ship south­ bound at 15 or more knots from Baltimore; a Baltimore harbor tug northbound from Norfolk; a deeply reefed sloop, heavily burdened as it crawled to windward.

"You have to be able to imagine what it must have been like a hundred years or more ago, when produce, Two hours before dawn, we headed east southeast from Smith Point at the mouth of the Potomac River, past the submerged wrecks of the S.S. Brazilia and The City of Annapolis. With the wind freshening and the jib set, the Fountaine Pajot Bahia 46 settled down and, with the help of twin diesels, made an easy 11 knots past the Tangier Lumps and the San Marcos Wreck toward Ditch Bank and Anglers Reef, where the bottom begins to come up toward the shallow flats that sit to either side of the entrance to Onancock Creek.

Once we had made the turn east, charter master Eric Smith came on deck for a quick look around, asking briefly about the night, the weather and the state of our watery part of the world before disappearing below. Later, as we neared Onancock Creek, a twisting, seven mile channel rimmed with crab pots and a small area of spoil, Smith was back on deck.

"No fair looking at the charts," he said, laughing quietly as he re‑booted the laptop. "Any old sailor can use charts‑‑the real challenge is using this new stuff."

Smith is the president of SailScape in Annapolis, a company that specializes in summer charters on Chesapeake Bay and winter charters in Belize. Big catamarans are his business now, but at one time he was a top notch monohull racer, campaigning a series of S2s named Blitz.

The Mayan Mystress, under the guidance of Smith and his business associate Douglass Dillard, was on loan from SailScape for four days and nights, and we had covered the longest leg, a little less than 100 miles in under 10 hours.

An hour past sunrise, Mayan Mystress lay at anchor off the Hopkins Bros. Store at Onancock Wharf. Douglass and my wife, Kim, were laying out food in the cavernous saloon and the slow mood of Virginia's second oldest port was settling in around most of us. While the wind was up outside the creek, the small anchorage was still as a millpond, and the sights and sounds of the morning were muted and muffled in the wet air‑gulls and great blue herons calling; fish dimpling the surface and making minute splashes as they fed on baits and bugs; egrets stalking the reedy edges and spearing baitfish in the shallows.

Crab skiffs moved up and down the creek, and a pair of youngsters hand‑lined from the city docks. In the distance a church chime sounded the hour, and soon the heat began to come into the day.

"If this is Onancock, where is it?" said Kim, as she slid onto a cockpit and swilled yet another cup of coffee. She had a point, from our anchorage there wasn't much of a town to see, just the Hopkins Bros. store, a fuel dump, gravel barges ready for loading and a modest municipal marina.

Finding the rest of Onancock, however, was a simple matter of landing at the public docks, turning right on Market Street and walking a half mile. After passing a handful of antebellum houses with gingerbread trim and expansive porches, Onancock opened up to show us the Market Street Restaurant and a small bakery, which can warm a rainy morning with fresh doughnuts, cookies and eclairs.

The old colonial town, reportedly established in 1680, is now a haven to a handful of artists and artisans like nationally known painter and sculptor Willie Crockett, whose gallery contains scenes of watermen, waterfowlers and waterfowl, spread on canvas or standing in mounts of cordgrass and driftwood. Crockett is a son of "The Shore," and his art accurately depicts the struggles and hardwon pleasures of his home.

At dockside the Hopkins Bros. Store offered basic provisions, waterside dining, and trinkets and treasures for customers of the tour boat, Capt. Eulice, which makes daily runs out to nearby Tangier Island. Alongside the harbor master's office, under a sign proclaiming the spot "Liars' Bench" old men and black labs gathered to hash over the events of a day or a lifetime.

"The way we really want to see this place is by boat, let's head up North Branch," Squareman said, quickly ingesting an éclair, and we cranked up the outboard on the inflatable to explore one of the shallow feeder creeks that flow off the Onancock; waterways where an hour or two of gunkholing will turn up mansions and wildlife, shacks and mud flats, classic sloops and hulks rotted away to floors and keelsons.

Later we returned to Mayan Mystress and continued with our cruise, to Tangier Island and Smith Island, curious watermen's enclaves where a hint of Elizabethan dialect lingers and the residents work the water and the tourists, trusting in the Almighty to make ends meet. Over the years, Onancock has served for many as a haven in a storm or a quick oven‑tight anchorage on the way to or from the wider Atlantic.

For us it had served as fine a staging area from which to approach the rest of the Chesapeake Bay. And although we may have wanted to do some further exploring, we had a long trip ahead and needed to be on our way.

