People, Boats and Water

The coming of the U.S. boat shows to Annapolis each October turns our thoughts toward the water. For all that’s new — and some that’s old — in boats and everything yet imagined to support the boating lifestyle, you go to the shows. In Bay Weekly’s pages, we support that lifestyle with reflections on the meeting points of people, boats and water.
    Last week, as the U.S. Sailboat Show flourished, sailor-writer Al McKegg took us to sea and back home again in his story about life’s turning points. This week, October 15 through 18, the U.S. Powerboat Show takes the stage at City Dock and powerboats fill our pages.
    This week’s feature story was born from reflections on my own boating experience, which began smack in the middle of the Short, Fast History of Powerboating, as I learned from Richard Dodds, Maritime History Curator at Calvert Marine Museum.
    “Modern boating has its origins,” he told me, “when people thought they could do anything: in the early 20th century’s energy, inventiveness and optimism.”
    The key? The internal combustion engine.
    Learn more in our Bay Weekly Conversation, starting on page 8.
    From there we visit a couple of powerboat extremes. One is the USS Calvert, whose ancient mariners reunited this month to visit Calvert County, their ship’s namesake, and Sparrows Point in Baltimore, the shipyard where it was born. The other is the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, which last month broke its way through arctic ice to the North Pole.
    In this week’s Sporting Life, columnist and extreme fisherman Dennis Doyle recounts the pleasures and possibilities of fooling around in small boats. Chesapeake Country, he writes, is “one of our nation’s largest maritime playgrounds.” A small boat — his own is 17 feet — with an outboard power, “will get just about any adventure underway from a crabbing excursion to sightseeing, bird watching, visiting waterfront restaurants, catching a rockfish or filling a cooler with perch and spot.”
    All those, I agree, are very fine pleasures. Last night’s dinner at the Martin-Lambrecht home was a tasty rockfish caught that very morning in a boat a bit longer but with no outboard motor. Our hour-long kayak paddle rewarded us with many of Doyle’s list of pleasures, bird watching prime among them. For gulls and terns had led us to the fish, with the many hungry six- or seven-inch-long rockfish that took our flies giving us first-hand experience of Maryland Department of Natural Resources survey conclusion reported in these pages: many baby rockfish were born this year.
    We saw other birds as well: kingfishers, mallards, egrets, one heron and a pair of fishing bald eagles.
    Sightseeing was spectacular. The 360-degree view you get out on the water puts you and life’s concerns in perspective. Simply put, the world is a lot bigger and richer than it seems from the inside. Take the long view, and you get the sky’s thrilling moving picture, all the richer because it encompasses all our senses. Take the short view, and you begin to see that water is a multi-hued triple exposure of itself, sky and land.
    It was all so pretty it could have been a picture. Here we were for this hour, living the timeless unity of people, boats and water to which impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte had opened our eyes at the National Gallery of Art on this October’s first rainy weekend.
    You don’t need a boat — or a great painting — to see like that. But both help.

Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]