Reef Ball Foundation Photos and Project Description Database

Chesapeake notebook: Group wants livereef project to flourish By John Page Williams, For The Capital If life hands you lemons, make lemonade." Anglers and charterboat captains in the middle Bay are taking that maxim seriously. The Gas Docks just above Cove Point will begin accepting shipments of liquid natural gas this spring. Dominion Resources Company, the docks' owner, will close the waters around them to all unrelated vessels, with the closure supervised by the U.S. Coast Guard. For nearly 30 years, the Gas Docks have served as an extraordinary complex of fishing reefs, attracting rockfish, gray trout, bluefish and flounder. On any given day in season, 30-50 boats gathered there to set chumlines, drop jigs or deploy live baits around the pilings, whose hard surfaces attracted a broad variety of Bay creatures, from mussels, barnacles and marine worms to grass shrimp, blue crabs and small fish. Two hundred years ago, this kind of "live bottom" grew on thousands of acres of oyster reefs. As overharvest, pollution, and disease have destroyed the oysters, the Bay has lost much of this keystone habitat. Thus, a prominent structure like the Gas Docks becomes a magnet for Bay creatures in its area. The docks will continue to function as a haven for fish, which is fine with a lot of anglers in the area, but they need alternative sites for their trips, and those sites must also be clear of target practice areas used by the Patuxent Naval Air Station. Last year, a group of anglers in the Solomons area came together to plan a major project for building live reefs from Cove Point down to Point No Point. This is a fascinating section of the Chesapeake. As part of the Bay's ancestral Susquehanna River channel, it's narrow and deep, with strong currents, sharp-breaking edges, underwater shelves and shallow flats on the sides. It's also the main highway along which every fish and crab traveling between the upper and lower Bay must move. We can only speculate about how rich it must have been when oyster reefs lined those edges, shelves and flats. The leaders in the reef project are far-sighted enough to understand......