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"Don't get on the boat," warned the old man on the wharf. "There's sharks in the water."
He was joking.
But plenty of sinister agents do lurk in the cloudy depths of the Chesapeake Bay.
Jenny Engle and her League of Women Voters friends traveled to Baltimore's Inner Harbor earlier last month to learn about them. The Lancaster group marched right past the wisecracking stranger and clambered onto the deck of the Snowgoose.
Eric Hartge and John Tapscott welcomed their vistors aboard the white, 25-year-old workboat and cast off on a three-hour tour of the Patapsco River.
The two field educators do this all the time for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's floating classroom project.
But time is not on the bay's side.
Decades of government mandates have yet to free the watershed of sediment, toxins and excess nutrients.
Anyone who leans over the sideboards of the Snowgoose and looks into the water witnesses the problem head-on.
Early on a leaden Saturday morning, Engle and her party could see only the olive-gray skin of the Patapsco, and this in an estuary once transparent 20 feet down.
Yet, Hartge and Tapscott balance the picture of a diminished bay with images of resilience.
Crabs still scuttle throughout the bay, they say. Striped bass still hunt for prey. "Everyone comes here and says 'Eeewww, the Patapsco,' " Tapscott said. "We always like to show them that oysters do live here."
Blue crabs foreverThis is the kind of dialogue the nonpartisan League of Women Voters specializes in educating voters and public officials about, according to Engle, who has long studied conservation issues.
"I've been wanting to get enough people to come on this trip for several years," she said.
Last month, she did.
Fourteen people turned out for the bay journey, including several relatives of members.
All sailors took a minute before the voyage to explain why they signed up.
"For most of my life," Nancy Warshawsky said, "I've seen signs that say 'Save the Bay.' " Now, she's heeding the call.
"I literally live upstream" from the bay, along the Conestoga River, Judy Stevens said.
Gary Leinberger, the husband of league President Susan Leinberger, said he thought it "kind of a sad thing we made this into an open sewer."
"We want to learn more," Engle summed up, but that's not all. "We want to be able to eat crabs forever."
Hartge took the environmental story from the top.
The sprawling, silty bay was formed by runoff from ancient glaciers, he told the group as the Snowgoose puttered downriver through a light chop.
Four centuries ago, he added, when English explorer "John Smith and Pocahontas were running around," Smith reported that he could jab his sword into the water anywhere and impale a fish.
Now, in summer, 40 percent of the bay's mainstem literally suffocates.
Lawn and farm fertilizer from Lancaster and other communities course downstream, polluting the bay with nitrogen and phosphorus.
Up and down the Susquehanna and other bay tributaries, raw sewage flows freely whenever hard rain overwhelms creaky treatment plants.
As a result, algae grow wildly. The vast blooms block sunlight and then die and rot, sucking air from the water.
"There's not enough oxygen in the bay for animals to survive," Hartge said. The deeper you go, the more desolate the waterscape gets.
So-called dead zones are spreading worldwide. But the condition is especially dangerous in the bay because it's so shallow, just 6 feet deep or less across 80 percent of its area.
Ironically, the problem is largely invisible.
Oxygen depletion sparks several fish kills a year in Baltimore Harbor, according to Hartge. But once the fish carcasses are cleaned up, people assume everything's OK again.
Hartge, who was raised fishing, crabbing and sailing out of Annapolis, Md., said he's watched the environment degrade subtly in his 29 years.
"When I was a kid, I remember always having a hassle sailing because there was seagrass in the water," he said. Now, in many places, the bottom is barren.
Civilization, meanwhile, continues to shoulder in around the bay. At ground zero lies the historic, heavily industrialized Patapsco.
Hulking freighters line the river shores, their hulls jutting clifflike from the water.
The skyline is tattooed with smokestacks, cranes and glassy office towers.
On the Saturday that the Lancaster group visited, pleasure craft crisscrossed the river along with the Pride of Baltimore II, a replica 1812 schooner Hartge once helped sail across the Atlantic.
As Tapscott steered the Snowgoose toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge, orange laserlike rays beamed across his GPS, showing the Route 895 tunnel far below.
Remarkably, all these human creations have not banished wildlife.
To prove it, Tapscott cut the engine near the ruins of Fort Carroll, an 1800s Army outpost built on an artificial island in midriver; Hartge commenced fishing.
Nine conservation voters lined up on the port side of the boat to haul up an oyster dredge.
"We are stronger than we look!" Jennifer Mann exclaimed as the cage surfaced with a brackish clump of oysters inside.
Using the engine cowl in the center of the vessel as a dissection table, Hartge pried open the bivalve with a short-bladed oyster knife.
Inside was a glob of gray jelly with a small black dot that marked the heart.
Oysters ingest water, strain nutrients from the plankton and then spit the water back out.
"These are wonderful filters for the bay," Hartge said, talking above the throbbing diesel noise. One medium-sized oyster can go through 50 gallons a day.
And, in the otherwise featureless underwater world, oyster reefs provide critical habitat for worms, birds and crustaceans.
University lab-bred specimens have been introduced at Fort Carroll and other spots. Oyster numbers have risen slightly since bottoming out in the 1990s.
Still, Hartge and Tapscott say, bay populations hover at just 3 percent of their 19th-century levels.
Dredging and degraded water quality helped do them in over the years, as did a couple of parasitic diseases, dermo and MSX.
Chatting about the ChesapeakeThe iconic blue crab fishery, meanwhile, was declared a federal disaster last year, after populations declined by up to 70 percent since the mid-1990s.
New regulations have outlawed crabbing in winter, a season when the hermaphroditic beasts are likely to be pregnant.
Hartge perched on the transom and fished around some more, this time with a net that came back up holding a crab, a striped bass and a tiny bay anchovy with a translucent body and huge eyes.
What do crabs eat?
"Anything and everything," Tapscott said, carefully clutching the captured specimen upside down, "including other crabs."
Despite its reduced resources, Tapscott said, the incredibly productive bay still furnishes 90 percent of the world's soft-shell crabs.
And 80 percent of East Coast striped bass, which are also called rockfish, are born in the Chesapeake.
The striped bass is both a bay success story and a cautionary tale.
Overharvesting in the 1970s and 1980s led to a fishing ban, which allowed the population to rebound.
But striped bass prey, such as menhaden and crabs, were not so carefully managed.
As a result, Tapscott explained to the group, "there's a lot of rockfish but they don't have enough food." That's why many of the fish are sick with lesions.
Striped bass can grow to a length of 5 feet and weigh 100 pounds, Tapscott added as the Snowgoose captive flopped to the deck in an apparent escape attempt.
Tapscott scooped it back up and returned it, dripping, to a plastic tank. He invited his charges to hold the fish, which had a spiny dorsal fin and green and silver scales.
"Just be careful how you pick it up," he said, "because they can stab you in the hands."
In short order, Hartge cranked the 46-foot Snowgoose around and steamed for home port. Spindrift flew off the bows. Tapscott returned his feisty rockfish to the water.
A long education season stretched ahead.
The CBF team would be heading out soon again, probably with one of the school groups that are the Snowgoose's bread and butter.
Programs can be tailored to everyone from fourth-graders to college students to adults, Tapscott said.
"Some days you're talking about SpongeBob, some days you're talking about the federal government."
Every day they're chatting about the Chesapeake — and reflecting on the toughest question they know.
"How do we get people to change to help the Chesapeake Bay?" Tapscott asked rhetorically. "That's hard."
Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.
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