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The Next BIG Thing

Two travelers on a small sailboat try to put the whole National Harbor experience into perspective.

by Jody Argo Schroath

Night had fallen, and behind us 18 stories of lighted glass and steel atrium glowed like a colossal moon. It was July 3, and my old college friend Jean and I were just about to join a group of boaters from Occoquan, Va., at the end of National Harbor Marina's A dock to watch the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center's first ever July fireworks show. But first she wanted to take a few pictures. As usual. Jean was using her underwater camera, which she had packed for our sailing trip up the Potomac River because she hadn't been sure whether this kind of sailing would involve as much tipping over and getting wet as sailing Sunfish in college had—the last time she and I had been on a sailboat together. I understood. We had tipped over a lot.

But Jean didn't understand. I don't mean about the tipping over. She got that now. No, what she didn't understand was the whole idea of National Harbor, which she was having trouble putting into perspective, despite the fact that we had now been here since the end of June.

"I mean it's crazy cool in an alternate universe kind of way, but I still don't get it. What is it really, and why is it here?"

Big questions indeed. How to explain?

We were standing on the dock as Jean turned away from the river to snap pictures of the thousands of spectators that had gathered along National Harbor's shoreline in anticipation of the fireworks. Finally, she stopped and pulled a brochure out of her pocket and began reading off its facts and figures. "National Harbor is built on 300 acres, has six hotels and about 20 buildings," she said. "When it's completed, it will have 7.3 million square feet of mixed use community space, 4,000 hotel rooms, 2,500 residential units, 500,000 square feet of class A office space (whatever that is), 1 million square feet of retail, dining and entertainment space and 10,000 parking spaces."

"Yes," I said, "it will be bigger than the Mall of America, the world's largest shopping mall."
"Then it's supposed to be a giant shopping mall?"
"Um, I don't think so."

We walked slowly toward the end of the dock; the lights on the atrium moon changed from white to red.

"I think it's supposed to be a kind of all-purpose destination, where you can spend your whole vacation or use it as a base for visiting Washington, D.C., which is a kind of uber-destination. Or you can make sidetrips to Alexandria or Mount Vernon by boat. At least I think that's the idea." I tried a little history. National Harbor's developer, Milton Peterson, wasn't the first one to think that this old gravel pit on Smoots Bay, in the shadow the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and the Beltway, would be the perfect place for something really big. In the 1970s and 1980s there were several big projects for the property that ultimately fell through. One of them was called Bay of Americas and another PortAmerica. "All very grand-sounding too, like National Harbor," I said. "But this was the one that came through—not that it didn't take an act of Congress." (In 1999, Congress passed legislation that exempted National Harbor from Federal review and protected it from environmental lawsuits—though there's no reason to believe any lawsuits would have occurred.)

We greeted our new Occoquan friends—we'd met earlier in the day when they had trickled in for their Fourth of July weekend rendezvous at National Harbor—and watched the city of Alexandria's fireworks arc silently into the jet black sky across the river. I reminded Jean that the tree-lined boulevards and specially commissioned public works of art, the hotels, restaurants, shops, water taxis, tour boats, bass charters, art works, and even the fortune-teller's kiosk, were all meant to give visitors plenty to see and do. "There are just more of things and they're just bigger than we're used to, at least around here. Hey, you live in Orlando, you should be used to this kind of thing."

"That's a point," she admitted.

"Take these folks from Occoquan," I went on. "They understand it." They had told me earlier that they'd made the trip to National Harbor four or five times already. "They can get in their boats and spend an hour or two coming upriver, pull into their slips, take out their deck chairs and relax. They barbecue, shop, listen to a calypso band, walk their dogs and go soundly to sleep in their own beds. When the weekend's over, they pull in their docklines and go home."

"We used to anchor out in the river for the fireworks," volunteered Alan Gross, who was sitting at the edge of the group with his German shepherd Schatzi and had overheard our conversation. "But then we had to get back to Occoquan in the dark with all that traffic. It was nuts! This is so much better!"

The first rocket shot into the air off a barge out in the river and exploded into a shower of color above our heads. Behind us the Gaylord atrium changed from red to blue.

Jean and I had arrived at National Harbor on a sunburst Saturday afternoon in late June aboard Snipp, my Albin Vega 27. After a week of zigzagging lazily up the Potomac against a persistent headwind (is there any other kind?), we had finally eased Snipp out of the Potomac's main channel and into National Harbor Marina. We were glad to get there.

We had spent the previous night at Smallwood State Park on Mattawoman Creek, where we had run smack into a hornet's nest of mid-tournament bass fishermen—men with steely eyes and gritted teeth and only three things on their mind: catch bass, catch them fast and catch them big. They had no patience for people on sailboats. We, on the other hand, just wanted to get off the creek and check into the marina. The problem was that we became so wrapped up in not running aground in the narrow channel into the park that we fell into the clutches of the many headed Hydra of marine vegetation lurking just beneath the surface. It caught us fast. Were it not for heroic action with a boat hook, a paddle and a Swiss army multi-tool, we felt we would soon have been sucked under to join other hapless wanderers. Once freed, we docked—as per earlier phone instructions—then had to undock because we couldn't get to the office from the dock. (There was a padlocked gate at the end of the dock.) We redocked near the office, where we were assigned a slip where we couldn't dock because it was shallow enough to ground a bass boat. We picked out a deeper empty slip and re-redocked. This slip naturally turned out to belong to the Seatow guy, so we re-undocked and re-re-redocked opposite a sailboat sunk at the dock. It was not an inspiring evening.

The stretch of Potomac above Mattawoman is crowded with things to see. First there's the broad entrance to Occoquan Bay on the Virginia side, with lovely Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge on the bay's north shore, and then a good long view of George Mason's handsome Gunston Manor, high on a bluff looking down on Gunston Cove and the Potomac. The river narrows here to a friendly size, and the channel moves restlessly from one bank to the other.

Soon we had our first view of Mount Vernon, that most familiar of American stately homes, as we crowded the edge of the channel to give a three-story-tall tour boat a wide berth as it bustled toward the Mount Vernon channel. Jean was entranced—as well she might be—but I stubbornly insisted that she pay less attention to the scenery and more to spotting floating logs and other debris that often litter this bit of the river. Soon after, Fort Washington loomed above us on the Maryland shore, and then finally we could see the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, and beyond it, the Washington Monument, a sight that never fails to thrill me.

Between Indian Queen and Rosier bluffs, the channel bellies up to the Maryland shore. Here 
it was just Snipp and yet another very large tour boat, both of us enjoying an all-too intimate moment between the closely placed red and green markers, and so close to the shore that we could just about touch the red clay and maples. But before long we had shot through to follow the channel toward the middle of the river, where it lines up for the trip through the center span of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Not that we were going as far as the bridge. But I need to mention the channel because it's here—about the time you reach the middle of the river and just as you clear South Point—that National Harbor is suddenly, without prelude, just there, like Xanadu or the Emerald City. It's enough to make you feel like either Kublai Khan or Dorothy—I'm not sure which. Either way, it's straight out of a storybook.

