Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1964 Sep
Contents
reap greater and more varied riches than can be imagined now." If the blue crab is the leading citizen, the sea nettle, a stinging jellyfish, is No. 1 pest of the Bay country. In wet years, when rain fall reduces the Bay's salinity, you seldom see a nettle. In dry summers, they ruin the swim ming clear to head of tidewater and cause economic distress by driving vacationists away from the Bay. I asked the University of Maryland's Ches apeake Biological Laboratory at Solomons Island (where the Marines trained for their World War II invasion of the Pacific Solomon Islands, incidentally) if they had a sea-nettle cure. They said no, but they were working on the problem. These days the lab is studying soft-shell clams, known on the Bay as maninoses or mannoes. Baymen have always known these long-necked shellfish live in the Chesapeake bottom thick as barnacles on a piling, but ignored them except as fish bait. Suddenly they learned that New England ers actually ate the things, steaming them to gether with lobsters and corn for the regional feast known as the clambake. Their oyster industry fallen upon hard times, Baymen turned gratefully to the catching of mannoes for Yankees, whose own steamer-clam beds showed signs of depletion. The catch has been good ever since Fletcher Hanks of Oxford, Maryland, invented an ef ficient power dredge that scoops mannoes up out of the sand. The Solomons lab sought to learn what happens to undersize mannoes the dredgers dump back into the Bay. To this end a biologist dug clams out of the bottom of a tank and watched to see if they could dig themselves back in. "They can," he reported, "especially the little ones. Fletcher can relax. His way of harvesting doesn't destroy small clams." Oystermen Still Work Under Sail Though clamming prospers, the Bay's oys ter business is in an unhappy state indeed. "Maryland oystermen caught 14 million bushels in 1875, their best year," I was told by Dr. H. C. Byrd, head of the Commission on Chesapeake Bay Affairs. "Last year they took a little more than a million." Overfishing depleted the finest natural oyster beds known. As a conservation meas ure, Maryland clings to fishing methods little changed since colonial times. In the wintry dawns the men go forth in two fleets. One, using long, rakish power 388 Stacked like cordwood, frozen albacore boats, combs the shallows with long-shafted tongs (page 372). The other, under sail, goes to deeper waters and scrapes with towed dredges (preceding page). Law requires dredgers to rely on wind alone, lest they take too many oysters too quickly. Result: The Chesapeake is the last place in the country where one may see a working fleet of sailing vessels. Each carries a small pow ered skiff, called a yawlboat, on davits astern; it is used to push the larger vessel in and out of harbors or homeward in a calm. Most of the boats are very old. Each year the fleet dwindles. No Chesapeake schooner or pungy still works the oyster rocks, and only skipjacks and a few bugeyes remain. I miss them all very much. In summers of my youth, before the trucks took over the cargoes, they hauled the wheat, watermelons,
Links
Archive
1964 Oct
1964 Aug
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page