Move over, Maui—our Maryland beach town is a hidden gem for hanging ten.

It was only a few years after The Beach Boys and Endless Summer that a 10-year-old Lee Gerachis started surfing in Ocean City. “We get overlooked for other places, but when it’s good, it’s very good here,” says the 64-year-old D.C. native, with shaggy hair and a permanent tan.

In the late 1960s, the sport was still regional and niche, largely relegated to the big waves of California and Hawaii that East Coast kids could only dream about. But Gerachis spent most of his summers right on the beach, living in a white cottage with a wraparound porch on Eighth Street, often paddling out from right there, or across the Inlet to “the wedge” at the top of Assateague.

These days, that same building is now home to his own Malibu’s Surf Shop—an O.C. institution since 1986—where walls are decked with custom-made boards, and every day, a webcam livestreams the surf conditions. “Storm days are fun, especially when you’re younger,” says Gerachis, pointing especially to the swells of nor’easters. “But what everybody loves are those glassy, sparkly, warm summer days, when the water is 70 degrees and they’re just peeling, chest-high waves. A lot of the fun is just being out there with your friends.”

Day in the Life

On Guard

Suited in red and slathered in sunscreen, the local beach patrol is a local lifesaver.

From his first trips to Ocean City in the late 1960s, Butch Arbin knew that he wanted to be a lifeguard. Every summer, his family would load up the station wagon in Baltimore County, drive across the then-single span of the Bay Bridge, and spend a few days at the beach, where those strapping young sentinels seemed impossibly cool. At 15, he signed up for tryouts and was on the stand the next day—the start of a part-time career that’s still going strong, 52 years later. But even after all that time, “Not much has changed,” says Arbin, now 67 and captain of the Ocean City Beach Patrol. “Except now a guard will make more by lunchtime than I used to in an entire week.”

In 1973, that meant $12.50—just enough for rent at a rooming house downtown, plus two slices of Lombardi’s pizza and a medium Coke for dinner. At the time, there were 112 of those white, wooden guard stands, compared to 91 today. Their rescue buoys were steel, not plastic, and the job interview was little more than a quick dip in the ocean and a few sprints down the beach—a far cry from the extensive test now held at the Arundel Olympic Swim Center in Annapolis each spring. “And there were no women,” says Arbin. “It was kind of a good ol’ boys club.”

Today, thought, there are plenty of female lifeguards, and Memorial Day Saturday through Labor Day Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. seven days a week, they all use the same time-tested systems—for watching the water, scanning the beach, alerting the crowds via flags and whistles, handling lost-and-found persons—not to mention first-aid and CPR skills, plus basic oceanography. Riptides remain a perennial issue in this region, but now, they have two-way radios and all-terrain vehicles, which make things easier and have more than likely saved a few lives. They perform upward of 4,000 rescues each year. “But they’re more than lifeguards,” says Arbin, himself a certified EMT. “I’d say 95 percent of the time, they’re ambassadors, telling people a good place to get steamed crabs.”

For better or worse, the patrol also enforces the rules—no smoking, alcohol, campfires, loud music, or pets. And that sort of supervision is something Arbin practices in the off-season, too. From fall through spring, he is a middle- and high-school science teacher in Southern Maryland.

So did he go into education for the summers off? “Yes,” he says with a chuckle. “The three best reasons to teach are June, July, and August.”

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE TODAY, what with all the high-rise hotels and twinkling traffic lights, but the Delmarva Peninsula, and with it the barrier island of Ocean City, is essentially nothing more than an ancient sandbar, created over the millennia through ice ages and global warming, ebbing and flowing in shape and size with the whims of Mother Nature. And historically, as coastal storms have battered the beaches here, they chip away at the grassy dunes, which hold the whole thing together. Enter the Army Corps of Engineers, who have been overseeing multimillion-dollar “replenishment” projects, which add hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of fresh sand to the seashore, widening its promenade and aiming to protect this spit of land for time to come. Go ahead, dip your toes into the strand, using a few of these pointers.

Head Uptown.