"Good heavens," Jean exclaimed from the bow, "what on earth is that?"

"That is National Harbor, of course, silly girl." "And what you are particularly exclaiming over, no doubt, is the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center, which is three times the size of everything else." I had been to National Harbor with friends in the spring and so was in a position to be annoyingly blasé about the whole thing. But really there's no denying that it's a stunner.

A moment later, however, something else had caught her eye. "Look at that gigantic sail!"

"You are referring of course to the eight-story tall semitransparent glass mainsail that decorates the front port side of the Westin Hotel."

She shot me a dark look and abandoned the binoculars in favor of her camera. Click.

"Jean," I called forward, "what's our next marker?" Click. Click.

"Sheesh," I said (or words to that effect), "find the next marker!"

I sympathized with Jean's desire to take pictures because the approach to National Harbor from the water definitely has it all over the land route for impressive views. But Smoots Bay is shallow and our charts, though pretty new, were not new enough to show the new entrance markers to the marina. And suddenly we also found ourselves rolling in the wake of a lot of very big powerboats. Did I mention that this was a Saturday afternoon? Click. Click.

"Jean, stop that!"

She sighed and put her camera away, then scanned the bay. "There . . . red," she said, pointing to a marker just off South Point.

I made a sharp turn to starboard and immediately asked for the next marker, which turned out to be two markers, a red and a green, just beyond. We continued to follow the markers as they skirted the shoreline until we had reached the outermost dock, which is also the fuel dock. There we turned in to look for our assigned slip: B17. An apropos number because the slip was almost big enough to hold a B-17 bomber. I roughly calculated that it would also hold eight of my Albin Vega 27, if you rafted them up two deep. I don't mean to say we felt a little out of place—no place could have been more welcoming—I mean that National Harbor is just the kind of place where you have to keep readjusting your sense of proportion.

Click. Click. Jean was at it again. But this time I didn't object, because we were tied up in our slip and had already been greeted by the congenial partiers on the boat next to ours. So I left her to it and went off to find harbormaster Eric Bradley. I found him in his office/kiosk on the outside dock, deftly juggling fuel fill-ups and assigning slips to boats looking for a few hours of parking or an overnight stay. A small battalion of dockhands moved efficiently between A, B and C docks, making fast a steady stream of arriving boats.

"Wait until the July Fourth weekend!"
Bradley said when I remarked on the congestion. "We'll be completely full, and we're expecting three yachts of more than a hundred feet on the north side of the main dock."

Before coming to Washington to open National Harbor Marina, Bradley was dockmaster at Annapolis Landing on Back Creek in Annapolis. "It's an entirely different set of boats," he said. "[In Annapolis] we had predominantly sailboats and transients from up and down the East Coast. Here we have predominantly large powerboats, most of which never go south of the U.S. 301 bridge. They're happy right here."

A large part of the marina is given over to annual slipholders—they had about 60 percent occupancy by mid-summer—but a generous number of slips are set aside for transient boaters—both overnights and hourly. "We are getting more and more boating and yacht clubs holding their rendezvous here." The groups especially plan their events around special programs scheduled by National Harbor nearly every weekend, like wine-tastings and a Beef and Suds Festival, or seasonal events such as Oktoberfest and repeating Christmas Market, which runs weekends from Thanksgiving until Christmas.

"I was thinking this would be a great place to come around Christmas," I said. "Do you stay open all winter?"

"We move boats off the C dock in winter, because we get a lot of ice pushed up against it by the river, but we keep the marina open all year." Eric explained that there is a breakwater under C dock to protect the inside docks from at least some of the wind-blown chop that builds up across the exposed water of Smoots Bay, especially during the winter.

At this point in our conversation, three boats pulled in and idled at the dock, waiting their turn, so I walked back to B dock, wondering idly whether Jean had used up her camera battery yet. Click. Guess not.

"Shower," was all she said. I held up the electronic key to the slipholders' facilities and smiled. We dove into the cabin for a couple of reasonably dry towels and some fairly clean clothes and went looking for the showers.

"Whoa, what's that?" Jean stopped suddenly and stared at a small beach, just to the left of the main dock, where a giant face, legs and hands poked dramatically out of the sand. Over, under and around the Volkswagen-size body parts, dozens of children scrambled eagerly, as dozens of parents snapped photos with equal enthusiasm. Click. Jean did too.

"That's The Awakening," I said, trying not to sound too annoying. "For about twenty years it was at Hains Point, there on the other side of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge in the middle of the Potomac, and practically zillions of people came to see it." I pointed vaguely in the direction of Washington and East Potomac Park, five miles upriver. "But somebody in his or her wisdom decided it didn't fit the image of the park, so it was put up for sale, and Petersen, National Harbor's developer, bought it and built a beach for it to rise out of."

When I finally got Jean moving again, we crossed a courtyard, which looked as if it doubled as a small stage, and turned right down the first street we came to, National Plaza. There, just across the street from the Westin Hotel and next to Olympia News, was the entrance to the harbormaster's office and the marina restrooms, laundry facilities and showers. Showers!

As I emerged sometime later, I ran into John and Betty Lockard of Arlington, Va., who keep their boat Irish Ayes at the marina. The Lockards had gotten their slip the previous May and their boat that June. "We love it!" they enthused. "The only issue is that we need to remember to make reservations at a restaurant if we want to eat dinner when we're here on the weekends."

Hmm, good thought. As we waved goodbye, I pulled out my cell phone.


All cleaned up, it was time to explore this all-American Oz on foot. The first thing we did was head for the Spanish steps.

"Spanish steps?" Jean asked.

"Yup, Spanish steps," I replied. "Probably because they lead to American Way, National Harbor's Main Street, which," I continued quickly because I could see this was making no sense, "is modeled after a main shopping street in Barcelona called Las Ramblas, which Petersen apparently fell in love with and so wanted to copy here. So," I continued, "like many southern European cities, it's a boulevard, shaded by a canopy of plane trees. This makes it a cool and shady refuge in the hot summer sun and bright and warm in the winter, when the trees are traditionally pruned back, practically to stubs.

"I know, I've seen plenty of European boulevards" she replied a little coolly, "I grew up in France, remember."

"Oh, yeah."

"And the Spanish Steps are in Rome, not Spain."

"Oh, yeah."

Fortunately, by this time we had reached the steps, which are flanked by two large mosaics placed in the walls on each side. Both mosaics are by Washington, D.C. native Cheryl Foster and depict Marylanders, especially those who've made a living on the water.

