In its younger days, Ocean City was half resort town and half fishing village. The fishing was “pound fishing,” a style I’d wager few people today have ever seen. It was practiced originally by Native Americans and became popular in the 19th century along the East Coast from Maritime Canada to the Carolinas. Pound fisherman used wide nets attached to wooden poles to catch fish. They drove these tall poles into the ocean floor about a half mile from shore, creating permanent structures called pounds. When fish entered the open end of a pound, they were then corralled by the nets and couldn’t escape. With no passage into the Atlantic, crews of Ocean City fishermen needed to launch 40-foot boats from the beach directly into the ocean and row out to the pounds. To harvest the fish, the crew would remove the ends of the nets from the poles and pull them up by hand. The fish were brought back to shore, carted across the island, packed in barrels of ice and shipped via railroad to fish markets in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. It was laborious work, and for years local businessmen petitioned state and federal agencies to create a manmade inlet to connect the bay directly to more fertile fishing grounds farther off the coast. A FIERCE STORM CARVES OUT A NEW INLET In August of 1933, a hurricane came ashore in Norfolk, VA, and tracked up the the Chesapeake Bay, bringing up to 10 inches of rain per day and flooding the back bays to the west of Ocean City. Oceanside, wind and waves destroyed homes, hotels and businesses on the boardwalk. When the storm subsided, the railroad bridge and fish camps had been washed away, replaced by an inlet 50 feet wide and eight feet deep that formed when built-up water driven by high tides rushed east over the barrier island from the swollen back bays to the ocean. Mother Nature did what governments wouldn’t do, and it changed Ocean City forever. It didn’t take long for officials to take advantage of this event and enlarge the inlet to ensure its permanence. As a result, a commercial harbor, marinas and docks
OCEAN CITY TUNA TOURNAMENT July 8-10, octunatournament.com Entering its 35 th year, this has become the world’s largest tuna tournament with more than 100 participating boats and a record payout that eclipsed $1 million in 2021. WORLD-CLASS OC 2022 FISHING TOURNAMENTS
WHITE MARLIN OPEN August 8-12, whitemarlinopen.com
First held in 1974, the WMO is inarguably the highlight of the Ocean City fishing tournament calendar. Now the biggest and richest billfish tournament in the world, the WMO drew 444 boats and 3,500+ contestants last year. POOR GIRLS OPEN August 17-20, poorgirlsopen.com Launched in 1994, this is the largest ladies-only billfish release tournament benefitting breast cancer research.
Despite its charitable overtones, the tourna- ment is all about the fishing, and hundreds of boats and hundreds of competitors take it very seriously.
Vintage shot of OC marlin
74
marinalife.com
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker