In case you thought a leisurely, month-long sail from Norfolk to Annapolis in Chesapeake summer sounds like fun, let’s examine Exhibit A: Matt Rutherford, who spent 30 days doing just that last July in his steel, cat-rigged schooner Ault.
Rutherford is the 34-year-old local adventurer who two years ago sailed alone around the Americas in 309 days, nonstop from Annapolis to Annapolis via the Northwest Passage and Cape Horn in a 27-foot Albin Vega. He’s no stranger to hardship. But nothing prepared him for the relentless biting black flies of the lower Eastern Shore, of which he reckons he killed 1000 at least, nor the oppressive heat, rolly-poley anchorages and long night watches plodding along at turtle speed.
“It’s research, and it’s not what you think,” he says. “It’s not utopia, sailing all day, cocktails in the evening. In reality, you’re anchored in the open Bay, rocking and rolling, worrying about getting hit by a fishing boat, or there’s no wind all day, so you work all night. If the purpose is to collect data, everything else comes second. You can’t go sightseeing in Oxford or Cape Charles. When we lost the dinghy, we couldn’t even get to town if we wanted to.”
The mission of Rutherford and his sailing partner, Nicole Trenholm, a marine scientist, was to count fish: specifically, to count acoustic (sound) signals from cownose rays and any other species they encountered, such as Atlantic Sturgeon, for a study by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).
Trenholm in action on the ORP'S summer research trip on the Bay.
Didn’t know sturgeon were in the Bay? There used to be many, until man nearly wiped them out for caviar in the 1890s. A few of the big, prehistoric fish still come back from the sea to spawn, and they’re listed as endangered. Of course, everybody knows about cownose rays, locally called skates, of which some resource managers would like to see fewer, since they plunder shellfish with their bulldozer snouts.
Science agencies have listening devices around the Bay to pick up signals from a variety of acoustically tagged species, but the devices are stationary. SERC needed a silent, slow-moving mobile platform to fill in blanks on the whereabouts of rays and other species. Motorboats wouldn’t work - too noisy. That’s where Rutherford and Trenholm came in. “We’re in the slow sailboat business,” he says.
At 24,000 pounds with a mere 550 square feet of sail, the battleship gray, 42-foot Ault fits the bill. Rutherford has three sets of reef points in the sails for ocean voyaging, so even if the wind is up, he can keep her reined in. Two knots was the magic number for best results, and if three reefs didn’t do it, he dragged a plastic lawn chair as a drogue.
The listening device was slung below the keel to avoid interference. All tagged fish in the Bay are on the same frequency, but each has a distinct signal, so if one swims within about 400 meters of a listening device, or if a device sails near it, a record is transmitted of that specific fish’s location. It’s an underwater EZ Pass that helps scientists analyze travel patterns.
Ault’s drift started up the James River by Jamestown, where it immediately picked up sturgeon signals. More came the next day, an auspicious start. But when Ault got to broader waters at the mouth of the James and into the main Bay, results were scarce, unsurprisingly.
Only 40 cownose rays have been tagged in the Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, so it’s “like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” says Rutherford. They did find a half-dozen rays and several more sturgeon.
At the mouth of the James, they began a long, languorous search pattern back and forth across the wide waterway — over to Cape Charles, back across and up the York River, then north to Mobjack Bay where Rutherford watched a massive loggerhead turtle surface next to the boat with a four-foot bull shark riding its back like a rodeo clown, an astonishing sight he’s still shaking his head over.
Somewhere in the lower Bay the U-bolt in the stem of the dinghy they were towing pulled out. Trenholm was the first to notice the loss. “Somewhere on the Eastern Shore, somebody has a nice Walker Bay,” says Rutherford, ruefully. Then the transmission blew up, requiring a stop in Deltaville for expensive repairs. Nobody ever said sailing was cheap!
And so it went: up the Potomac, over to Tangier Sound, up marshy tidal creeks near Crisfield where hungry black flies swarm, over to Solomons, back across to the Choptank, and on up the Bay till they were back home in Annapolis at last, hard data in hand.
Rutherford is proud of the effort, which amounted to the first real paid contract work for the tax-exempt science organization he and Trenholm run, Ocean Research Project.
By comparison to two earlier, unpaid scientific jaunts by the duo — 7000 miles across the Atlantic and back in Ault, then 7000 miles across the Pacific in a Harbor 29, both times towing a seine to pick up plastic bits for a study on ocean pollution — 30 days on the Bay was a piece of cake, right?
“No way,” says Rutherford. “It sounds great but it’s arduous. None of it is about having fun. “We do it for one reason. We think it’s important.”
oceanresearchproject.org article by Angus Phillips