A general rule: The farther north you go, the quieter the streets, and in turn the beaches, become in Ocean City. We personally like those in the hundreds, where the hubbub of the boardwalk becomes a faint memory, and on a good day, even free street parking is often available. Some hotels and condominiums have private beach access, but for the most part, every block up to Fenwick has its own public entryway, including two dozen that are wheelchair-accessible.

Arrive Early.

As the saying goes, early birds get the best beach chair. Stake out your spot as soon as possible, especially in prime season. Lifeguards arrive in their stands at 10 a.m., but in the hours before that, you can swim, surf, or fish at your own risk. Bring your own umbrella. Pack a picnic. Build a sandcastle. Finish that book. Make a day of it. Then be sure to take your trash home with you, whatever hour you finally leave.

Treat Yourself To A Rental.

Nobody likes hauling their stuff to the beach, and so luckily, there are a several local businesses that help you kick back in the lap of luxury, with rental options for umbrellas, chairs, cabanas, even boogie boards—set-up included—on both a daily and weekly basis. A handful of hotels also offer this pampered service for guests. At The Castle In the Sand Hotel on 38th Street, it’s open to the public as well, where, best of all, you can order food and drink from their Coconuts beach bar right to your seat.

Boogie On Down.

Surfing isn’t the only way to get out on a board at the O.C. beach. Whether you call it a boogie or a body board, this small, lightweight foam flotation device is a summertime staple for the East Coast’s mid-size waves. Rental options abound, and for two days each in July and August, the local beach patrol, along with Endless Summer Surf Shop on 38th Street, co-host summer camps for kids eight and up to perfect their moves.

Go Ahead, Get Scopes.

You know those supertan teenagers who run down the beach with a messenger bag and professional camera throughout the summer? We must admit, we still have a few of the keychains they sell for Telescope—simply known as “Scopes” back in our day. It might seem cheesy, but in the age of instant-gratification cell-phone photographs, the sentimental surprise of these pocket- sized pictures might be worth the momentary embarrassment of posing in front of the rest of the beach. Trust us: Years later, you’ll be glad you did.

Explore Our Big, Beachy Guide to Going Downy Ocean

Sticky, sweet, and sentimental, our most iconic indulgences can still be found at a handful of old-school businesses.

What would a trip to the beach be without what we eat? For a few hours or days, all inhibitions get thrown to the sea breeze as we revert to our childhoods and indulge every craving our stomachs could desire, be it the saltiest snacks—popcorn, pizza, hot dogs, heaping piles of French fries—or the sweetest, most cavity-inducing desserts—candy, funnel cakes, fried Oreos, enough ice cream to last us through Labor Day.

But our affinity for these decadences is about more than just vacation-induced gluttony. Over the last century, they’ve become the nostalgic flavors of American youth. Of not only the beach, but carnivals, county fairs, end-of-school field days, and, in turn, the freedom of summer. In our fast-paced world, perhaps we are so drawn to them, often against our better judgement, because of their ability to transport us back to those simpler times.

Many of the establishments behind them have been open for decades, if not a dozen of them. These treats “are timeless and special,” says Anna Dolle, fourth-generation co-owner of her namesake Dolle’s Saltwater Taffy, which dates back to 1910 on the boardwalk corner of Wicomico Street. And for whatever reason, she adds, “they just taste better at the beach.”

Sure, these days, when you come to Ocean City, you can sit down for a fancier meal in a more modern setting, with servers and silverware to boot. But if you ask us, no visit would be complete without at least one extra-large slice of pizza while walking the boardwalk, or a couple carefully clenched cones over a game of Skee-Ball, or a few subs eaten over your beach towel on a bluebird afternoon—sand be damned.

Just like it always has been. Just like we always hope it will be.

THE HITS

Dolle’s

Saltwater Taffy

Since 1910, this fourth-generation business has been luring beachgoing sweet-tooths with its sticky specialty of saltwater taffy—originally invented in an age without refrigeration as a treat impervious to summer heat. Although there are multiple locations, the original brick-and-mortar stands on the boardwalk at Wicomico Street, where old neon signs still glow in red and teal, and bins of perfectly wrapped confections can be bought by the pound. Made onsite by hand to this day, the taffy’s flavors range from vanilla and chocolate to cotton candy and birthday cake. We’re always a sucker for banana and peanut butter.