  Tangier lies about 10 miles in from the entrance to Onancock out past Crammy Hack, Stone Rock Watts Island and east inside The Target Navy pilots practice strafing and bombing Smith, deciding the wind was light and contrary, fired up the twin diesels and Mayan Mystress sped along at 12 knots among thousands of small buoys marking the locations of commercial crab pots.

For Chesapeake boaters, the floats can be a nuisance: fouling props and hanging up on struts or skegs. For the people of Tangier and Smith islands, they mark the future and the past.

The islands were first explored by Capt. John Smith in 1608, as part of the English colonization of the Virginias. But Smith Island was not settled until 1657, by a group of colonists who chose it over St. Clements Island, west across the bay in the Potomac River. Tangier was first settled in 1686 by the family of John Crockett, whose descendants are still numerous on the island.

During their history, the islands have sheltered British troops in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 as well as picaroons and pirates. And despite the presence of television and satellite dishes, tour boats from the eastern and western shores of Maryland and Virginia, the older islanders are rooted in the traditions built over more than 300 years of relative isolation.

The younger generations, however, are moving elsewhere.

"We got a new preacher recently, and in four years he has been to 41 burials and only one or two weddings  " said Capt. Frank Dize, who for 56 years ran the mailboats Island Belle and Island Star from Crisfield to Smith Island. "Me young people, they might come back to visit once in a while, but they don't stay here anymore."

Life on the islands is restrictive, the workday is long and hard, and while a waterman still can make a living, the blue crab catch in Chesapeake Bay has been in decline for several years. Between them Smith and Tangier islands have historically accounted for a larger catch of blue crabs than any place in the world.

Entering Tangier from the west side of the island, the hard land to the south is set with boatyards, churches, small businesses, homes and graveyards. To the north and east the marsh is studded with crabbers' shanties built on stilts and connected by raised walkways to keep them dry at high water. On the deck of one shanty, a teenage girl sat and wrapped polypropylene cord around floats. On another a mother and child dip netted for crabs, and farther along, a waterman, dressed in slickers since 3 a.m., moved among his shedding tanks and sorted out the crabs that had shed their shells and were ready for the soft shell market.

Everywhere there were skiffs and workboats. moving among fuel docks and crab shanties and coming in from the heavy ram that had suddenly blown up outside the harbor. Three youngsters, in a 12‑foot skiff with a Dalmatian standing in the bow, towed a larger crab boat to the fuel dock., waving and chatting with school‑age friends who passed in other boats. Boats here are as necessary as taxicabs, buses and tow trucks in any major city

Looking through the rain, across the activity in the harbor and out the east channel, the crab shanties and channel markers that disappeared into the noonday gloom seemed to mark the end of the world, but Michelle McCready and her electric powered tour cart were standing by, ready to pro vide a healthy dose of local reality.

Loading the five of us aboard, McCread, started south along Tangier's one main street (speed limit 15 miles per hour, checked by radar), a narrow roadway built and maintained in part with sand and gravel barged in from Onancock. That June afternoon, he was one of perhaps a half dozen tour guides and cart queued up to meet the tour boats due in from Crisfield, Reedville and Onancock.

"As you can see, we are a small island, about 3. miles long and 1.5 miles wide and at most 5 feet above sea level," McCready's words began, and drifted away to pirates, picaroons and British troops as the wind blew the thinning rain towards the salt marsh.

What a place it must have been when raiders slipped out of the reedy cuts to plunder local ship ping. Imagine the commotion and the ribaldry '. the absence of government the independent and hedonism of it all.

These days the marsh is set with crosses, and for years the battle has been against environment groups such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation which has lobbied heavily in the Virginia State Legislature for tighter controls on the crab harvest

On several shanties there were signs that read "Welcome to Tangier. Help preserve our heritage. Do not support Chesapeake Bay Foundation."

"We are fiercely independent," said McCready, as the shuttle slowed to cross Suicide Bridge, a 3 foot span rising a breathtaking 6 or 8 feet over narrow cut in the marsh. "We like our way of life and we want it to continue."

But slowly the island's 175 licensed commercial crabbers are realizing that as the crabs go so go their lives, and nearly a third of the watermen have recently announced their support of CBF conservation initiatives.

While there are several marinas at Tangier with transient slips, and boats can anchor in the roadway between the east and west channels that lead to the center of the island, crabbing is an around the clock activity and perhaps Tangier is best suited to a day trip with an overnight anchorage in Onancock or Crisfield, Maryland, a dozen or so miles to the east northeast.

