Episode 14
Copyright © John Page Williams Jr. All rights reserved.
This is John Page Williams with another set of readings from Chesapeake Almanac. This one is the general "Introduction to Summer."
[I have to note at this point that the the stories--the sketches--in Chesapeake Almanac come from a column I wrote for Chesapeake Bay Magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the book is an edited collection of them. Some of the friends referred to in here have passed on to sail and fish on other bays.]
When summer comes, Dr. Jonathan Sutton relaxes. He is a busy Annapolis pediatrician, but at this time of year he spends a lot of time on his big sloop Wahoo, and the Bay soaks up the tensions of his tight schedule. Some years, he and his wife Mary lead the Sailing Club of the Chesapeake on a cruise down to the East River on Mobjack Bay in Mathews County, where he spent his summers growing up. For short cruises, he likes to head for the Wye River, with its rolling pastoral shoreline. He always trolls the line behind, so as to have a fresh blue fish for dinner. (One year he caught a blue a bit too large for dinner—14 pounds—but it won the annual contest sponsored by Chesapeake Bay Magazine for sailboat-caught bluefish.)
John Sutton is a summertime Everyman. He's a good example of someone who loves the Chesapeake and spends a lot of time on it, especially in this season of the year. But we could find thousands of other people like him for whom the Bay is summer playground and soother of spirits. For most of us, this is the high season. Whatever we do, whether fishing or crabbing or cruising or all of the above, this is our favorite time on the water.
In any season, what we choose to do on the Bay is a strong reflection of what is happening in the Bay. In summer, the air is warm, if not downright hot. Rainfall is often sparse. The weather is generally stable, with morning calms and afternoon southerly breezes, punctuated by occasional and generally brief thunderstorms, which, as any Chesapeake skipper knows, can sometimes be violent. But the overall pattern is one of less wind than in spring and fall.
The summer weather pattern has a number of effects. The high water temperature generally raises the activity level of cold-blooded animals like fish and crabs, whose body temperatures are dependent on it. These animals have optimum activity ranges, and summer water temperatures sometimes get too high for them, especially in the shallows and in the shallow parts of deeper water. At those times, they seek cooler areas if they can find them.
Because rainfall is less and high air temperatures increase evaporation, salinity begins to rise. Fresh water coming down the rivers floats over the salt water coming in on the tides, as it always does; but because the river flow is diminished, there is less turbulence and mixing between the layers than in spring. Thus, the bottom water may be half again as salty as the surface water, and its greater density reinforces the effect of separation. Under these conditions there will be little exchange between the two layers, unless disrupted by a strong storm. Hence the main Bay and the lower tributaries become stratified, with cool, salty water at the bottom and warm, fresher water above.
Remember that the deep layer of salty water tends to move up the Bay and into the rivers, while the net movement of fresher surface water is down the Bay and out into the Atlantic. This phenomenon works all year, but its effects are perhaps most easily observed in summer, when many of the Bay's animals use the two currents as up and down escalators.
Perhaps the best example of this use is by blue crabs. All the Bay's crabs are spawned at high salinities near the Bay's mouth. As larvae, they are swept out into the Atlantic onto the continental shelf, returning in a short time to be swept up the Bay. As they go, they metamorphose from larvae to tiny but recognizable blue crabs. The currents and the crabs' increasingly strong swimming ability carry them up the rivers into coves, creeks, and marshes where we see them and wish them speedy growth to catchable size. Once on their summer grounds, the young crabs find plenty to eat, and warm water temperature keeps their activity level high, so they grow quickly. Thus we find plenty of their sloughs (that would be cast-off shells) when we walk shores at low tide.
Spot, the favorite panfish of the lower Bay, spawn on the continental shelf, and juvenile spot, too, are swept into and up the Bay. They, in fact, travel farther up than their adult kin, so it is not unusual to catch them in minnow seines north of Baltimore in May, even though they're only an inch long. Food for them is abundant in summer, so they grow fast, reaching two to three inches in July and four to five inches by September.
Spot belong to a large family of fish, the Scianidae, that also include croakers (also known as hardheads), sea trout, and red and black drum. All members of the family follow the same life cycle pattern to some extent. In addition to spot, it's common to find small trout and croakers spread all over the system. Besides the Scianidae, bluefish and flounder also used the Bay as juveniles, especially later in the summer.