At the top of the steps is the belvedere. "A place that commands a view," I parroted. This belvedere is a large platform that overlooks the beach with the awakening giant, and beyond that the marina, the Potomac, and finally Alexandria on the opposite shore. A "view" by any standard. But Jean wasn't admiring the view. She had her head down and was meandering this way and that over the belvedere, studying Maryland artist Steven Weitzman's 1,600 square-foot map, which portrays the early American history of the Chesapeake Bay. The piece, Chesapeake Journey, is made of Fotera, a kind of structural concrete, like terrazzo, that Weitzman developed for public art pieces.

"Enough of this," I said finally, "let's go shopping!"

And so we did, wandering up one side of each of National Harbor's half-dozen streets and then down the other, sometimes cutting between streets through cunning little pedestrian passages. On Waterfront Street, we dawdled through Art Whino and Fossil. On National Plaza, we sampled gelatos at Aromi d'Italia. And on American Way we browsed through South Moon Under and Govinda Gallery, then carried off an espresso from Mayorga Coffee Roasters and continued up the street until the shops, restaurants, hotels and residence buildings gave way to coming soon signs and a fenced-in dog walk area. We peered hopefully into the fortune-teller's kiosk, but it was empty. I guess they didn't know we were coming. The plane trees have a few years to go before they make a canopy over the street, but the center boulevard is already dotted by various arrangements of stones, brought from New England and shaped and sometimes polished. The effect is a little like southern Europe's old fountains, which often anchor their old main streets.

Before our walk up American Way came to an end, we passed the site of the future home of the National Children's Museum. This 150,000-square foot, Cesar Pelli-designed building is projected to open in 2013. It will be within easy walking distance of another project: a Disney hotel. Just before we arrived at National Harbor, Disney had announced that it had purchased a 15-acre site at the end of American Way, where the company plans to build a 300-room resort hotel at a date yet to be named.

Oh yes, all that, and we hadn't even gotten to the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center. So we did, and spent another few lazy hours marveling on what you can do with 2,000 rooms and nearly half a million square feet of convention space. We learned that you could hypothetically use the 800-foot-long convention hall to store the entire Washington Monument, if you laid it on its side. And, we were able to answer the question: What can you do with a cavernous 18-story atrium? Aside from the obvious answer—enjoy the view—you can actually build a small Colonial-style town chockablock with shops and restaurants, including a sports bar with a 30-foot-high video wall. You can also run a small stream through the atrium and out into the gardens in front of the building. And you can build fountains inside that shoot 65 feet into the air and dance to the music between 7 and 10 p.m. each evening.

Whew! Thank goodness it was time for dinner. Jean and I were able to summon just enough energy to pick our way out of the atrium and into the gardens. Then we walked along Harborwalk and back into "town." We found Rosa Mexicano restaurant on Waterfront Street, and collapsed happily into chairs on the terrace overlooking the marina. We could see Snipp, which looked a little lost in its colossal slip, surrounded by a phalanx of sleek big-boy powerboats.

Several cold beers, a couple of tortilla soups and mole dishes later, we zombie-walked back to the boat and tumbled into our bunks. But not before Jean had taken just a few photos of National Harbor by night as seen from the bow of a small sailboat in slip B17. It was a beautiful sight . . . and very big . . . and maybe even a little strange.

"Maybe tomorrow everything will fall back into perspective."

"Sure. Good-night, Jean."

For more articles on Chesapeake Bay marinas, boating, sailing, fishing, culture, and history, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

HORTON AT LARGE: Scraping By

Admire it now, while you can, because Smith Island's graceful scrape boat is rarer than the skipjack and closer to the vanishing point

by Tom Horton

We were off the eastern side of Smith Island, in water so shallow I had to trim up the motor on my little flat-bottom skiff to stay clear of the grassy bottom. A dark, bruised sky hung over the westward marshes and a warm, pink sun rose behind us, lighting the island's soft crab fleet, their low hulls glowing white against the rich greens and golds of spartina grasses. These boats—sometimes called Jenkins Creekers or bar cats, but most commonly known as scrape boats—are as much Chesapeake classics as the more famous oyster skipjacks. And they're even less likely to still be around a decade from now.

In his classic 1976 Chesapeake portrait, Beautiful Swimmers, William Warner described the scrape boat as "a workboat unlike any other I had ever seen on the Bay." Seeming half as wide as it was long, he said, it looked like a "a miniature battleship." There's a reason for that, of course. It's a classic case of form following function; the boat evolved for one purpose, to ply the Bay's grassy shallows for shedding blue crabs.

Said to "float on a heavy dew," scrape boats run from 26 to 30 feet long and 9 to 10 feet wide. The hull is a shallow-V deadrise that quickly flattens toward the stern, enabling the boat to pull its twin scrapes—rectangular steel frames, each with a trailing mesh bag—in knee-deep waters. The broad beam might sound ungainly, but the hull tapers toward the stern—betraying its sailboat origins. And it has a graceful sheer, flowing from a bow height of a few feet to little more than a foot above the water amidships.

And you want a low freeboard when you spend the whole day hoisting aboard scrapes, which weigh 50 pounds apiece, not including the load of sea grass and crabs that come in too. Low sides or not, there's a higher than average inci-dence of back problems among scrape boat crabbers. They spend long days bending in precisely the position back doctors say puts undue pressure on the lower back as they sort through rolls of grasses to pluck out the peelers and softies. And that alone may be why crab potting is now the far more common way of catching soft crabs.

Some people think that's good, assuming that dragging a scrape across the Bay's beleaguered grass flats must be destructive. But the smooth bar of the scrape, unlike a toothed dredge, doesn't uproot grasses. In fact, where scraping is traditional, the grass beds seem relatively resilient. I've often thought if Maryland and Virginia had stuck with scraping as the major legal way to soft-crab, overfishing might not have become a problem. Pots can be deployed everywhere and by the thousands, whereas scraping is limited to grass beds and to ground covered at three miles per hour; and even the sturdiest waterman can only pull two of them by hand. But peeler pots seem here to stay, and other soft crabbers have taken to using a single, large scrape operated from larger workboats by hydraulic power.

The bottom line is that these lovely, superbly functional expressions of Chesapeake crabbing culture now number only in the dozens, if you count working, wooden models. There are some fiberglass scrape boat hulls in service, and a Carolina skiff or two has been adapted for the task. They are functional, but have little art to them.

It is probably a sign of how fast scrape boats are going that the Smithsonian Institution recently took the lines off Darlene, a scraper worked by Morris Marsh of Smith Island, for its archives. You can see photos of scrape boats, and learn more about the 140-year old history of scraping, from Paula Johnson's fine book, The Workboats of Smith Island. Mr. Marsh, still going strong in his late 60s, is the scraper who took Warner out nearly 40 years ago when he was researching Beautiful Swimmers.

