Our Maritime Playground

It’s almost impossible to look out over our Chesapeake Bay without also gazing at a graceful waterman’s workboat or anglers in a skiff speeding to the next honey hole, a family in a cuddy or cabin cruiser slowly trolling for trophy rockfish or heading for dinner at a waterfront restaurant. Sometimes all of them at the same time.
    The plain fact is that if you live in our area and don’t have a boat, you are missing out on enjoying one of our nation’s largest maritime playgrounds.
    At 4,500 square miles with 11,000 miles of shoreline and hundreds of tributary rivers and streams, the Bay is the biggest and most complex estuary on the North American continent. It is also home to 300 species of fish, 170 species of crabs and shellfish and visited by more than a million migrating waterfowl each year. Our Bay is a recreational heaven and a naturalists’ wonderland. A boat is the key to experiencing it fully.
    It isn’t necessarily true that owning a watercraft is a seasonal, expensive, time-intensive and dangerous pastime. Today’s marine craft are safe and robust. The motors, once the bugaboo of seafaring, have become models of reliability and efficiency. Modern materials and refined technologies have much reduced maintenance requirements and breakdowns.
    Today’s boater can expect to enjoy almost eight months of comfortable use in an average season on the Chesapeake. Stalwarts willing to endure more uncomfortable conditions (sometimes including myself) often log in full 12-month calendars.
    While there is no upper limit on the size or expense of a craft that will allow you to enjoy our maritime cornucopia, a boat of 21 feet or slightly larger with outboard power is a good starting point. Such a boat will get just about any adventure under way from a crabbing excursion to sightseeing, bird watching, visiting waterfront restaurants, catching a rockfish or filling a cooler with perch and spot.

My Requirements and Desires
    My own boating usually involves just me and sometimes a friend. My wife, a high school art teacher and successful sculptor, generally has a full schedule. Our three sons have mostly flown the nest.
    Spending at least three or four days a week on the water in fulfilling my duties as a sporting columnist for Bay Weekly, I have chosen a simple 17-foot center console skiff. It is easy to tow, launch and handle solo or with a friend. Powered by a 50-horsepower Yamaha four-stroke motor, the relatively light and slender craft (800-pound hull, six-foot beam) can max out at 30 mph, cruise easily in the mid 20s and fish all day on about three gallons of gas. Its modified V-hull with a wide, flared bow runs dry in a chop and handles just about any kind of weather I’m apt to fish in.
    I’ve equipped the skiff with a stern Power Pole or shallow water anchor, an electric trolling motor for stealthy shoreline running, a good quality GPS/fishfinder combo and a handheld compact VHF marine radio. This setup excels for shallow-water plugging and fly fishing and is quite satisfactory for deeper water tactics such as chumming, live-lining, jigging or just bottom fishing with bait.
    I’ve come to prefer keeping the craft ready on its trailer, having found that one of the keys to angling success on the Bay is getting promptly to where the fish are — even if that entails a road trip to a distant public boat ramp.

Try It!
    Whatever your requirements and desires, being on the water is a life-expanding experience.