As if these well-known species weren't enough, the summertime Bay is also full of forage fish: anchovies, silversides, and menhaden. These are the most numerous fish in the system. Only menhaden are fished commercially—for industrial oil, animal feeds, and crab bait. About 500 million pounds of them are caught each year. Probably just as many of them are eaten by fish, birds, and other creatures. Yet enough menhaden are leftover to make more menhaden for the following year, so their total weight must be something over a billion pounds, at an average of maybe three fish to the pound. Those numbers are the roughest sorts of estimates, but they give a ballpark idea of the fishes' abundance. We do note, however, that in recent years the stock appears to have been lower than that. Recent research suggests that there are even more anchovies than menhaden in the Bay.
All three forage species feed on plankton, the only food base abundant enough to sustain such huge fish populations. The menhaden, which may be anywhere from one to ten inches in length in the Bay, filter food from the water as they swim. Anchovies and silversides, which grow to four inches, are small enough to prey on large members of the plankton community, like copepods.
As with bluefish, flounder, and the Scianidae, most menhaden winter on the continental shelf, coming into the Bay to feed in the summer. Menhaden shoals are familiar sights on the surface on slick, calm summer days. Anchovies and silversides winter in deep holes in the rivers in the Bay, like the 70-foot trench along the Kent Island shore near the Bay Bridge or the 140-foot trench just off Smith Point Light. In summer, however, they're everywhere. The little fish make patterns like raindrops on the surface.
With young spot, young trout, young croakers, anchovies, menhaden, and silversides, the Chesapeake is full of small fish in the summer. Down the Bay, there are even more that we do not normally think of as Chesapeake fish. There are also a lot of small shellfish. Thus our waters are also full of predators. Bluefish, like John Sutton's big one, grow fat. They seem to be especially partial to menhaden and spot. Young fish eat anything moving that they can get their mouths around, especially anchovies. But even the young blues have their predators, for example, big gray trout. There are other well-known predators too, like rockfish, and, in recent years Spanish mackerel, plus others of which we are generally less aware (like cownose rays, needlefish, houndfish, and sea turtles). Finally, upriver predators are active now too, especially the familiar largemouth bass and channel catfish and blue catfish. Here, also, there are less well-known but interesting fish eaters, like garfish up in freshwater, and of course, also snakeheads.
Great blue herons and ospreys catch their share. We're fortunate to have so many of each species on the Bay each summer. Two of the season's real pleasures are watching a heron stalk the edge of a marsh, spearing small spot and silversides as it goes, and seeing an osprey hover, then dive on a school of menhaden.
The Chesapeake's gulls are much in evidence during summer, but many of them are immature birds. Early in the summer, a large number of the adults are preoccupied with laying eggs and rearing young on the Chesapeake's most remote islands and along the barrier islands across the Eastern Shore on the Atlantic Coast.
We must count in other fishermen, as well, like the river otters that forage mostly at night. The most obvious ones, of course, are ourselves, whether we be cruising sailors trolling a line for dinner, or hard-core anglers jigging trout or bottom fishing for spot.
Most of us tend to focus on the larger creatures of the Bay community, but there is a vast array of smaller creatures as well. While ospreys, herons, and gulls draw the greatest portion of our attention, the male red-winged blackbird does his best to claim a share. In the water, several fascinating animals escape our notice unless we look for them. There is, however, at least one animal of summer that we would just as soon overlook, if we could.
Finally, with all of this life in the Bay, there must be fish and shellfish dying, and thus scraps for scavengers to clean up. Blue crabs stay busy at this task, as do a host of mud crabs, sea worms, barnacles, anemones, and other small creatures. They in turn furnish more food for fish and blue crabs, making the system ever richer and more diverse.
As summer unfolds, inevitably signs of seasonal change begin to herald the fall, and it's always a good game to try to find the first of them, like a leaf or two on a black gum tree turning red at the end of July. One of the most intriguing is the movement of monarch butterflies through the Bay region in August. At the same time, the salt marshes and the upriver brackish and fresh marshes reach their peak in an explosion of green growth and, especially in the fresh waters, showy wildflowers.
All of this activity under and around the water invites us to join in. This is the high season. Enjoy it.
Subscribe to this podcast at https://chesapeake-almanac.captivate.fm/listen
For more on topics touched upon in this episode, see
- June's For Soft Crabbers, Summer Is a Busy Season for details of the sloughing process;
- for more on predators of which we are generally less aware, see June's Cownose Rays Are Really Graceful;
- find more on great blue herons on June's The Stalkers: Great Blue Herons and Their Kin.
For more happenings around the Bay in June see our other Chesapeake Almanac podcasts and read our blog post "Worms in Love in June."
