1859 U.S. Coast Survey’s progress chart of the Chesapeake Bay, Wikimedia Commons.

The Chesapeake (and it’s always The Chesapeake) is bordered by three states, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. We thought about fishing Delaware, but it was too hard logistically. Delaware will have to wait for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

The drainage for the Chesapeake covers six states, including New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Bay’s border states. Its northern origin starts in the Susquehanna River near Cooperstown, NewYork, the place where baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday (along with the Lazy Susan) in 1840.  It’s an estuary, with fresh, brackish, and saltwater, and is considered to be shallow, but not flats boat shallow. It has an average depth of about 10 feet, and above Annapolis where we’ll fish it’s 35 feet deep.  That’s almost as deep as the Galveston Ship Channel. The guide says we’ll fish with sinking lines. I reckon.

I first met The Chesapeake as a young lawyer circa 1985 when the owners of a Baltimore crab house came to Seadrift, Texas, to talk to  the city council about their crab processing plant. A few years before in Seadrift a shrimper was killed and shrimp boats were fire-bombed in a feud between the locals and Vietnamese immigrants. Meanwhile the Marylanders were in Texas because The Chesapeake didn’t produce enough blue crabs. It wasn’t producing enough blue crabs, or enough oysters, or enough striped bass. It suffered from agriculture runoff, sheet flow from exploding growth, poor sewage treatment, overfishing, and industry.  Still does, though things are better now than then:  striper fishing was banned for a few years to allow stocks to recover, the states have encouraged farmed oyster production rather than dredging, and grass has recovered some.  Every few years the states reach agreements on appropriate goals for cleaning things up. The goals aren’t met though, and all in all improvement is still incremental. I wouldn’t swim in the bay near Baltimore after a heavy rain.

My Marylanders took a helicopter from Houston to Seadrift. It was the first and last time I was in a helicopter.  I remember the Marylanders explained soft shell crabs to me. Who knew?

Stripers are the most popular Chesapeake gamefish, though no one in Maryland calls them stripers:  Rockfish.  The state fish of Maryland is the Rockfish. They’re anadromous, spawning annually through their adulthood in the freshwater tributaries.  Stripers were so common in Colonial America that some of the first colonial game laws prohibited harvesting stripers for fertilizer.  Eight to 40 pound fish are common now, and the largest ever netted was 124 pounds.

Currently the striped bass suffer from an outbreak of mycobacteriosis infections, which relates to agricultural runoff.  It’s tough to regulate agricultural runoff.  That’s like regulating apple pie, and it would have to get past rural legislators.

At its narrowest, The Chesapeake is 2.8 miles across.  At it’s widest, it’s 30 miles. It covers 4,479 square miles. It’s big.

We fish with Captain Tom Hughes. I’ve talked a bit with Captain Hughes, and emailed a bit more. We’re taking nothing, no rods, no flies, no leaders. I figure we’ll learn some about rigging for stripers.