Eels, Ducks, and Clams

Bay fishermen trapped eels in eelpots baited with crabs, clams, horseshoe crabs, and similar bait, while in earlier years children also caught eels with fishing worms on a string and kept them as salted eels. Until a few decades earlier, Chesapeake watermen mainly caught eels for trotline bait for crabs rather than for people, but in the mid-1960s eels became an important food export, with watermen sometimes catching up to 1,000 pounds and shipping them live by air to Europe or Japan. In Shady Side, ducking was more for sport than subsistence; Maryland's first duck hunting club was founded in 1819, and by the 1870s hunters were shooting almost 15,000 canvasbacks a day on the Bay. In the 19th and early 20th century, the Lerch family operated a duck hunting facility in Shady Side, and when the sport was popular duck blinds stood every 500 yards just offshore from Shady Side to Deale. J.H. Perrine of Barnagat, New Jersey, built a sneakbox in the early 1900s for duck hunting in the Chesapeake and Barnegat Bays, and hunters, especially on the Eastern Shore and the Susquehanna Flats, used sneakboxes from 1819 until Maryland outlawed them in 1936, while Anne Arundel County had already banned them in 1854, the first county to do so for shooting wildfowl. Hunters draped sinkboxes and sneakboxes with muslin or canvas and camouflaged them with as many as 300 duck decoys, some of cast iron, then waited hidden in the boat to shoot ducks after they landed beside the decoys. Bay residents also harvested clams with buckets and shovels on a small scale, but beginning in the 1960s the hydraulic clam harvester enabled larger-scale work. Watermen retrofitted deadrise workboats such as the Edna Florence for clamming by removing aft cabins to install machinery, and although the hydraulic conveyor was highly efficient and helped clamming reach a peak in 1965, catches soon declined from over-harvesting. Hydraulic clamming could also damage oyster beds, leading to major controversy between oystermen and clammers over when clammers could work.

Shady Side, Maryland · United States