Indeed, scraping seems to win over those who master it. Marsh's father-in-law, Ed Harrison, scraped for almost 70 years, nearly wearing through the cross-planked bottom of his boat—from the inside—with decades of walking the planks, tending his scrapes. And an islander who scrapes with Marsh today, David Laird, says he is 71—one year younger than Scotty Boy, the scrape boat he took over from his dad in 1958. "I wouldn't even know how to crab in another boat," Laird says.

Soft crabs may well be caught—or farmed—a century from now on the Chesapeake; but no one will devise a way to take them so intimately and beautifully from the shallowest marsh edges and tiniest crevices in the shore as the scrapers do.

For more articles on Chesapeake Bay tides, marinas, boating, sailing, fishing, culture, and history, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

The News from Newport News

It may look like nothing but big-port muscle and sinew, but don't let that throw you; there's charm aplenty, if you know where to look, in good ol' New Port Newce.

by Paul Clancy

As soon as you enter Hampton Roads, the city begins to reveal itself. It's sprawling, muscular and—from the water, at least—somewhat forbidding: a commercial fishing basin, a giant shipyard, an open-air coal pier, a fleet of reserve ships aging on the waterfront. Somewhere—ahh, there—between gray behemoths, are a few downtown office buildings, a narrow park and the barely visible top of a victory arch.

But don't be put off. Newport News does have accessible marinas, a few lovely spots for dropping anchor, inviting beaches, a vibrant fishing industry, a gorgeous performing arts center and one of the world's finest maritime museums. And it's all reachable by water, with a little extra effort—okay, maybe a lot.

There's history here, as deep as the water just off the shoreline, and it begins with a name. It may well be, as some contend, that Newport News Point—the point of land that marks the end of Hampton Roads and the beginning of the James River—got its name from the good news that Captain Christopher Newport, leader of the Jamestown expedition, had returned with supplies. But I prefer a more likely theory, that one William Newce, a knighted Irishman, arrived shortly after the 1607 settlement and established a seaport that came to be known as New Port Newce.

It was just off this point of land, two-and-a-half centuries later, that two ungainly ironclad warships, the U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Virginia (nee U.S.S. Merrimack) battled to a draw on a fog-shrouded morning in March 1862, marking the beginning of the end of wooden fighting ships. Every time I pass this way I think of that battle, and how so many naval ships, "ironclads" all, are now built just over there, on that near shore, practically within hailing distance; Also not far from here, perhaps the distance of a cannonball's flight, are the hoary remains of the Monitor itself, resting in a world-class museum.

I'm traveling by sailboat—my Tartan 30, Ode to Joy—from my mooring on the Lafayette River in Norfolk, hoping to take a closer look at what makes Newport News compelling, especially by water. Newport News, a linear city that's at least 20 miles long but only two to four miles wide for most of that length, parades slowly by as I pick up a gentle northerly breeze, put Middle Ground Light astern, slip past the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel and enter the James. To my dismay, there's no ideal place for a cruising sailor to tie up—not in the Small Boat Harbor that is home to a commercial fishing fleet (more on that later), not downtown, not along the beach, and certainly not along the industrial waterfront. I feel like I'll have to keep going to Williamsburg or Jamestown. But I won't give up yet; there is a way to see this town. I keep moving.

At the coal pier, the ship Energy Enterprise out of New Orleans, and a barge from Baltimore are poised under a gantry taking on black coal that is piled in tall mounds on land (regularly sprayed with water to keep down the soot). Not too inviting here. The city's dominant feature, stretching for miles along the waterfront, is the giant Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard. It was founded by railroad baron Collis Huntington more than a hundred years ago to service the ships that unloaded at his docks.

The Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding Co., as it was known then, began turning out military ships by the scores during the war years, becoming the largest individually owned yard in America, until Northrop Grumman bought it not long ago. At one of the piers, towering 20 stories above the water and looking about as big as a reclining Empire State Building, broods the newly commissioned aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, undergoing post-shakedown maintenance and repair.

Security is tight as a tick here. You don't even want to think about docking or losing headway. Nice doggy. Don't worry. I'm just passing. At 3:30 p.m., a siren wails. A shift change, I hope. Miles farther and there's still no place to stop, but that's about to change. Just before the James River Bridge I come to the city-owned Leeward Municipal Marina. I'm fond of Leeward. It was where I found my first boat, a sweet little swing-keel Spirit 23, which I bought there and sailed home. Tucked in next to the bridge, the marina is surrounded by a white cement breakwater. I had stopped here by car a few days earlier to see if I could go anywhere on foot. And to my delight, I could. Just up from the marina a stoplight allowed me to safely walk across the approach to the James River Bridge. And right there on the western side of the bridge was a sandy oasis, Huntington Park. On that day it was teeming with beachgoers: families with blankets, umbrellas and coolers, lifeguards and swimmers. Just beyond a refreshment stand I found a ramp, where half a dozen boats were being coaxed off trailers into the water. One could easily anchor out and dinghy in or tie up at the small pier that accommodates ramp users, even go for a swim at the beach.

There's a fishing pier at Huntington Park that rests on remains of an older James River Bridge, with the Crab Shack Seafood Restaurant—it's good, I hear—perched over the water. Beyond the beach is an elaborate children's park called Fort Fun, and then, a not-so-fun place, I imagine, the Virginia War Museum. But what I was looking for and found was a footbridge crossing a small creek. Aha again! If I wanted to get to the Mariners' Museum by bicycle from the waterfront entrance to Newport News, following the inviting River Road beside the James, I could. This city is opening up a little at a time.

Back in the present, I'm under the James River Bridge and passing by this lovely beach, then several miles of waterfront mansions, as well as the park that surrounds the Mariners' Museum. An hour later, after spotting the entrance markers to Deep Creek, I drop my sails and motor in. On the port side is Menchville, where several deadrise workboats are moored. Ahead is Deep Creek Landing Marina and the Warwick Yacht Club, both bristling with yachts. To starboard is James River Marina, my destination today, and a place I'm looking forward to revisiting.

Owner Marty Moliken, whom I met eight years ago when writing about the James, is there to help with my lines. For the past 60 years, workboats had tied up at an ancient city pier next to the marina. Finally, this year, the old pier was removed as the city improved the bulkheads and dockage across the creek. Now Moliken has gotten the ball rolling for 40 new slips and a raw bar at the end of the old pier. If the building-permit gods smile on him, he says, it could all be up and running by next summer.

At this point, Barb arrives in the land yacht and begins to unload our bikes. We'd thought of bringing them across by boat. It's possible to stow them on deck, but they're not the fold-up types and, frankly, we didn't want the hassle of loading and unloading them. What I was trying to test out was my theory that we could fairly 
easily get to the Mariners' Museum from James River Marina—because you just can't visit Newport News without going to that gem of a museum. We'll test my theory about biking there in the morning. Now we test the food.