Like Tangier, Smith Island is a working backwater with a trickle of transient cruisers, mailboats and excursion boats that call from Crisfield. Unlike bustling Tangier, Smith Island is quiet, its three small towns ringed by marsh and travel among them possible only through shallow channels that seem to shift with the seasons.

"You got to know where and what you want when you come here," said Dize. "But, then, these days not so many people come, anyway."

Smith Island is at a crossroads. It is a place the Squarernan photographed years before, more than a decade before the new preacher arrived, before

          burials outnumbered weddings 20 to 1.

"Where's it gone?" Grieser said, as Smith eased the Mayan Mystress through the west entrance to Ewell, the largest town on the island. "It's almost a ghost town. Man, looks like hard times."

A pair of crab boats unloaded their day's catch along the municipal wharf, waiting for the Captain Jason to get in from Crisfield. Across the channel a single radio blared out country music while another waterman worked on his boat's engine. Heading out Big Thorofare to the east, a 5‑year‑old took the wheel of his daddy's boat as they rumbled out to check their pots.

               Paradise here seemed lost somewhere between the pressures of the present and the religion and traditions of the past.

The biggest news in Ewell this summer was that a store and cafe owner had applied for a liquor license and many of the residents of the island were up in arms because beer means brawling and the nearest policeman is a 45­ minute boat ride away.

"If we have done without it all these years, I don't see that we need it," said Jennifer Dize, who was born on the island 50 years ago and lives on the same plot her grandparents did. Steven Eades, who bought a bed and breakfast on the island a couple of years ago and retired to run it along with his store and cafe, said he simply wants to allow progress to gain a foothold and his customers to get a cold one while they eat crabs steamed fresh out of the Chesapeake.

"In the evening, after the crab feast is done, we don't want any bottle throwing," 68‑year‑old island native Jennings Evans said in a voice mixed with tones from the Old South and merry old England. "Mat's when people go to bed. They work hard here, and they don't want any brawling."

So, for the time being at least, Smith Island remains a true waterman's enclave, where the few shops and eateries open up when the tour boats arrive and close when they leave.

All in all it is a pleasant place, where youth league baseball is hotly contested on summer evenings, church bells call to worshippers, and the sounds and smells of the crab business drift across the marsh at all hours.

But where Tangier bustles with tourism, Smith lies relatively quiet and aloof, its residents certain that faith and hard work will carry them into the next millennium as they did for nearly 350 years of the last.

For cruising boats that can get into Ewell, dockage is available at the main wharf, although a fee is charged and the spaces for the tour and mail boats are off limits. Anchorages are available as well, although in the height of summer there are flesh‑eating flies and dive-bombing mosquitoes.

With enough bug repellent, however, and a good dinghy, the channels running among Ewell, Tylerton and Rhodes Point open up on the waterman's world, and it is a show that is still worth seeing.

"There is still a romance here," The Squarernan said, as Smith slid the Mayan Mystress toward the Chesapeake and another rain shower closed in. "But you have to see it for what it is. This is one of those places that refuses to change with the times, and that is a story in itself."

Once clear of the long stone jetties on the west side of Smith Island, the Mayan Mystress headed north northwest, past the Mud Leads and the wreck of the Old Hannibal, another practice site for Navy bombers and strafers, and on beyond Deep Hole and The Targets toward the mouth of the Patuxent River on the western shore of the Chesapeake.

Through the thin rain, the low profile of the Eastern Shore disappeared, but I realized there were still dozens of backwaters there to be explored: Crocheron, Hoopersville, Slaughter Creek and Church Creek, Tilghman, Sherwood and Claiborne among them.

"I have raced on the Chesapeake for years, but I've never really cruised it," Smith said. "There really are things here you won't see anywhere else. I just never took the time to see them before."

Cruising the Bay…

   Sailing on the Chesapeake Bay is mostly a three‑season affair, although in some years the weather remains almost balmy straight through the winter months.

Best times to sail are April through June and September through most of November. Winds generally are 8 to 12 knots, southerly, in the spring and summer and northerly in the fall and winter.

Anchorages are numerous, and it is possible to sail 20 to 30‑mile legs between ports with full facilities and much shorter legs among backwater towns with minimal facilities., Navigation is simple. Virtually all, shoals, channel entrances and bridges are, well marked and well charted in both, Maryland and Virginia waters.  

For information on chattering from SailScape, a division of ‑Bay Yacht Agency in, Annapolis, Maryland, call (410) 263‑2311, or surf to the company's Web site at www.bayacht.com

 For more, go to: www.bayacht.com/chesbay.htm 

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