LAND OF PLEASANT LIVING
That's what was known as the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay back in the fifties.....fifties? Yep, almost 60 years ago. I write this more for my kids and....shhhhhhhh, Grand kids! And not my other three thousand readers!
The area is probably still known by that today, but it was a special term.
The boat was an old Bateau (wooden row boat for those of you still in the government run grade schools). They had what we called one lung engines in them. Small air cooled engines which would run all day on a gallon of gas (the 37 cent per gallon type). You needed about two feet of clothes line with a knot in the end to wrap around the flywheel of the engine. One pull and the thing started and ran putt......putt.....putt.....putt! Literally that slow but all day long. You also needed a tin coffee can flattened on one side to bail all the water in the boat either from rains or leaks. Didn't matter how it got there--------it seemed there was always a lot of it.
I think that I slept with that knife by my side just in case I caught an oyster catcher (Monk fish) and had to dispatch him before putting my fingers in it's mouth. A terribly disgusting fish that fed on the bottom, bit hard on the bait, and because they could break an oyster shell with their mouth, bit fingers equally as hard.
They were known locally as a trash fish you could not eat. Of no commercial value, they were killed and thrown overboard to feed the crabs which did of course have great commercial value.
Fishing on the Bay in the mid fifties for a boy of 15 was like going to the Bahamas and searching for all the world class trophy game fish of the magazines. "Field and Stream" and "Sports Afield" glistened with enough imagination for any young angler. And we just knew we were in the midst of it on the Chesapeake. There were even sharks caught in the pound nets hung by the Watermen. To us this was the wild, wild, west and we treated it as such.
We caught a lot of white perch around the docks of the bay, in the tributaries, creeks and streams. This seemed to me to be the staple fish when I first emerged from the front porch to explore the vastness of this, the worlds largest estuary. A few yellow perch always added to the mix and there were always, always small pan stripers of about a foot long.
Financial sustenance for us young anglers necessarily included earning money from some source or other to support our finny ambitions. Crabs were our money crop. We could even catch a half dozen from each dock, simply by dipping them from the pilings with a long handled did net. Didn't matter whose dock we walked out on, everyone knew what we were doing and did not seem to mind. So one of us would carry a bushel basket and the rest with dip nets and we would go up and down the shore marauding everyone's dock. Just marched out on them like we owned the place. Nobody bothered. Hell, nobody even locked their front doors at night.....ever!
When we needed money, we just headed for the shallows of the bay and netted a bushel of these blue crab critters. Took them to the fish house and sold them for as little as $5 a bushel as I remember. I hear the now go for around $200 plus retail. One anchored the boat in the shallows and jumped into the water with a dip net. We towed a bushel basket in an old inflated inner tube and put the crabs we caught in the basket. You learned early on that the only place to hold a crab was the back fin in order to avoid being caught yourself. They look small, but believe me they could bite and almost aways drew blood. We walked slowly through the bay grasses to make the crabs swim out ahead and then tried to snatch them up with the net. It was great sport and took some unknown technique passed down from the Native Americans. (That's Indians for you sensitized politically correct government scholars) Often we would get doublers, or two crabs doing something together.
Most of the time one of them would be a much sought after soft crab.
If we got really lucky we also caught a mess of the soft crabs which sold at a mighty premium.
There were (still are) such places as Love Point, Love Point Light, Hickory Thicket, Hodges Bar, Swan Point and Creek, Tavern Creek, Rock Hall, The Triple Bouys, Tolchester, Betterton, Chester River, the Bay Bridge, and Gratitude.
If we got low on gas we had to go to the marina at Gratitude or the commercial docks in Rock Hall. Rock Hall was were the Watermen hung out, tied up their boats, met fishing parties, and sold their catch. In the fifties there must have been as many as a hundred party boat captains who took the Philadelphia and New York green horns out striper fishing. It was great sport and superb fishing, but as with everything else, it had it's place in time. Eventually party boat fishing on the upper bay died due to lack of fish and a five year moratorium of striper fishing. (Actually the moratorium was the best thing to happen to the fishery, but it took years to prove).
We took the money from our crab forays and went to local restaurants where they had pin ball machines that paid off. We could take a five dollar bill and run up 300 games that paid off $15, and our week was made. In fact our little band of misfits wandered all around the area, bare foot, shirtless, with two fishing knives on our belts, and both pockets bulging with nickles won on the machines. We could also throw those knives and stick them into trees almost every time......so we were armed. Didn't do any good though, we never had to use them. We just postured. And that didn't do much good either, we were still just a bunch of kids living on and in the water.
Men were called Mr.-----(Insert first name here), and the women were Miss----(Insert first name here). The neighbors down the street knew what you were doing all the time and told your parents before you could get home. There was total respect for our elders.
But you had to fight to become a regular in town. Rock Hall, where I grew up in the summers, had the reputation that if the boys knew that Mohamed Ali was coming to town......they would fight just to see who would fight him. All the time knowing they would lose to him. A fishing boat captain told me that! And I believe it.
You see I hung out with a local guy who was about five foot two. Sonny or Fess had this Napoleonic complex and everyone knew he was crazier than hell! Tough as nails and would fight anyone at the drop of a hat. Didn't matter if he was outweighed by 200 pounds.....he was respected because he was crazy. Or at least all the town ruffians thought him to be crazy.....I just stood behind him. After all my momma didn't raise any dummies that lived.
There was a time when I did have some of my New Jersey high school friends down after graduation. We thought that we would go to visit some girls out to Piney Neck. Now there was a certain competition between the Rock Hall boys and the Piney Neck boys. Hell, there was a certain competition between the Rock Hall boys and ANY boys from out of town. All I remember was that we had our fishing knives on our belts and looked very John Wayne-ish, but they had a gun or two. One of us had to dive through the window of my moving station wagon as we were run out of town. I think I got that old Pontiac up to 105 on the straight away outside of Piney Neck. That was 1957 and I was just 17 with a new NJ drivers license. The following two years, my parents would not allow me to go back to Maryland for the fear that I would get with the wrong people. Actually one particular wrong female people. But that's just another sordid story well left as is.
Stay tuned!
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