orld. But, farther upstream, the waters that feed the Bay are less cooperative.
Historically, people in these areas have been less interested in traveling by water. They mostly just wanted to cross it. During the 1800s, covered bridges were a popular solution.
Don Shomette was about 10 years old in when he first encountered the “ghost fleet” of Mallows Bay.
He was aboard a jon boat with his father and brother, coming down the Potomac River from a shoreline campsite in the mid-1950s. It was a gray morning. The water was churning and visibility was poor. On the river, they met an old waterman setting out crab pots who asked if they were trying to find the ghost fleet.
Some people’s default position is active-outdoors mode. They have kayaks strapped to the roofs of their cars and paddles in their backseats. They know all of the Chesapeake’s put-in points. They have maps, optimized Smartphones and an eye for identifying birds. They are the people for whom the Subaru commercials are made.
Then there are people who like being outside, but are a bit intimidated to paddle the Bay and its tributaries without a leader. They fear getting lost, or dehydrated or just tired. They want someone to tell them what is that pretty plant over here, what is the name of that bird over there. And, if at all possible, at some point during the outdoors-filled day, they would like to have a glass of wine and take a nap.
If you want to paddle where few have paddled on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Monie Bay with its three marked water trails — and potential for freelance exploring — is worth a day trip.
The paddler sign-in log where we put in near Deal Island, about 20 miles south and west of Salisbury, had one other name, from more than a year before us.
As river trail maps and smartphone apps continue to pop up around the Chesapeake, the river atlases produced by the Virginia Canals and Navigations Society at first glance seem anachronistic.
But what makes these atlases special is their devotion to the era when the craft of choice to move tobacco, grain and flour down Piedmont rivers was a long, narrow wooden boat called a batteau.
Perched on the eastern rim of the Chesapeake’s watershed, closer to Atlantic beaches than to the Bay, Delaware’s Trap Pond State Park offers the standard recreational amenities, from ballfields and nature walks, to tenting, cabins and picnic tables shaded by tall pines.
But it’s Taxiodium distichum, the lordly bald cypress, that defines this nearly 4,000-acre park that guards the headwaters of the Delmarva Peninsula’s Nanticoke River. It is the nation’s northernmost natural occurrence of a species whose range extends south to Florida and west into Texas.
One hundred years ago, when Harper’s Magazine writer J.W. Church wanted to visit Tangier Island, he presented a letter asking for transport to a Crisfield oysterman.
The oysterman agreed to have one of his captains ferry the writer and his photographer to Capt. Peter Crockett’s island store, but counseled caution. Tangiermen, the Crisfielder said, “sure are a strange lot.”
In the center of an enclosure filled with tall oaks, a bobcat strolls nonchalantly toward what looks like a large rock, wagging his characteristic shortened tail in full view of visitors 20 feet away on an elevated boardwalk. On this sunny late autumn day, the cat opts for a bed of leaves in dappled sunlight nearby.
“That ‘rock’ is actually made of concrete and has a heating element, which makes for a nice dozing spot in the winter,” said George Mathews, Jr., curatorial director at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News, VA.
Events and Activitys around the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, Smith Island stands defiant. Its community remains strong and proud while all the other island towns in Maryland have faded away, their populations fleeing for the mainland.
Smith Island clings to a way of life that is centuries old: hard work on the water all week and then a day of rest to worship the Lord on Sunday. Many of its residents refuse to evacuate, even in the strongest of st