Fisher’s

Popcorn

From movie theaters to baseball games to the beach, there are few more simple pleasures than an old-school box of popcorn. And here in Maryland, that always means Fisher’s, with the family-run stand cooking kernels on the boardwalk’s Talbot Street since 1937. Classic butter and caramel flavors persist from the old days—“If it ain’t broke,” says third-generation owner Donald Fisher Jr. But now there’s also cheddar, and chocolate-drizzled, and our hands-down, always-and-forever favorite, Old Bay caramel—like an ever-so- slightly spicy taste of the Old Line State. Grab one of the small paper boxes full of the stuff for any of your sits in the sand or leisurely strolls.

Dumser’s

Ice Cream

A confession: We’ll always have a soft spot for the frozen custard at Kohr Bros. But they’re from Coney Island, so when we’re really craving an authentic scoop, cone, or shake in Ocean City, the locally owned Dumser’s Dairyland is our destination, and any one of their several locations will do. Since 1939, this old-fashioned parlor has been making ice cream daily, with tried-and-true flavors like strawberry, butter pecan, and mint chocolate chip. You’ll find all the fixings, too—hot fudge, whipped cream, rainbow sprinkles, a bright-red maraschino cherry on top. On the hottest nights of summer, Dumser’s is the most happening place in town, and the lines are well worth the wait.

An ode to Maryland’s signature drink of summer.

When the weather gets warm enough in the Land of Pleasant Living, an inevitable thirst emerges. Not for any particular can of beer, mind you, not even an ice-cold Natty Boh. Instead, it's our state’s unofficial but undisputed drink of summer—the one and only orange crush.

All across the state, and now even up and down the East Coast, there are fans of this refreshingly bittersweet cocktail, made with citrus-flavored vodka, fresh-squeezed citrus juice, a triple sec-style liqueur, and lemon-lime soda over ice—like Maryland’s tastier screwdriver. And for at least the last 40 years now, Ocean City has been the drink’s epicenter, and in many ways, where it all began.

“It’s a rite of passage,” say Mike Strawley, co-owner of The Bearded Clam on Wicomico Street. “We’ve been around long enough that people’s kids are coming in now, getting the same crushes that their parents drank.”

There’s debate over the origin story of the orange crush, of course. West Ocean City’s Harborside Bar & Grill claims to be the “home of the original” since 1993, serving “well over a million of them,” says co-owner Chris Wall.

Meanwhile, many locals believe that Strawley’s circa-’78 bar was the first to serve some version. Back in the ’40s, his grandparents started slinging “squeezers” at their original establishment, just up the seaboard in Cape May, New Jersey. When his dad took over the business and moved down to Ocean City, he brought the tradition with him, with fading Kodachrome photographs of the early Clam showing the same hanging fruit baskets and steel juicers still used in the bar today.

“I never asked how they came to be, because they were just always there,” says Strawley, 56, who learned the recipe on day one as a barback at age 19. “I can make them in my sleep.”

The ingredients are simple, and largely the same from bar to bar, but perfecting the ratio is somewhat of an art form. Too much triple sec? The drink’s too sweet. Too much soda? It’s too weak. Fresh juice is always key, hence halves of fruit being squeezed to order, with the Clam moving through more cases of citrus than it cares to count. And then there’s the technique, often inducing a Pavlov’s dog-like reaction in onlookers, who then generally can’t help but order one. “You can’t not love the show,” says Wall.

These days, there are also grapefruit crushes, and half-and-halfs with both juices, and “skinny” versions that swap Sprite for club soda. Some places like Seacret’s and Fish Tales even blend them into frozen drinks. But every iteration, as the name implies, is often dangerously easy to drink. “A lot of people come in before they even check into their hotels,” says Strawley. “It tastes like vacation.”

