THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408070041
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: AROUND THE BAY IN 50 DAYS
Earl Swift is exploring the geography, history and people of the
Chesapeake Bay on a 50-day kayak trip that began July 1.
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
Of all the open water around the rim of the Chesapeake Bay, the stretch that had me most apprehensive lay at the mouth of the Potomac.
The big river is 6 to 12 miles wide between Point Lookout, on its Maryland side, and the curving Virginia coast to the south.
Its currents are treacherous, and when the weather changes, the river's mouth is prone to sudden and violent mood swings.
So when I broke camp at Point Lookout State Park early one morning last week and saw a line of clouds gathering to the southwest, I decided that to risk a two-hour charge across the river would push my luck: Were I halfway across when a storm struck, I might, at best, be swept into the Bay's middle, miles from shore.
Instead I turned upriver and fought the wind and current for nine miles to Piney Point, a lobe of land at the tip of a narrow isthmus jutting into the Potomac, only four miles from Virginia.
In intense, hazy heat I started across.
The Potomac is rather unimpressive at Washington, but here, 90 miles downstream, the far shore is often invisible, and the water is filled with creatures one normally associates with an ocean, not a river. Here, I was not the dominant player in the food chain. Large rays are often sighted, some with spans of six feet or more. Sharks, too, are caught on occasion.
In Oxford, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, I'd spent time sitting on a porch with Jim Wilkes, a retired Washington lawyer who has spent much of his life on the lower Potomac. Jim told me that several years ago, as he drove along the river to work, he'd often passed a huge black man sitting on the bank with a fishing pole. A rope was always looped around his waist and a tree. ``One day I decided to stop, and I said to him, `You have been a curiosity to me for a couple of years, and I have to ask you, why do you tie yourself to this tree? Is that rope a joke?' He told me: `I'm catching carp. I've been here almost every day for four years, and I've caught a carp just about every day.' ''
These carp, the man went on, started life as goldfish, were flushed down toilets in the nation's capital and over years of breeding and fine river dining had evolved into 120-pound behemoths. And so the rope. Carp might not be a game fish, but if you hooked a big one, it would pull like a tractor.
I recalled this story about a mile south of Piney Point, the Virginia shore still a faint blue line on the horizon, and found myself studying the water for the flashes of silvery scales. Jim couldn't vouch for the toilet-flushing part of the story, and I wasn't sure I believed it, but even so it occurred to me that I might be due a karmic payback for the many dime-store goldfish that expired under my care as a child.
No monster carp appeared, however. Nor did I witness any of the rays ``big enough for five men to stand on, not touching each other,'' which Jim reported seeing.
The water seemed inhabited only by small fish that leaped into the air every few minutes and jellyfish, hundreds of thousands of jellyfish. After escaping their presence all along the Eastern Shore and halfway down the other side, here in the Potomac I finally confronted the stinging invertebrates in numbers so vast they seemed to boost the river's viscosity. As I paddled into the Potomac's center and deeper water, they only grew thicker. At times my paddle's blades became so fouled with their tentacles that I had to pause to shake them loose.
Thirty minutes into the crossing the wind died altogether. The haze thickened to completely obscure the Virginia shore, by now only two miles away, and the water surface turned to glass. I now faced an unexpected challenge: Water and sky blended so completely that I couldn't make out a horizon, and without it, I found it difficult to keep my balance. The kayak tottered a few times as I fought off vertigo. Eventually I found I could stay steady only by staring at the small wake cut by my bow.
After 55 minutes I reached Virginia and turned southeast down the Westmoreland County shoreline. Beyond the herons standing frozen on the bank was farmland that has produced as much leadership as it has crops. Westmoreland County was the birthplace of, among others, George Washington, James Monroe and Robert E. Lee, and the site of the Leedstown Resolutions, a forerunner of the Declaration of Independence.
Today it is a weekend retreat for the residents of Richmond and Washington. I beached the kayak at the part-time home of Pless Lunger, a Vienna, Va., real estate broker. He and his family invited me to stay the night, I took them up on it, and after a while we climbed into his car to tour a bit.
From his house at Sandy Point, we drove to Kinsale, a village on the Yeocomico River and once a bustling port where tomatoes, oysters and grain were loaded onto steamships bound for Baltimore. A marina and a grain silo have replaced the old wharf buildings of a century ago, but otherwise the place hasn't changed much.
``It's really interesting, how people make a living around here,'' Pless told me. ``Everybody's a deputy sheriff.'' Indeed, on our 20-minute tour, we spotted three deputies.
The next day I paddled downriver, crossing the Yeocomico into Northumberland County and resting for an hour on the porch of the Lewisetta General Store, which locals jokingly refer to as the Lewisetta Mall. There are no real malls in Northumberland County. In fact, there isn't a single stoplight.
After camping on an empty stretch of beach at the southernmost point of the Potomac's mouth, I rounded Smith Point into the Bay and started down the Northern Neck, bound for Reedville. MEMO: Swift's next report will appear Monday. His 50-day journey around the
Bay began July 1.
ILLUSTRATION: Map
STAFF
by CNB