THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408140057
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 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 : 161 lines
With 489 miles behind me and 19 more to go, I paddled my kayak out of Bennett's Creek in Poquoson on Friday under a gray, early-morning sky, headed south through the salt marsh along the Chesapeake Bay shore.
Two long days before, I'd camped on Rigby Island, a low hump of sand near the mouth of the Piankatank River. I'd cruised south along the Middle Neck on Wednesday, rounding New Point Comfort and traveling the height of Mobjack Bay to Ware Neck, where I'd pitched my tent in retired railroad man Harry Turner's back yard.
On Thursday, I'd pushed south across Mobjack among pods of lazily surfacing porpoises, crossed the broad York River, then threaded my way through marshland to the Poquoson River and Bennett's Creek.
Now I was on the water again, nearing home, a week ahead of schedule on my journey around the Bay.
By day's end, I'd be sleeping indoors. In my bed. With a refrigerator nearby and music on the radio. Food that wasn't freeze-dried. A telephone within reach.
There'd be hot water. Indoor plumbing. Electricity.
Chairs.
My excitement was tempered, however, by the knowledge that the procession of strange and wonderful experiences I'd had over the past six weeks would soon end.
I remembered, as I paddled, heading south from Annapolis with a thunderstorm approaching and the horizon blurred by fog, hearing the low, mournful horn of the old Thomas Point Light cutting through the mist from a couple miles offshore.
I recalled the lonesome clanking of a channel buoy's bell drifting across the water at the Bay's mouth, and the otherworldly whooshing of a dozen trumpeter swans flapping hard against a gale near Tilghman Island.
The swans had been among a host of animals I'd encountered: porpoises, sea turtles, deer, nutria, hundreds of ospreys. Bald eagles in the tall trees of the Maryland shore, raccoons and muskrat in the swamps along Pocomoke Sound, leaping mackerel, slow-moving heron. Stingrays in Mobjack Bay that waved their wings as I passed. Silvery little fish that skipped along the water's surface, on several occasions nearly landing in my lap.
I had glided amid tall marsh grass miles from the nearest house and beached the kayak on white sand that likely had not seen a human visitor in months. Along Maryland's Calvert County shore, I'd fossil-hunted at the foot of 100-foot-tall cliffs. Three times I'd camped on uninhabited islands, the Bay's waters visible in every direction from my tent.
People along the route had opened their homes and businesses to me. On the Virginia Eastern Shore, the McCaleb family put me up on their Craddock Creek farm, the Bagwells of Onancock fed me, and Eastville's McCarters invited me ashore for a July Fourth picnic.
In Saxis, the Miles brothers cooked lunch for me and regaled me with watermen's tales in their crabbing shack, and in Bivalve, Md., townspeople provided me shelter, auto tours and great local legends.
Pless Lunger, the first Virginian I met after crossing the Potomac River, not only treated me to a steak dinner and a place to sleep, but also power-sprayed a month's collected scum from my boat.
In Reedville, Virginia House Speaker Tom Moss threw steaks on the grill, too, and took me up the Great Wicomico River aboard his sports fisher. Then he followed me south, meeting me at Windmill Point and again in Deltaville, ready to help.
I'd had some discouraging moments, of course. Perhaps the worst came on a muggy July morning off the Nanticoke River on Maryland's Eastern Shore. My charts told me that by taking a narrow gut through a peninsula on the river's west shore, I'd shave four miles off the day's paddle.
The charts lied. I found the gut, headed in, and a half-mile later sat at a dead end, swarmed by biting flies, unable to turn around or back out. I slipped out of the kayak into chest-deep water, and spent 15 minutes turning my 18-foot-long boat around in a 3-foot-wide space, while green-headed deer flies chewed me to pieces.
I had been driven near mad, too, after my supposedly weatherproof Walkman quit working during a mid-July light drizzle and my brain started producing its own music. It settled on one song, a song that I couldn't evade, so that any other song I tried to hum would inevitably segue into this one.
Unfortunately, the song in question was the theme from ``Casper, the Friendly Ghost.''