Oh, and in a town run on Natural Light—aka “Delmarva champagne”—the Clam also keeps a steady supply of Natty Boh in stock for its bevy of Baltimore patrons. “People get excited to see it, I can tell you that,” says Strawley. “We’ve had it so long, it’s cool again.”

Q&A

A RISING STAR

One of the best restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic is two blocks north of Ocean City, just over the Delaware line at One Coastal in Fenwick, where James Beard Award finalist Matt Kearn works with local farmers and fishermen to celebrate land and sea.

• What local ingredients do you love this time of year?
  We use Henlopen Sea Salt, right from the ocean in Lewes, Delaware. We get our blueberries from Bennett Orchards in Frankford. And we only serve fish that swim in [Mid-Atlantic] waters—Chesapeake catfish, tuna, scallops, even shrimp.

• What are your most popular dishes?
  There are two dishes I can never take off the menu. We get our eggs locally to make the pasta for our cacio e pepe...And then our chicken liver pâté and buttermilk biscuits are constantly evolving with the seasons. It’s a little bit French finesse, a little bit Sussex County. You can’t get enough of it.

• Do you ever cross over into Ocean City?
  My staff usually hangs out at Ponzetti’s, this great dive bar pizza parlor. My wife and I love Spain Wine Bar and The Hobbit.

Day in the Life

DeVito’s Deli perfects the quintessential beach sandwich.

The meats in the cold case at DeVito’s are almost impossible to read without a Tony Soprano accent: soppressata, mortadella, prosciutto, Genoa salami, and of course, capicola. And the owner of this longtime delicatessen still carries the hint of an Italian-American inflection, too, even after 40- odd years of living at the beach, where he opened one of the most beloved sub shops this side of the coastal bays.

“I try to do the early shift, come in, bake the bread, get all the prep done, then let Tony take over, because these old bones just can’t do it anymore,” says Mike DeVito, 72, through a thick salt-and- pepper mustache, referring to his youngest son, who helps run the place six days a week in summer.

Between a laundromat and ice cream shop in a one-story strip mall off Coastal Highway on 143rd Street in the northern neck of Ocean City, a green, white, and red flag declares DeVito’s open on this Thursday afternoon in early April. Closed from December through March, it reopened two weeks ago, and is already busy, with only three rolls left in the wire rack by the back Blodgett bread oven.

“It’s been word-of-mouth,” says DeVito of the business’s success, making up to 400 subs a day during the peak season—and that’s subs in these parts, despite all the out-of-towners who ask for hoagies, heroes, torpedoes, even wedges. “That’s what they call them on the north side of Long Island.”

In 1934, Mike’s grandparents opened the original DeVito’s Restaurant on the corner of 10th and H Streets in Washington, D.C., with neon signs advertising pizza, Coca-Cola, and air conditioning. By the time his father took over, the family had already begun vacationing at the beach, even buying some of the first lots at the proposed resort town on Assateague. In the late ’70s, they started eyeing the northern streets in Ocean City. “I saw a for-sale sign in the window here and said, ‘Hey, what about this place?’” says DeVito. “We’ve been here ever since.”

Like in the early days, the menu features an assortment of classic cold cuts, served on fresh-baked bread with the works, plus hot sandwiches, like cheesesteaks and chicken Parm, as well as pizza, using the same old family recipe. Meanwhile, cnnolis get shipped in from Vaccaro’s in Baltimore.

“The good thing is, we’re on this side of the highway,” says DeVito, meaning oceanside, not bayside, with many of his customers calling in orders from the beach, then sending their kids straight from the beach for pick-up. He’s known some families for generations. “In the summertime, you don’t even look at the clock, you don’t have time, you just cruise, because it’s constant from the moment we open.”

He gets why subs are a go-to for beachgoers. They’re a whole meal. They’re easy to eat. And here, it’s all about consistency and quality. Meats and cheeses are imported from Italy, every ingredient gets sliced fresh daily, and then there’s the bread.