James River Marina owns what has long been a popular local restaurant. Originally named Herman's Harbor House, it's now called Slightly Up the Creek. We get a table on the front porch overlooking the creek, and while a fan whirs and the sun sets, we indulge in some very good shrimp and crabcakes. And—we couldn't resist—some astonishing caramel bread pudding. The western sky is dominated by sail-shaped clouds, with sunset in their bellies.

With bread pudding in our bellies, Barb and I bed down aboard Ode to Joy, falling asleep to the murmurs of conversation and the occasional peal of laughter from the night owls in nearby slips. We awake at dawn, dawdle over cereal and fruit, then pedal off toward the museum.

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The Lowdown on Lines

Look at the wall of any marine-supply store, and you'll find a dizzying array of lines to choose from. Here's what you need to know to make the right choices for this critical boating gear.

Accepting amateur submissions for the 2010 Bay Photo Contest!

Chesapeake Bay Magazine is now accepting submissions for the 2010 Bay Photo Contest. Click here for contest rules, submission details, and past winners!

November Issue now online!

The November issue of Chesapeake Bay Magazine is now on newstands and online. Online, you'll find articles about Newport News, Virginia, nautical lines, and more! Go to ChesapeakeBoating.net and click Current Issue for a full table of contents and a peek inside.

October Cruise of the Month: Cocktail Creek

A great breeze carried them to Brooks Creek on the Little Choptank River, then made it the perfect
spot for a glass of wine and a mosquito-free night on the hook.

by Jane Meneely

The Bay glittered madly, as if sprinkled with a billion diamonds. The wave tops shimmered. Even the spray spilled across the deck like so many sparkling gemstones. It was as if the sun were in overdrive. And did I mention the breeze? Magnificent! Bearing southeast from Herring Bay on that fine summer afternoon, we had a steady reach across the Bay. All its myriad possibilities lay before us.

My friend Karen studied the chart thoughtfully. What are our options? she asked. I held the tiller of my little sloop Petrel and looked ahead. With the wind like this, we could drive all the way to Cambridge, I told her. But Karen shook her head. She wanted to go someplace new. With her index finger on the chart she traced the shoreline below the mouth of the Choptank River and paused at Trippe Bay. Here? she suggested. Too shallow, I said, and a lee shore at that. Her finger moved farther south to Hills Point. What's the Little Choptank like? she asked. I'd been to the Little Choptank lots of times, exploring its creeks and harbors—even running hard aground once in Hudson Creek. The river is full of hospitable gunkholes, with a few dining spots to boot. We have our choice, I told her. We can anchor out or we can run up Slaughter Creek and have dinner ashore. She nixed the dinner ashore option. I want to be away from people, she said. I'm on vacation. (Karen works as a real estate agent in downtown Philadelphia. I could appreciate her wanting to enjoy the peace and quiet of a night on the hook.) We had plenty of food on board, and a box of Black Box red wine. What more could a pair of old high school chums want? This was our first cruise together as empty nesters, and we had a lot of catching up to do.

We angled Petrel farther south and worked our way to the mouth of the Little Choptank. The river is framed by Hills Point Neck on the north and Taylors Island to the south. The three hummocks of James Island to the southeast offer a buffer to the wide fetch of the Bay rolling up from the south. Although the actual distance between James Island and Hills Point is a good three miles or more of open water, much of it is shallow. So we steered Petrel well to the middle of the river's wide opening in order to find deep water—and safely round the flashing green "1" mark to enter the river proper. Even then we had to stay clear of Ragged Island, at the other end of Hills Point Neck. Once clear of that, we could see the markers leading into Slaughter Creek, which forms the narrows for Taylors Island on the south side of the river. If we had been going there, we would have dropped almost due south from flashing green "5". Instead, we slid on past and headed upriver.

The wooded shoreline had put a damper on our breeze and turned it fluky, so we cranked the engine and headed directly for the river marks. But something caught our eye in the water ahead and to the left, outside of the channel—a huge turtle's head, maybe? Chessie? A floating cushion? It appeared to be fixed. We drew nearer still and swung close to see just what it was. (Petrel has a centerboard, so we can stray from most marked channels with relative impunity.) Holy cow! It was a submerged piling, not marked on the chart. Either that, or it was a snagged deadhead, but snagged in an upright position. Boats navigating mark to mark would miss it, but at high tide that piling would be beneath the surface, just waiting to bedevil any boat that happened by. How did it get there? Karen asked. It was too far offshore to have been part of a dock. More than likely it was a support post for a duckblind in the shoal off Ragged Island. The ice had probably carried the rest of the blind away long ago, and may have even snapped the top off this remaining post, making it virtually invisible to passing boaters—except at low tide.

We continued on our way, staying in the channel and keeping a sharp lookout. Soon we spotted the entrance to Brooks Creek, the first creek on the north shore of the Little Choptank. It looks inviting, but its broad mouth is deceptive; its only navigable water is limited to a narrow channel that snakes into the three-mile creek. At first glance, it would seem too narrow a channel to anchor. But there is a bump, said Karen, pointing to a small bulge in the deep water outlined on the chart.

We had listened to the weather, so we knew we were in for a pleasant night; the NOAA voice had said the wind would veer to the south but stay gentle. The creek doesn't afford much protection from the south, but gentle weather sounded just fine. So we chugged past the first marker, then, just before reaching the second, eased off the main drag into the little hole of deep water Karen had found. Down went the hook, and we were caught fast on the sticky bottom.

Two houses sat on the shore on one side of us; a scraggly thicket of trees sat on the other. The creek's mouth was off our stern and its head beyond our bow. What's more, the delicious breeze that had carried us across the Bay now kept us tight on the anchor and kept 
the mosquitoes tight on the shore.

Karen tapped our little Black Box, I found some crackers and a hunk of cheese, and we watched the sky run through a veritable rainbow of hues as the sun slowly settled in the western sky. A dazzling end to a dazzling day. That night, as predicted, 
the wind clocked around to the south and found its way through the forward hatch. Had it been stormy, we might have wanted more shelter.


As it was, we were high and dry and comfortable. We woke up refreshed and ready to sally forth to a new and exotic port. A breeze from the south? Perfect!


View Chesapeake tide tables here.

For more articles on Chesapeake boating, marinas, Bay weather, sailing, and more, visit Chesapeake Bay Magazine.

Feature article : Chesapeakeology 101

Instead of just giving us the whys and wherefores of Bay science, editor T.F. Sayles takes us on a boat-based "sciencey-stuff" field trip, to the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Md., and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the Rhode River.

For this and more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

October Issue Online!

The October Fall Boat Show issue is now on newstands and online. Check out the online articles about nature, boating, golf, and Brooks Creek. Or go to ChesapeakeBoating.net and click Current Issue.

2010 Bay Photo Contest

Chesapeake Bay Magazine is now accepting submissions for the 2010 Bay Photo Contest. Click here for contest rules, submission details, and past winners!

