Nowhere to Go but Upscale
It was a perfect spring day—presidential blue sky, congenial 10-knot breeze straight out of the heart of Dixie, temperature comfortably in the porch-rocker 70s. In fact, it had all of the ingredients you would throw into your January daydreams to produce the ideal first cruise of the year. Of course, it had taken its sweet time getting that way. Dense fog had kept us—my cruising buddy Hal, ship’s dog Skippy and me—cooling our heels since early morning, first at the mouth of the Yeocomico and then at the mouth of the Potomac, waiting for visibility to improve before poking our nose out into the Bay. But our patience had been rewarded at last, and here we were in the middle of the Chesapeake—with Point Lookout aft and Smith Island fore—on our way to Crisfield for the very first time.
Now, among Chesapeake Bay boaters, having never been to Crisfield is like a French person never having been to Paris. No, that’s not right. Annapolis has got to be Paris for a Chesapeake boater, so that would make Crisfield more like Marseille. Crisfield, like Marseille, was built on maritime trade and it is on the southern end—of Maryland, in this case, instead of France. Okay, and it’s not on the Mediterranean, either. Look, forget I brought it up.
Crisfield, which is known everywhere on the Bay as “the town that used to be known as the Seafood Capital of the World,” was built on the triumvirate of oysters, terrapins and crabs. Only crabs, that Julius Caesar of seafood, have survived in any useful numbers. But Crisfield, too, has survived, though it has long since been demoted from seafood capital to quaint former seafood capital. But that in no way has diminished its appeal to boaters on the Bay. In fact, quaint,