“If all I had to do all day was bake bread, I’d be in seventh heaven,” says DeVito, leaning against the stainless-steel prep table in a flour-dusted apron. “I say it’s nothing but earth, wind, and fire. But I like taking something from nothing and watching it grow.”

Skip the beach bars for the city’s stalwart watering holes.

Every beach town is a bedlam of tourist traps, especially when it comes to the sand-strewn bar scene. Ocean City is no different, full of big, busy, booze compounds, tempting open tabs, and always toting at least one bachelorette party. One surefire way to drink like a local, though, is to find a dive bar. And luckily, downtown, in the historic heart of things, a trio of timeworn watering holes offers a respite from the rest of the revelry. Make a night out of bouncing between them, and remember to tip your bartenders.

From top, A cold beer at Cork Bar; the neon sign; the Bearded Clam’s pool table; outside on Wicomico Street.

STOP 1: CORK BAR

3 Wicomico St.

This might be our favorite bar in all of O.C. Beneath the small neon sign featuring a dripping mug of frosty beer, Cork Bar has been a fixture for local residents since it first opened on Wicomico Street in 1964, with its lone pool table, Keno, and surprisingly good food menu. (Get the hot dog.) In this corner of the state, Natty Light, not Natty Boh, flows like a high tide. Have a cold one or two before moseying down the street.

STOP 2: THE BEARDED CLAM

15 Wicomico St.

Just 100 feet from Cork Bar, you’ll find the blinking bulb lights of the circa- 1978 Bearded Clam. Through its hulking Formstone façade, the long wooden U-shaped bar is covered in a collage of old license plates, motorcycle swag, and cop memorabilia, giving off a sort of delightfully debaucherous TGI Fridays vibe, with its own carryout packaged- goods store to boot. Order what’s said to be the original orange crush, play a round of darts, and then head west.

STOP 3: HARBOR INN

216 Somerset St.

By the time you reach the little brick shack of this bona fide dive—perhaps Ocean City’s oldest bar, dating back to 1935—it’s likely time for last call. At Harbor Inn, expect no frills. The cans of beer are cold and cheap, the plastic cups of mixed drinks are potent, and the crowd gets louder and lewder as the hours wear on. Chat with the sassy barkeep, add a dollar to the ceiling, and call a cab to take you home.

Explore Our Big, Beachy Guide to Going Downy Ocean

July 2022

Lynne Outerbridge’s parents would pack up the car and pile her in with her two sisters, bathing suits and beach towels in tow, before heading south, out of Dundalk, away from the asphalt heat of Baltimore, then onwards east, toward the cool breeze of the Atlantic Ocean.

“We’d go to Ocean City, and with that, you knew, hey, we’re going to the Bay Bridge,” says Outerbridge, 65, her eyes lighting up behind thin glasses. “You were going to be in traffic, but you’d sit out there and eat snacks and play games—that was part of the experience, you know? It was fun. And when you got to the top, you saw all the boats, all the fishermen, and thought, ‘Oh, isn’t it pretty . . .’”

Years later, while working at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Outerbridge came across an open toll collector position for that very location—about 30 miles from her home in Baltimore County, just north of downtown Annapolis, on the heel of Sandy Point State Park, at the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. She was hired in 1986, working her way up to shift supervisor and manager before retiring last April, seeing many evolutions of that iconic crossing, from the removal of the westbound tolls to the addition of E-ZPass and the traffic that came with it.

“When I was little, I thought, that looks like it would be an easy job—sit there and take money all day?” Outerbridge remembers. But that was before she descended the stairs into the tunnel that snaked beneath Route 50, climbed up through a tollbooth door, and saw the volume of vehicles, first during the prime-time commute, then more still, during the height of Maryland and Delaware beach season.

“That first summer weekend really shook me, when you looked up and saw it—headlights—as far as the eye can see,” she says. “But you got used to it.”

In fact, Outerbridge preferred the busy shifts. Regulars would bring her coffee, and when traffic stalled, she’d chat with the passersby. “Everyone had a story,” she says, not forgetting the grief she sometimes received from gridlocked travelers. During downtime, she’d read books, and on occasion, play ball in the center plaza with her colleagues until, inevitably, the cars returned.

