Article by Capt. Monty Hawkins
Ocean City Reef Foundation
(Part I)
Just north of the bow section of the African Queen, a 1958 shipwreck about 12 miles SSE of Ocean City's inlet, I watched a barge lift high on one end and, in one whooshing last breath, settle out of sight. The year was 1988 and I was running the old wooden headboat, “Angler” out of Talbot Street. I didn't think much of it. It was nice to have a new fishing spot. I did notice someone had cut pretty big holes in the deck of the barge.
June of 1989, a year later; Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources and a bomb squad sent the well-decorated WWII United States Navy submarine, “Blenny” to the bottom in front of a big fleet of spectators. Again, it was nice to have a new spot, but I didn't feel the earth move or see an ocean of potential.
Maryland’s DNR’s reef program did sink a few ex-Coast Guard cutters; some 85 footers, some 44 and the Army sunk a bunch of Vietnam era armored personnel carriers & M60A1 tanks in subsequent years. The state of Maryland stepped up and reefed a large tug, a huge barge, and just before my time, tires.
The tire units of the mid/late 1970’s had been bundled; compressed and strapped together instead of weighted with concrete. As their strapping soon rusted away and broke, many tires washed ashore, halting reef building for a decade. What a mess! Their memory still stymies reef construction to this very day. Those early tire reefs, which were more about mosquito control on land than fish habitat at sea, still create friction at every level for reef building. To this day, a few tires still wash ashore after each major storm. The scientific literature claims nothing grows on tires. This is 100% incorrect. On a reef monitoring trip in May, 2014, Nick Caloyianis took video and photographs of a pocket of late-1970’s tires that had been sanded-in behind an old clammer. The tires are fantastically grown-over with hard & soft corals.
One afternoon in the mid-1990’s, I had a charter of special needs children; a school trip aboard the 88-foot super-cruiser “OC Princess." I took those youngsters to that very same barge I'd seen sunk in 1988, the “Pendor”. I’d instructed the mates to bring two buckets of sand fleas with us thinking maybe we'd see a handful of tautog with a few sea bass mixed in. When we anchored that afternoon, however, those children, with no previous togging experience whatever, participated in the best tog bite I'd seen in over a decade. Wheelchairs, crutches, laughter & delight; what a blast! Some of the most fun you could ever hope to have on the ocean.
Unfortunately, the headmaster was miffed; "There was no need to throw fish back. I paid for those fish." This was not the last time we'd see and hear such comments as that. It was amazing to see folks step up to the Atlantic and demand fish. The children, at least, had a ball and didn’t feel cheated in the least.
As the remarkable success of the children's trip settled in, it finally dawned on me what we'd witnessed. We’d just caught tog where there had never been any before. This was entirely because of new habitat.
Where else could those fish have come from? I knew for a fact that nearby, the African Queen’s tog population was also recovering. There were also now tog showing up on the submarine, “Blenny”. But hadn't we “wiped them out” in the early/mid 80’s? Indeed we had, at least on habitat we were aware of.. Yet during the 1990’s, tautog numbers were not only climbing on new reefs being sunk, but on the very same places we’d first targeted the fishery, the older wrecks we’d pummeled a decade earlier.
Then fishing with self-imposed size & creel limits, I’m confident this was when I first realized we could not only recover lost fisheries via regulation, but with the inclusion of habitat as a management tool, we could make some fisheries better than they'd ever been - ever!
It wasn’t just tog. We caught an awful lot of sea bass off these new reefs as well. In later years we would gain a new fishery, or one lost for so long no one remembered it. Summer flounder are probably the #1 most targeted fish on our reefs today. Compared to the 1980’s, reef/wreck fishing has unquestionably gotten better - incredibly better.
Still, just as habitat’s potential was beginning to shine, just as Ocean City was starting to see a real difference, a wonderful difference, in reef-fish abundance due to increased reef habitat; in 1997 Maryland DNR cut all funding for the artificial reef program in favor of an oyster hatchery to support the put and take oyster fishery. Any benefit Maryland's Atlantic Coast had received was of no consideration to the "Chesapeake Bay State" DNR of that era.
Capt. Bob Gowar and myself, both keenly aware that artificial reef building was working, lobbied Ray and Charles Nichols to help us find some way, any way, to continue the program, and they did! DeWitt Myatt, a previous MD State Reef employee, was especially key because he had a steady stream of corporate funding & a lifetime of reef building experience. The Town of Ocean City accepted the State of Maryland's Army Corps reef permits; and with it’s initial funding paid entirely by the Nichols’ family, the Ocean City Reef Foundation was born.
After extensive informal meetings with the commercial trawl community, I presented a suite of coordinates to Ocean City engineer, Gail Blazer, who began an Army Corps of Engineers permit process that would last roughly 7 years. More than doubling the area we were allowed to build on, this is how the Jackspot Reef, Isle of Wight (now called The Sue Foster Memorial Reef) and expansion of the Bass Grounds (First Lump) Reef occurred.
To be continued next week in the Coastal Fisherman... the evolution of the Ocean City Reef Foundation.
Capt. Monty Hawkins is Captain of the headboat, “Morning Star” and President of the Ocean City Reef Foundation.