September Issue Online

Take a peek at the September 2009 issue of Chesapeake Bay Magazine. Click here for the full Table of Contents and 3 online articles about boating, marinas, and Bay cuisine. Or go to ChesapeakeBoating.net and click on Current Issue.

Check out the new Bay Weather section!

Check the Bay Weather page for current wind & weather conditions in the Upper and Lower Chesapeake Bay. Includes wind speed & direction on the Bay, cloud cover, temperature, and precipitation for a 7 day time-horizon.

Check ChesapeakeBoating.net often for updates and new features for Bay boaters!

Of Time & Tide

[03.04 issue]

When an unusually low tide revealed a treasure trove of empty bottles, the neighborhood kids saw cash on the barrelhead.

by Jane Meneely

Memory magnifies events. That said, let me tell you about the time Spa Creek dried to a mere trickle one summer day, when the tide sucked everything out of the creek bed but the docks.

Spa Creek normally wheedled its way past the Annapolis city dock, threaded itself through the Eastport bridge, and rubbed up against a shoreline of old wharves and cattails and massive maple and oak trees that leaned into their own reflections. There were plenty of docks and houses and street ends on the “town” side of the creek; the opposite shore was too far off the beaten track to be worthy of homesteading. A few sailboats lay at anchor in the deeper creek water; workboats clung to the street ends, sterns tied to heavy iron rings in the seawall, bows tied tentatively to an old tree limb or half-rotted piling that had been pounded into the muck.

We lived in a house on Market Street. I was five years old, a grubby little tomboy with scraped knees and hand-me-down dungarees. Photographs show me with an unruly clump of curly hair on top of my head—coiled tendrils reaching this way and that as if flying to the moon would be a safer bet than staying put. My little round belly, tender and yellow as a toad’s, pudges out from my T-shirt like a waterman’s gut.

In those days I rather liked the smell of tar and dogs and the mounds of seaweed, all gnarled with dead fish and driftwood, that bunched up on the lip of the water at low tide, and on this particular morning, the fetid marsh smell rose in hot whiffs from the creek basin and drew us kids down to the seawall to see what our noses already knew: that the creek bed lay as bare and naked as a dead muskrat. We stood there, my eight-year-old brother Dickie, his friends Peter and Vincent, and I, gaping at the broad expanse of muck that lay open to the sky. We stared past the relatively hard sand of the shoreline, which occasionally showed its wet toes on a normal low tide, past the sodden mass of seaweed that lay gasping and sweating without the protective skirt of the creek to hide in, out to where we could actually see the mooring anchor of a little sailboat that lay groaning on its side, a sea gull perched quizzically on the boat’s upended scupper.

As we watched, a group of older boys lurched their way through the treasury of the creek bottom like a ragged band of Neanderthals, pulling pieces of flotsam and jetsam out of the mud and dragging them back to shore. They found an anchor and a few barnacly things that they were enormously proud of, but the muck eventually proved too much for them, and their efforts deteriorated into a colossal running mud fight—fortunately, away from us and around the rim of the creek bed, out of sight.

That was our chance, our opening, our golden opportunity. Those big guys might have found an anchor, but they missed the good stuff. While they whooped and chased each other like savages, they completely ignored the gold mine the creek had laid bare: empty soda bottles. Scores of them. Everywhere. Old ones, new ones. Big ones, little ones. Pepsi. Nehi. Brand names we’d never even heard of—or, more likely, couldn’t read. Some were slimey with goo; others sparkled like diamonds in the hard summer sun. Clearly our ship had come in. These bottles were worth two cents apiece, hard cash, from any grocery store. “Peter, get your wagon!”

The wagon didn’t negotiate the creek bottom too well. Its narrow wheels sliced the mud like a plow. We ended up leaving it on shore. I stayed with it, chief guard and wagon packer. After all, Mom had laid down the law: I’d be whalloped into next week if I had so much as stuck a sneakered toe across the mean low water mark. Young as I was, the irony of such a restriction in this particular situation was not lost on me: Ma, there isn’t water to drown in! But her imposition remained; perhaps my mother thought such an errant tide would sweep back across the flats in a hungry wall of water, scarfing down stray kids and spitting them out like watermelon seeds. Or not—she let my brother go (of course, we had boys to spare).

When the older kids returned from their battle, slimed and choked with mud, they scoffed at our efforts. “Nobody’s gonna take those bottles,” they snorted. “They’ve been lying around for fifty years!” Which doubtless some of them had. “They’re gross and disgusting!” Which indeed most of them were. But blazing with the hope and courage of young enterprise, the boys sallied onward until they’d gotten every last bottle—that is, every bottle that could be had without sinking up to their knees in muck.

It took all of us hauling and pushing to get the wagon up the Market Street hill to a garden hose, where we set to work rinsing and scrubbing our catch of the day. Then we gathered all the empty bottles we could find in our own homes (a paltry haul by comparison) and turned our wagon toward Joe’s.

Joe Collison ran a little store on the corner of Conduit and Union streets. He sold meat and popsicles, and he always knew whether your mother would approve of a clandestine candy purchase or not. (“Not from me, no sir. Not at a quarter to six I’m not selling you a Hershey bar and spoil your supper. No sirree.”) Joe would have nothing to do with our bottles. “You didn’t get those bottles here at my store, you didn’t,” he said, surveying the lot. “I’ll take them there and that’s all.” Like some omniscient god he zeroed in on the bottles we had liberated from the cabinets at home.

We decided to gamble. It was all or nothing. If he didn’t want the whole wagonload, we’d take our stash elsewhere. So we started off for the Acme. This was no mean trek. The Acme stood adjacent to the town dock (Fawcett Boat Supplies today). To get there we had to roll up Market Street, cut through the funeral home parking lot (something we were perennially warned against by our parents, who vowed to thrash us if they ever caught us trespassing there, which threat we perennially ignored), slide down Green Street and across Compromise Street.

Acme would have nothing to do with our bottles either. The manager himself even came out and gave us the once over. “Where’d you get them bottles at?” We told him that we got them from our various basements and kitchens. He didn’t believe us. “I’ll take them,” he said pointing to the same bottles Joe had coveted. We looked at each other with the beginnings of panic. “We’ll try the IGA,” Peter said stoically. “Yeah, they’ll take them,” we echoed dutifully.

So the IGA it was. We had to cross by the gas station (where the flagpole is today) and again by the old fish market to the row of stores that faced the harbor. Then we had to wheel the wagon up the little inclined entryway that had the letters IGA inlaid in the stone. A friendly store clerk gave a laugh as we entered. “Get a load of this, will ya!” he called to the rest of his crew. “Now what do you expect to do with all that?” he asked.

“Turn it in for the deposits?” We faltered, a little abashed by now. We had run out of stores. The A&P, on the other side of the harbor, was too far even for eight-year-old boys to venture.

“You pick all this up out of the creek?”

How did he know? We went honest and told him the whole story, the gathering, the scrubbing, the rejections.

“They wouldn’t take these bottles over to the Acme?” the man asked incredulously. “Why this is the best lot of bottles I’ve seen come through here in all my days. You bet we’ll take ‘em here sure enough. Every last one of them. Count ‘em!” So we counted. I don’t remember exactly how many bottles there were, but I distinctly remember that my share of the haul was 32 cents—a veritable fortune to a five-year-old. You can bet Mr. IGA got every penny of it back, too.

The tide swelled the creek back to normal eventually. It may have taken days for the rhythm to return. Or it may have been the fluke of a single day, an odd oops in the cosmic way of things. I don’t recall that part of the story, only our wagonload of bottles and the remuneration it brought. As for the details, I scan through my memory banks and realize that it was all recorded by a five-year-old. And five-year-olds, I’ve discovered, tell colossal lies.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Jamestown’s Big Bang

[05.07 issue]

Jamestown’s 400th anniversary gives birth to a universe of activities across the Bay.

by Jody Argo Schroath

By the time 2007 takes its own place in the past, there will be perhaps two or three people in the Chesapeake area who have not been touched by a Jamestown 400th-anniversary event—they’ll be the ones wearing Pampers. And even then. . . .

There are so many special events marking the quadricentennial of the landing at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, that they spilled over backward into last year. The replica ship Godspeed, for example, made a tour of the East Coast before returning to Virginia to prepare for this year’s first landing re-enactment on April 26. Jamestown Live! allowed a million students across the country to watch an hour-long webcast on Jamestown’s legacy that featured questions from students to a panel that included Chickahominy Chief Stephen Adkins, Jamestown’s chief archaeologist William Kelso and former astronaut Dr. Kathryn Thornton. The Virginia tribes held a conference last October on 400 Years of Survival. And last month, radio host Tavis Smiley hosted a 2007 State of the Black Union event on the Black Imprint on America. Smiley asked a panel of 36 notable African-Americans to discuss the role that Blacks have played in the development of America, from the arrival of the first slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the present.

But don’t worry, there are plenty of special activities still on the 2007 event horizon, including the biggest and brashest one of them all. That would be America’s Anniversary Weekend, May 11 to 13, at Jamestown, a mega-celebration that will feature three days of special events and all manner of famous folks—James Earl Jones, Ricky Skaggs, Chaka Khan, Sandra Day O’Connor and, of course, the Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra (they grow their own instruments). To help you make sense of all the Jamestown 400 hoopla—which will include a visit May 3 and 4 by Queen Elizabeth II—we’ve ruthlessly marshaled these activities into several neat groups— Jamestown events, all-around-the-Bay-events and (our readers’ favorite) events with boats. Finally, you’ll find two related stories—the first, how our understanding of what happened at Jamestown has changed over the years as we have changed; the second, information on cruising the Jamestown area.


Jamestown Events
When we talk about Jamestown, of course, we are talking about not one Jamestown, but two. For Jamestown newbies, here’s how we went from zero to two: Since Jamestown had all but disappeared as a town by the middle of the 18th century, 1907’s 300th-birthday celebration was held in Norfolk instead. But organizers of the 1957 event moved the 350th birthday party back to Jamestown—to a facility constructed for the purpose, called Jamestown Festival Park and located adjacent to the original site. Jamestown Festival Park is now named Jamestown Settlement, while the site of the 1607 landing, early forts and town is called Historic Jamestowne. Hence two Jamestowns and three sites for the 400th Anniversary Weekend (the third is Anniversary Park, across Route 31 from the settlement, and where many of the weekend’s concerts will be held).

Jamestown Settlement, under the operation of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation of the State of Virginia, includes a re-created Indian village, a reproduction Jamestown fort, 70,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor exhibition space—where you can walk down a 17th-century English main street—and reproductions of the ships that brought the first settlers: Susan Constant, Godspeed andDiscovery. Special 400th-anniversary programming at the Settlement begins April 27 with the opening of “The World of 1607,” an ambitious cycle of four exhibits put together by 28 scholars using ma-terials borrowed from all over the world with the aim of putting the settlement of Jamestown in a global context. The idea is to make us nonscholars recognize that events do not occur in a vacuum, but rather as a part of larger forces, including political, social and artistic. Items that will be part of the exhibit include a 15th-century copy of the Magna Carta, a 1607 jade wine cup of the Emperor Jahangir of India and a 17th-century African carved-ivory saltcellar. Don’t you feel smarter already?

A lot of the other special programming at Jamestown Settlement will take place only during the Anniversary Weekend. This will include artillery demonstrations, honor guards, story- telling, pageantry and plays. There will be demonstrations by artisans and craftspeople, and more than enough to keep several thousand children as happy as clams for hours at a time. The replica ships will also be open for tours, and costumed interpreters will act as guides in all areas of the park.

The archaeological site, known as Historic Jamestowne, is a partnership between the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). It’s on nearby Jamestown Island, connected to the mainland by the Colonial Parkway and a short bridge across Sandy Bay. In 1994, the APVA hired archaeologist William Kelso to excavate the site in hopes of finding something exciting for the 2007 anniversary. Although earlier excavations had failed to find evidence of the original James Fort, Kelso found it on his first dig—that April. The site of the fort was long believed to have been flooded two centuries ago by the James River. In fact, nearly all the fort’s original footprint is on dry land, with only one corner under water. In the years following that discovery, Kelso and his workers have uncovered more than 700,000 artifacts, including a particularly intriguing skeleton found just outside the original walls buried with a ceremonial captain’s staff. Kelso believes this may be the remains of Bartholomew Gosnold, captain of theGodspeed and one of the colony’s key leaders. [See sidebar, page 57.]

Historic Jamestowne has recently added a sleek, multi-windowed Archaearium, which uses clever display techniques to show off a selection of the artifacts within view of where they were unearthed. Also at Historic Jamestowne, visitors can visit the glassblowers house, the remains of a late-17th-century church, archaeological finds such as the outlines of Jamestown’s last statehouse (1663), an early burial ground, and statues of John Smith and Pocahantas.

Special Anniversary Weekend events at Historic Jamestowne will include commemorations of past Jamestown celebrations, a series of programs called 104 Men and Boys, lectures and the official send-off of the replica shallop that will spend the rest of the summer re-enacting Captain John Smith’s 1608 voyages of discovery on the Chesapeake [see “The Captain’s Trail,” October, November 2006]. Smith had set off from Jamestown not long after the settlers arrived to explore the Bay in search of gold and the long-sought Northwest Passage to Asia and to make contact with the Native American tribes living along its shores. During two major voyages of discovery, Smith and his crew sailed or rowed up nearly every tributary on the Bay and Smith himself created its first detailed map. The re-enactment voyage that leaves Jamestown May 12 will largely retrace Smith’s trips, making about two dozen stops at cities and towns along the way.