“The collectors would yell, ‘Here they come!’ and I’d say, ‘Okay, go get it!’” she says. “We raced each other to see who could move the most vehicles.” Her record was 500 an hour.

Even on days off, she would find herself there. “My husband and I used to go across all the time for vacation, to the beach, for Bike Week—we still do every year,” says Outerbridge, who recently moved to Pennsylvania. “From up there, you can really see everything. To this day, we get to the top and I say, ‘Hey, that’s my bridge.’”

Opening photo and video by Jay Fleming

T

here is the Francis Scott Key, and the Hanover Street, and the Hatem Memorial, but as far as any Marylander is concerned, the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial Bay Bridge—located between Annapolis in Anne Arundel County and Stevensville in Queen Anne’s—is the Maryland bridge.

Halfway down the state, two silver ribbons of steel and concrete seem to defy gravity as they float for more than four miles across the waters of the wide and majestic Chesapeake Bay, riding high—200 feet above seafaring ships and sailboats, alongside seagulls and osprey, between foggy sunrises and against dazzling sunsets—before sloping softly into the eastern and western shores, which, from up there, seem to welcome its arrival.

It is the stuff of postcards and license plates, having evolved into a quintessential symbol—a 20th-century architectural feat heralded as the great connector of the Old Line State.

The truth is, most people either love the bridge or hate it. For some of the 27 million cars that cross each year, it is the gateway to vacationland, through which sandy strands and vinegar-splashed buckets of boardwalk French fries await, no matter the traffic. For others, it’s a parking lot of taillights, or a towering deathtrap too terrifying to travel. And it's a division only likely to increase in the days ahead, as the ninth smallest and fifth densest state continues to grow, and its officials discuss what might become of this soaring infrastructure that so sparks our emotions.

But now, as it was when the first cars drove across it 70 years ago this month, as it will be with whatever iteration comes next, those iconic spans—in fact two bridges—remain an undeniable threshold. Between an otherwise disconnected state. Between economies, industries, and communities along the Chesapeake watershed. Between the past and the future. A precipice that has, for better or worse, forever altered the fate of Maryland.

L

ong before the Bay Bridge, the body of water that it was built to cross served as the region’s primary bond and barrier. By sheer geography, the Chesapeake Bay divided the horseshoe-like landscape, with its limb-like western and eastern shores separated by the nation’s largest estuary. On either side of those brackish tides, distinct worlds developed based on a variety of factors, such as proximity to trade and access to natural resources, and with them came wholly unique cultures, ideologies, and even dialects.

To the west, urban areas like Baltimore City and Annapolis became epicenters of industry, transportation, and politics—part of the metropolitan corridor near the eventual capital of Washington, D.C. To the east, the nine Maryland counties of the Delmarva Peninsula, surrounded on all sides by a labyrinth of tributaries and ocean, remained resolutely rural, rooted in maritime and agricultural traditions, at times even threatening secession into neighboring Delaware and Virginia. “The bay has always isolated us,” says Pete Lesher, chief curator of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, “but at the same time, the bay has always connected us.”

Before roads and rails, the bay was the region’s interstate highway, “a natural artery that helped us get from here to there,” says Lesher, moving people and products between its two shores. During the Colonial era, towns were situated near waterfront ports that were lifelines to the outside world, and vessels, from schooners to skipjacks, commonly swapped the seafood and produce of the east with the manufactured goods of the west.

But after the Civil War, the Chesapeake Bay became an obstacle. Suddenly train and automobile transportation better connected the Eastern Shore to rival cities like Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York via the northern peninsula, while Baltimore hoped to keep that valuable commerce in state.

The first Bay Bridge discussions date back to the 1880s, but it wasn’t until 1927 that Baltimore businessmen were authorized to raise funds for construction of a crossing between Miller Island in Baltimore County and Tolchester in Kent. Those efforts were squandered by the stock market crash of ‘29, while a second attempt, mired in arguments over the location, was put on hold by World War II.

