To Fish or not

The Island Queen moved slowly through the narrow gap where the Honga River entered the Chesapeake Bay. Having booked a three day fishing trip on Marylands Eastern Shore at my request , I was the only guest aboard The Queen,a tough little boat outfitted for fishing.

To be honest, I didn’t care if I caught a fish or not. I just needed to get away from the hectic hustle of city life. I needed to regain some sense of myself. I wasn’t on an Ernest Hemingway fishing challenge. No “Old Man and the Sea “for me. If I hooked a good eating Striped Bass I was likely to release it back to its watery home. Ernest Hemingway would not have approved. He kept every fish, large or small , he ever caught and there were a lot of them in his lifetime.

But one thing I had in common with the champion fisherman author was my boat The Island Queen. Like his boat Pilar, The Queen was 38 feet long and had a 3 1/2 foot draft. The draft was important in this world of shallow waters of marshes and disappearing islands ; even passing through the Gap we had recently traversed to the Bay could be a challenge at low tide.

The Island Queen was special for me. I had watched the self sufficient Hoopers Island watermen built her and launch her. I watched as seventy year old islanders crawled under her to place pine logs that would roll her into the stream that led to the Honga. It was a happening that I probably would never see again so it was etched in my memory for life.

Now I was aboard this special boat heading for the fishing grounds of the Chesapeake Bay.As we entered Hooper Strait, in the long view of the water I felt a sense of peace envelope me. Such is the magical effect of water.

Capt Lee turned south towards Hoopers Strait Light that in one form or another had warned of shallows since 1827. According to Island talk a hexagonal light house that had marked this site had been shorn from its base by ice and was carried 5 miles south before the 2 keepers were rescued. The light house is now on shore on the campus of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum north of us, a first preservation effort of its kind.

We passed the now spark plug tower that marks the shallows. It too is a National Registered Historic Place . it is only one of eleven in the nation that rests atop a caisson foundation.

The Queens radar showed fish hunkering around Bloodsworth Island so we set the fishing line to troll careful to stay far enough off shore of this “no-public-allowed” place. Acguired by the Navy during WWII, the Island served as a training ground for Navy warfare. Depending on the wind, explosives could be heard up and down the Bay until 1995.

We were alone on the Bay. Not another fishing or workboat visible for 5 miles. Yet off in the distance on the horizon I could see the silhouette of a small ship, like an apparition on this quiet day.

The fish may have been running but they weren’t biting so we headed back to Hoopers Island while the water was still high enough to move through the Barren Island Gap to Fishing Creek. An Inn in the village with a view of the water provided for me a relaxing end of the day.

Early in the morning at high tide Capt Lee and I headed out again. We headed south to Tangier Sound once the mega producer of the worlds best tasting oysters. To the frustration of Capt Lee, a true fisherman, I asked him to just keep going south past miles and miles of marsh land while I feasted my eyes and ears on nature. Approaching mystical Smith Island I noticed yesterdays ship on the horizon, in the same place, ghost like, unmoving.

South of Smith we paused to observe a pelican rookery. Every bit of Sandy beach and grass land covered with these big birds and their young.

Curious about the mirage ship on yesterday’s horizon, I asked Capt Lee to cruise on to investigate. As we moved close to the ghost ship I could see it wasn’t a ship at all but a boat. Finally , there she was an ancient Skipjack mired in the shallows and encrusted with barnacles. In some strange way the shallows protected her and she had not shattered.

At one time the Skipjack was the master of the Bay oyster industry that supplied 50% of the worlds bivalve to a voracious public. As the oyster beds disappeared and the industry crashed the 2000 working boats were just abandoned. Here was one of them. Once a proud workboat called Lonesome, Tangier, Va her name was still visible through flaking paint on her transom.

“Ahoy there mate. Want to buy a boat”? came a call from 2 guys in a motorized craft. Capt Lee watched warily. Soon the sounds of voices with a decidedly old English dialect drifted towards me as the Capt “shot the breeze” with the Tangier Islanders out to check their crab pots.

Time to bid adieu, Capt Lee pointed The Island Queen north. In high gear we whisked past the rookeries and miles of marsh land and Smith Island to the Barren Island Gap into one of the States most pristine and beautiful rivers called the Honga on an island called Hoopers founded in 1668 by Henry Hooper from Warwick, England.

Tomorrow. Another day.Perhaps we will really fish. Catch and release of course. Hemingway would not approve.