A friend had suggested Matapeake Park and Romancoke Wharf County Park in Queen Anne's County on Kent Island. (No, for those of you who went to Baltimore City Public Schools, Kent Island is not in Kent County). I got to sleep in until 7:30am that morning. I got up early every day for the previous 4 days, so I needed a day to catch up. And sadly 7:30am is sleeping in.
How many of you love driving over the Bay Bridge? I wish someone could drive over the bridge for me so that I could hang my head out the window and look at everything and take pictures. And what's with all those ships anchored just south of the bridge. It seems like they've been there for years, but maybe they're different ships each time.
Once we got over the bridge, we exited on Maryland Route 8 and headed south. Ever seen one of those dashboard cams where a car veers off of the road into a ditch, then the driver over-corrects, flies out of the ditch, back onto the roadway into the lane of the on-coming traffic, then jerks hard to the right again to regain control just short of a head-on collision with an oncoming car while a cloud of dirt blows across the road? Yeah, we were that car with the dashboard cam. Some young guys in an older Ford Explorer performed the stunt. It happened in about 4 seconds, but seemed to last an eternity. I slowed to a crawl while my jaw dropped into my lap. Fortunately, no one was hurt and they pulled off to the side of the road to change their underwear.
Once we gathered our sense, we continued down the road on our search for the park. We finally found it, but were greeted with lots of signs, including this one with a glaring grammatical error. And $10 to park at a fishing pier??? Thanks, O'Malley.
Look at it closely:
1. Follow the instructions on the machine and it is screen.
Good grief, Charlie Brown. And 2 rods per fisherman? What is this, New Jersey???
Anyway, we caught a few striped bass, a bunch of croaker and spot, and a few white perch. At lunch we decided to call it quits and head to Romancoke.
Here was our view from the Matapeake fishing pier. Very beautiful.
Romancoke is about 15 minutes south of Matapeake State Park on the Eastern Bay side of Kent Island. This is what we saw when we got there. Pretty cool. The shore on the other side that you see - yeah that's 7 miles away. I measured it on Google Maps. The Eastern Bay is HUGE. And I get the feeling that it's not really that deep.
The next thing we saw once we got on the pier was this sea monster. I think it's a cow nose sting ray. We fished there for about 7 hours and saw another 4 get caught. These things are strong!!!
The Asian fishermen all wanted to keep them. I once heard that people take cookie cutters to them and fraudulently sell them as scallops. And not that it matters, but I think we were the only Caucasian fishermen there that day. Most of them were Asian, with some Hispanics, African-Americans, and West Virginians. Who says the Eastern Shore is not diverse???
We ended up catching a ton of striped bass there. ALL were undersized. This did not stop the other fishermen from keeping them, chopping them up, and using them as bait. This is VERY against the law. Attention Maryland Natural Resource Police - go to Romancoke and arrest all of the fishermen!
Another guy caught a 17 inch red drum fish. That was under-sized, too, but he kept it. And another guy caught what he thought was a shad. He was a pretty good size, but I didn't take a picture of it.
Altogether we fished for about 10 hours. Then we had an hour and 15 minute drive home. Good times. But we caught a lot of fish and got to experience two new places. It was fun. And it may be our last big fishing trip of the season. Booooo!
Oh, and you know I like fire trucks. Here's the Romancoke Fire Department.
1 comment:
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