The Chesapeake Bay Is Ailing, and This Time It's Serious

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. I was keenly anticipating returning to my home waters of Chesapeake Bay last week after a month crossing the Atlantic and cruising the Adriatic. The water in both places was clear as Russian vodka but not too productive. No crabs, no oysters and few fish, at least not that I could catch.

The bay, by contrast, may be murky but it's a veritable font of life, the natal grounds for a host of tasty marine and river species. When Capt. John Smith arrived here in the 1600s, he wrote that you could just about walk across the rivers on the backs of fish.

So imagine my disappointment the first day back when I called an old friend to suggest a little celebratory crab feast. I was licking my lips. "We could go," he said, "but you should know in advance they're $80 a dozen. Crabs are scarce this year."

Eighty bucks a dozen in late June? That doesn't sound like the Chesapeake I know. Oh, well, there's always rockfish, the delectable, snow-white Maryland state fish. I called Kevin Kenno, dean of Bay Bridge anglers, and proposed a foray out to the pilings off Sandy Point to jig for our dinner. We checked the tides, arranged a time and hit it perfectly on a fast-running flood. We fished hard for four hours in ideal conditions but never got a tap.

Kenno took time to retell a shocking experience from last year, when he caught a lean, 30-inch rock and brought it home to clean. He opened the stomach to see what it had been eating and found, to his horror, a 12-inch rockfish inside. "They're so hungry they're eating their own," he said.

All of which adds up to a less-than-cheery picture, which only got worse when someone pointed to the June issue of National Geographic magazine, in which Tom Horton, longtime journalistic conscience of the Chesapeake, writes darkly about the state of his beloved estuary.

"The bay scene is changing," he writes, "and there's an air of finality to it now." Adds Horton, "The bay today has become the ecological equivalent of a morbidly obese person, force-fed nitrogen and phosphorus."

Ouch.

Is it really that bad? Anyone who lives in the Washington-Baltimore area has been reading dire things about the bay for decades, yet we seem to soldier on. We've watched beds of bay grasses die off and the oyster catch drop in a decade from 1 million bushels a year to 26,500. We've seen once-vast beds of soft clams all but disappear. The big rockfish we could catch all summer 15 years ago are gone. We saw crabs grow scarce and watched menhaden, the great forage fish at the bottom of the food chain, netted by the millions of pounds by Virginia factory boats, and boiled down for cat food and oil. Many believe rockfish are eating their own because they can't find any menhaden.

But aren't marine species by nature volatile? Could this be just another cycle? After decades of general decline I no longer think so, and when no less an authority than Horton, who has covered the bay and its woes expertly and thoroughly for over 30 years, writes as grimly as he does, I'm clearly not alone.

The dark drumbeat actually started two years ago when Howard Ernst, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, concluded three years of research by writing a worrisome book called "Chesapeake Bay Blues," in which he made the case that almost nothing in the bay is getting better and all kinds of things are getting progressively worse.

Meantime, he maintained, public agencies and private organizations in position to change things do little but trumpet nonexistent or incremental improvements while wasting time and money on reports and studies to back their claims.