In the meantime, steamboats rose to the occasion, with ferries tempting passengers to “save 100 miles” instead of driving up and around the headwaters of the Chesapeake, and entire towns were built as rural retreats for urban clientele. The Sandy Point-Matapeake line would become the precursor for the present-day Bay Bridge, operating at one of the narrowest distances across the estuary, with notorious queues of sunburnt beachgoers waiting to head west on Sundays. At the on-ramp of the eastbound lane, you can still see remnants of the old terminal, deteriorated by weather and time, an artifact of another era.

“From the viewpoint of the average citizen, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge project has had a checkered career,” wrote The Sun in 1936. “Is there hope or isn’t there of a bridge ever materializing?”

Nothing more than “castles in the air,” surmised H.L. Mencken, created by “the artful hand of realtors.”

But after World War II, skeptics would finally be convinced, when in 1949, Governor William Preston Lane Jr. broke ground on what was then the largest public works project in the state’s history.

The massive undertaking was overseen by the J.E. Greiner Company of Baltimore, which would also engineer other local landmarks like the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel and Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Plans called for construction of what was then the third longest bridge in the world and the longest continuous steel structure over water. Rumors quickly spread that it would be too light to be safe, surely to be washed out by the wind and ice of Chesapeake winters.

But engineers deemed the two-lane design, featuring some 60,000 tons of steel and 118,000 cubic yards of concrete (allegedly mixed with Baltimore City water for its purity), structurally sound. Sections were built by the Bethlehem Steel Company, then towed down the bay on tugboat barges to floating cranes that would lift them into position.

The bridge was actually a series of bridges, consisting of beam, girder, truss, cantilever, and suspension spans, designed to handle 3,000 cars an hour with 354-foot towers and 1,500 tons of suspension cables resting on a foundation of 57 concrete piers and 4,130 steel pilings pounded some 200 feet into the bay bottom. At the water’s surface, boats bound for the Port of Baltimore were provided 186 by 1,600 feet to navigate the shipping channel, a factor that necessitated the bridge’s elegant 90-degree curve.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” says Timothy Hyman, 84, who started his 66-year career as staff photographer for the Maryland State Highway Administration at age 12, documenting the construction of both spans. “I walked that bridge from one end to the other, many times, before there were even roads, using land, sea, and air to get my shots. . . . I was one of the many unsung people who worked on the bridge, then got out of the way.”

In the end, the bridge took three and a half years and more than six million man-hours to complete, carried out by more than 2,000 laborers from both shores, some of whom lived in a floating hotel at a nearby pier during construction. It cost $45 million, with a commemorative issue of this magazine hailing it “one of the greatest structures ever built.”

“It is a vital link in a fast-growing network of superhighways serving an ever-increasing volume of private automobile, bus, and truck traffic along the Atlantic seaboard, Maine to Florida,” wrote The Sun the weekend before its opening—one that is “expected to have a profound impact on the economy of the state, and in particular on that of the nine Eastern Shore counties.”

The setting of concrete support piers. Photography by TIMOTHY HYMAN
Timothy Hyman in his home holding his photographs and camera from the construction of the first Bay Bridge. Photography by MIKE MORGAN

On the hot summer morning of July 30, 1952, an estimated 10,000 people crowded Sandy Point to watch as then-Governor Theodore McKeldin, wearing a light suit and striped tie, cut a silk ribbon and freed the way for traffic on the brand-new Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Red, white, and blue buntings hung from the tollbooth plaza while a police-led motorcade made its way up the span. At the top, cars pulled over for passengers to look down, take pictures, and throw pennies into the bay.

“It is more than just a great, new bridge, modern in type and highly useful in purpose,” said McKeldin that day. “It is a symbol of America. It is industrial progress.”

In the first 72 hours, nearly 30,000 vehicles crossed the bridge in an average six minutes at 40 miles per hour for a toll price of $1.40. Long lines backed up on both sides with motorists eager to get a look at the new crossing, while several cars ran out of gas, got flat tires, and even burst into flames. Others drove slowly, taking in the view for some 20 miles in either direction. In fact, it was supposedly up there that executives of the National Bohemian beer company invented the state’s “Land of Pleasant Living” nickname. On the other side, state police declared that the Eastern Shore “had never seen more traffic.”