Musical events will play a big part in the Anniversary Weekend schedule—including a 1,607-member chorale and 400-piece orchestra, famous performers such as Bruce Hornsby, Chaka Khan and Ricky Skaggs, and award-winning musical groups from dozens of schools and independent organizations all over the country (including that all-gourd orchestra). In addition, there will be re-enactments, plays, fireworks, pageantry, demonstrations and dramatic readings . . . in short, just about everything you can imagine. No more than 30,000 people will be admitted on any one of the three days, so buying a ticket in advance is essential. For a detailed schedule of events, visitwww.jamestown2007.org. You’ll find ticket information there, too, and in the sidebar on this page.


All Over the Bay Events
While the Anniversary Weekend will produce the biggest bang for the history books, you can be sure that there will be a Jamestown 400 boomlet near you. It may be a Signature Event—the term used by Jamestown 2007 organizers for a dozen or so major events around the region, many of which adopt the anniversary’s official theme: A convergence of three cultures. Among these are the American Indian Intertribal Festival in Hampton, Va., on July 21 and 22 and the African-American Culture and Commerce Expo on August 24 and 25 in Hampton Roads. Also on the schedule is the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., June 27 to July 8, which will feature performers, storytellers and crafts from native Virginia, southeastern England and West Africa. September 16 to 19 will see the concluding Forum on the Future of Democracy in Williamsburg. (You’ll find more information on all these events at thewww.jamestown2007.org site.)

Elsewhere, a special exhibit in Richmond is especially worthy of note. “Rule Britannia! Art, Royalty and Power in the Age of Jamestown,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, runs from April 28 through August 12 (www.vmfa.state.va.us/rule.html). This is an exhibition of 17th-century royal portraits and maritime paintings—some of them massive—that include special loans from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II, museums such as the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private British collections. Some of these works have rarely been seen by the public.

In Norfolk, the Virginia Living Museum will offer two special and very different programs as its contribution to the Jamestown festivities. “Survivor: Jamestown Maze,” which runs through November 25, challenges children and adults to wind their way through a maze, making decisions along the way in order to survive in this new world. Also at the Living Museum, backyard horticulturalists will delight in a new permanent garden that highlight’s Virginia’s botanical history from 1607 to the present.

Two more Norfolk events are worthy of note. Sail Virginia, June 7 to 12, will feature military parades and ceremonies, historical re-enactments, maritime and cultural activities with tall ships off Ocean View and Norfolk Naval Base, and Harborfest weekend, with plays and special exhibits. (www.sailvirginia2007.com) Norfolk will also be the location for Working Waterways and Waterfronts—A National Symposium on Water Access, May 9 to 11, at the Sheraton Marriott Norfolk. (www.wateraccess2007.com).

The Kimball Theatre in Williamsburg (www.vptheatre.com) is currently showcasing a historical play, Smith, Being the Life and Death of Cap’n John by Ivor Nel Hume. This runs April 5 to December 31.

We could go on, but the list of Jamestown-related events at locations throughout the Chesapeake would stretch into next month’s magazine, so we recommend that you checkwww.jamestown2007.org/calendar.cfm. You can search by date and area.


Events with Boats
Happily for all of us boaters on the Bay, a great many of the 400th-anniversary events will be taking place in and around the water. Here, too, it’s enough information to sink a ship, so we are only going to hit the high spots. But we’ll give you some websites where you can find out more. The water-centered events fall pretty much into two categories: re-enactment events that feature one or all of the three replica ships, Godspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery, and re-enactment events centered on the 1608 discovery voyages of Captain John Smith and his crew. To make things even more interesting, the Bay has produced not one, but three replicas of Smith’s 30-foot open boat, called a shallop, that was carried aboard ship from England and then reassembled in the New World. Each of the replica shallops has its own itinerary—though occasionally, like on this first event, they will all be together.

By way of Jamestown re-enactments, this is the Big Bang. On Thursday, April 26, all three ships and all three shallops will be at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach for a dramatic redo of the Jamestown settlers’ first landfall in America at Cape Henry. The first-landing program will start at 9 a.m. Can’t make it that early? Don’t worry, the second first-landing program will start at 3 p.m. There will be an admission charge at the park for the event.

The replica ships will leave Virginia Beach on April 28, as the Godspeed takes the lead in the Signature Event called Journey up the James. The Godspeed will stop at three other ports before arriving at Jamestown on May 11 for the start of the Anniversary Weekend. [For all the ports of call of Godspeed’s Journey up the James as well as its journey on the Bay this summer and fall, see sidebar, page 57.] Recreational boaters are invited to join the flotilla from Virginia Beach to Hampton on April 28 in what Hampton calls the Great American Dock Party. The date also coincides with the city’s International Children’s Festival. (For infor-mation on participating marinas, call 800-487-8778.)

Although all three shallops will be at Virginia Beach on April 26 for the First Landing event, the “official” shallop—the one built in Chestertown by Sultana Projects—will get its formal send-off at 10 a.m. on May 12 from Historic Jamestowne for the start of its re-enactment of Smith’s voyages of discovery. (You’ll need an Anniversary Weekend ticket to see the send-off.) The first of 20 official stops in the re-enactment voyage will be at Onancock on May 19 and 20, coinciding with that town’s combined celebration of Captain Smith and the 200th birthday of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At all of the official stops, visitors will be invited to meet the crew and view the traveling exhibits that go along with it [see sidebar, page 56].

Special events are planned to coincide with official stops of both the shallop on its re-enactment voyage and the Godspeed as it visits ports throughout the Bay following the Anniversary Weekend, so check the schedule in the sidebar and then look for informa-tion near your home port or favorite cruising grounds.

Finally, this summer’s Captain John Smith 400 voyage will inaugurate the nation’s first all-water historic trail, the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Water Trail, which was approved by Congress in December 2006 and which is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. At three points in the Sultana shallop’s trip, NOAA will activate its first three “smart buoys” that will give information about the historic and ecological significance of the particular location, as well as live readings of weather and water conditions and of water quality. The first buoy will be located 400 yards offshore due south of the Jamestown monument and will be dedicated during Anniversary Weekend. The second will be a mile or so northwest of the Point Lookout Light near the mouth of the Potomac River. The third will be activated when the shallop approaches Baltimore and will sit about a mile east-south-east of Seven Foot Knoll light. Boaters (and everyone else) will be able to dial these buoys by calling the toll free number 877-BUOYBAY. You’ll be able to access the buoys over the internet at www.buoybay.org.

Okay, that’s it for us. Now it’s up to you. Take a look, learn more about America’s beginnings, and then get on board and go see it for yourself!

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net