17 JULY 2013

One of the delights of living on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake was for me to be able to get in the car and visit just about anywhere within a couple hours.  I was kinda centrally located and could get to Havre de Grace in an hour and a half.  Have de Grace is a bustling little city at the head of the bay on the Susquehanna River.  For me their claim to fame is the Concord Point Lighthouse which I visited many times.  I even showed my work there one year for the Maryland Lighthouse Challenge.

I am using the high lights here as links to other images which will help you understand my verbosity  as I wander through the small places in my brain.  Please click on them and enjoy.

A few states hold a challenge each year and they are generally very successful.  Entailed is the opening of a number of the lights in each state over a weekend and one has to get to each one in order to win some sort of accolades in the form of stickers, pins and other things that said you had made it.  I have attended the New Jersey one for many years, showing at the Hereford Inlet Lighthouse where I will be again in October.  It's a fun weekend and if your state hold one give it a whirl.

Instead of travelling north to the head of the bay, I could have gone south as far as the eastern shore of Virginia or even Assateague Island in both Maryland and Virginia.  I guess the shore in Virginia has finally been "Found", but it is still a long haul from any large city.  I suppose the closest are Norfolk and Virginia Beach which lie across the Bay Bridge Tunnel on the western shore of the bay.

Some of the towns in southern Maryland include Deal Island, Tilghman Island, Easton, and of course Smith Island.  Deal is a small flat piece of land with few inhabitants who mostly fish the bay or farm the land.

This is not a horribly old picture of the docks on Deal, but I have processed it in such a way as to look archival and old.  In fact the Skipjack was probably built in the late 1800's or early 1900's. 

Because I spent a large part of my life on the bay, Deal Island is to me what the Bay used to be.  A watermen's territory until the 1970's when the sailors took over and the fishing declined.  The number of watermen have been declining since that first settler in Jamestown learned to harvest oysters from the Indians.

Hence, you will find a growing gallery on "The Galleries" page devoted to the Watermen and the Bay.  I lived either in Rock Hall or Chestertown, Maryland for over fifty years off and on and frankly consider that area as one of my home towns.  Two other areas of the country where I have a home town are Westfield, NJ where I went to high school and to a lesser extent the lakes region of New Hampshire.  I put all that here just so the NSA doesn't have to spend my tax dollars to research all that.  And they might not discover all that in my phone conversations.

Much more to come my friends, stay free!