Discover the hurricanes, blizzards, and historic floods that have shaped the history of the Chesapeake Bay. Even before John Smith's crew weathered its first squall, the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries had been ravaged by every type of storm imaginable. A 1769 hurricane altered the course of history, demolishing the shipping channels of Charlestown and making Baltimore the dominant port. A once-in-five-hundred-years storm, Tropical Storm Agnes, left more than seventy people dead and devastated the ecology of the bay. Before the blizzards of 2009 and 2010, the snowfall record was held by the combination of the Great Eastern Blizzard of 1899, which blew the water out of the bay, and the Great White Hurricane, which stranded the oyster fleet of Baltimore in feet of ice. Join author David Healey as he keeps an eye to the red horizon and chronicles the most remarkable storms to churn the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Includes photos and illustrations

An appendix documents the many small islands that have dropped entirely from view since the seventeenth century.

This reference traces the region's 400-year recorded hurricane history, from Jamestown to the present, drawing on accounts in newspaper articles, books, private journals, and interviews. Emphasizing the human side of a hurricane's aftermath rather than scientific aspects, each hurricane account tells how individuals and communities reacted to the storms. Storms are profiled in year-by-year entries from the 1600's to the current century.

Sailing on the Chesapeake Bay's myriad inlets in summer, it is hard to imagine that, come January, icebreakers may be plowing the waters you cruised in July. When portions of the Great Shellfish Bay are iced up, the flow of commerce is impeded. At the turn of the nineteenth century, with the center of the new nation's government established it its arms, a frozen Bay meant that the United States' emergence to a status on par with the foremost nations of the world might be painfully slow. James Foster chronicles the disasters and pitfalls, large and small, that come with the coldest of winters.

Examines the emerging physical science of space weather and the impact the sun and solar storms have on Earth life.

In the 1900s, skipjacks were a familiar fixture in every port on the Chesapeake. Their captains and crews were tough, hardy souls who earned a living in the harsh conditions of the wintertime Bay, dredging for oysters under sail. The author has gone among skipjack captains, gathering stories of exciting events in their lives and reminiscences of how it was in the good times when oysters were healthy and plentiful. They told too about the bad times, when storms endangered their lives, or ice threatened their boats, the times when harvests were meager or the price they could get for oysters was too low to cover their expenses. Throughout, the author threads the history of the skipjack, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century when dredging by sail was the only legal method, to the 1990s when the twin scourges of disease and water quality threatened to put an end to the country's last commercial sailing fleet.

Chesapeake Boyhood is an account of growing up on the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake during the years following the Great Depression. Turner's stories include rousing tales of 'coon hunting, crabbing, boat building, duck hunting, oyster tonging, and Saturday jaunts to town. Turner brings the characters, experiences, waterscape, and landscape of rural Virginia to life as no one has done before or is likely ever to do again. His own drawings illustrate the stories, and they, too, win us over with their honesty and charm. "Its chief virtue (besides its highly literate style), it seems to me, is its intimate, sensory knowledge of a vanishing Chesapeake landscape: its sounds and smells, the way things feel to the touch, the lore lodged in the names of the commonest creatures and activities... At one point Turner likens the local farmers and fishermen sitting around the table in the country store to fixed positions on a compass, with `all the cardinal points taken,' and I think of this [book] as a kind of compass too, that describes one man's orientation to the Eastern Shore."--Andrea Hammer, St. Mary's College "Modern outdoor writing has enough anemic adventures by faint-hearted writers reared in the suburbs. What it needs more of is the droll wit of an Ed Zern, the robust foolishness of a Patrick McManus, and the lean prose of an Ernest Hemingway. It gets all three in the tales of Bill Turner."--George Regier, author of Heron Hill Chronicle and Wanderer on My Native Shore "Storms, boat wrecks, childhood pranks and even old dogs are remembered with a sense of humor in Turner's book. He has captured the rhythms of country life in a time before fast cars, credit cards, and air pollution." -- Waterman's Gazette