But save for all but a handful of such qualifications, my journey around the Bay had been a joy. Just Thursday night, in Poquoson, Jerry Wilson turned to me at the Owens Marina bar and asked whether I liked soft-shell crab. When I told him I did, he led me across a gravel parking lot and past a squadron of boats on blocks to a crab house where dozens of peelers rested at the bottom of saltwater tanks.
Jerry plucked three big crabs, cleaned them, and cajoled the bartender into frying them up for me. Later, the marina's owner, Holt Bellamy, put me up on a couch in his apartment above the bar.
My reverie was interrupted off Buckroe Beach in Hampton, as I made my way around the fishing pier. I'd battled motorboat wakes all morning, and didn't feel much like heading far offshore to invite more. So as I approached the pier's end I paused and yelled to the fishermen there that I couldn't see their lines. How far out, I asked, did I need to go?
``A lot farther out,'' one yelled back. ``You gotta go 400 feet.''
I was 50 yards off the pier's end, give or take a little. ``Look,'' I hollered back, ``I'm against a headwind here. I'm not going out 400 feet. Just let me know if I'm close to fouling your lines.''
Halfway across the width of the pier, I watched a fat fellow in a ball cap rear back and cast directly at me, and I followed his lure as it arced over my head and landed in the water a few yards to my left.
``Hey!'' I screamed. ``What the hell do you think you're doing?''
He didn't bother to answer. He was busy reeling. I kicked my rudder to port and tried to whip the kayak's stern around, but before I could escape the line, he'd hooked the bungees strung across the deck behind me. Then he began winding me in.
Now the boat was sliding backwards, parallel to the wind and waves - a dangerous prospect.
``Cut the line!'' I yelled. Just perfect, I thought: After traveling more than 500 miles of the Bay without a mishap, I might suffer a serious accident right here, a half-dozen miles from home, within sight of the Willoughby beach.
``You gotta be 400 feet out!'' one of his buddies bellowed again.
``Cut your line!'' I repeated.
He refused. He kept reeling, until eventually he gave the line enough of a tug that the bungee stretched, the hook came loose, and I was able to paddle away, as the fishermen enjoyed a good laugh.
I was still spitting mad as I passed abandoned gun emplacements at Fort Monroe and turned south, into the mouth of Hampton Roads and toward the shipping channel that passes over the submerged leg of the bridge-tunnel.
Within a few minutes, however, the pier incident had left my mind. The water off Old Point Comfort was wildly confused. I found myself fighting waves that came from three directions at once, and it was slow, tense going as I inched toward Fort Wool.
Not far into the crossing I was joined by the Cape Henry, a state Marine Patrol boat that I'd run into north of Buckroe, and whose crew offered to keep an eye on me as I paddled amid the channel's big ship traffic.
As the Cape Henry chugged alongside, we spotted two local schoolteachers, Wendy Farnham and Sandy Baylor, bobbing near the island fort in small kayaks. My reception committee.
Mark Twain once lamented that he'd been drawn to a career as a steamboat pilot by the Mississippi's beauty, but that once in the wheelhouse he learned to see only the river's hazards.
I can understand that. After six weeks on the Chesapeake, I suspect that I see a very different bay than that which I set out to circle on July 1.
It is a visually stunning body of water, and it remains that for me. But I know now, thanks to making the trip during the wettest, stormiest summer in memory, that its moods are fleeting, its power immense.
On Saturday, after sleeping 11 hours, I stumbled out of my house onto the beach at Willoughby and eyed the Bay from the crest of the dune. The sun shone brightly, and only a few high-level clouds interrupted the blue overhead.
But a stiff breeze rippled the water's surface from the west, and I found myself thankful that I wasn't paddling against it. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
IAN MARTIN/Staff
Swift ended his 508-mile trip around the Chesapeake Bay on Friday.
Photo
IAN MARTIN/Staff
Earl Swift paddles away from a Poquoson marina Friday morning on the
last leg of his trip around the Chesapeake Bay.
by CNB