That record, of course, would soon be broken. For years, countless advertisements tied to the new bridge ran in The Sun papers, promoting real estate, recreation, and relaxation from Kent Island to Ocean City. Among those Eastern Shore communities was a mix of excitement and apprehension.

“What the ferries did to some extent but what the bridge does with an exclamation point is strengthen those ties to Baltimore,” says Lesher, also a Talbot County councilman. “The steamboats are on borrowed time, the railroads are struggling, and the highways are what’s going to connect us, making it so much easier to travel back and forth. And of course, the more lanes you add, and the more traffic that can cross, the stronger those bonds become.”

By the mid-1960s, new debate had already begun about a second parallel span, with traffic reports stating the first would reach its maximum capacity by the summer of 1967 when Sunday traffic headed west from the ocean. Critics claimed that the State Roads Commission was not considering the whole picture and accused then-Governor J. Millard Tawes of porkbarreling to seal the votes to build.

The public voted down the addition in 1966, but it was approved a year later via an emergency bill by the General Assembly under new Governor Spiro Agnew. Mired in mounting costs, delays, and controversy, the second span nonetheless managed to open with three lanes just north of the first on June 28, 1973, costing $148 million and funded by revenue bonds to be paid back by toll dollars, like the first.

(Just months later, in an ironic twist, Agnew, now Richard Nixon’s vice president, would be forced to resign following a criminal investigation into kickbacks to his associates, including the State Roads chairman and a Greiner Company affiliate with whom he purchased 107 acres of land near the bridge.)

By this time, Ocean City was in the midst of a major transformation into Maryland’s Jersey Shore. Once a sleepy resort town and fishing village in Worcester County, the 10-mile barrier island had only grown by 259 year-round residents after the first bridge, but following the second it more than quadrupled, to 6,900 residents today.

And were it not for Mother Nature there might have been two such towns in the same vicinity. Plans for “Ocean Beach,” a 15- mile resort community dreamed up by Western Shore investors along a “Baltimore Boulevard,” were permanently washed out by a winter storm and, in 1965, Congress established that same land as the Assateague Island National Seashore.

The Atlantic seaside was an especially meaningful destination for another governor, William Donald Schaefer, who had grown tired of sitting in traffic on the way to his summer trailer in Ocean City. In 1987, he announced his seminal “Reach the Beach” initiative, which would add express lanes to the Bay Bridge, widen Route 50, and establish a travel hotline.

Though considered a success, not everyone was a fan of Schaefer’s big ideas. “Spending all that taxpayer money on U.S. 50 and calling it a ‘Reach the Beach’ program is equivalent to widening the Jones Falls Expressway under a ‘Get to Pennsylvania Faster’ sign,” wrote The Sun’s Peter Jensen in 1991. “Most hardcore Shoremen would like to blow up the Bay Bridges and let the fool chicken-neckers swim.”

Not that Schaefer always loved them back. “How’s that shithouse of an Eastern Shore?” he was once overheard asking a local delegate, leading a band of angry residents to bring a parade of wooden outhouses and bags of manure to the State House.

W

hether they liked it or not, the Eastern Shore would experience a watershed moment with the Bay Bridge, as projected by The New York Times in 1952: “It is expected to bring the Eastern Shore and the Western Shores of the state...into closer unity of thought and habit, and to work other important social and economic changes—all in time, of course,” particularly in counties along the beach corridor.

The crossings opened the floodgates for tourism and recreation, expanded markets for its pride-and-joy produce and seafood, increased populations with newfound commuter access to more job opportunities on the Western Shore, and with it, diversified mindsets in a region reluctant to give up Jim Crow. Since 1970, Queen Anne’s County grew from 18,500 to 50,163 residents, whereas just south, Talbot County jumped 19,428 to 37,626 since 1950, even as empty beaches now stand where forgotten ferry-era resorts like Tolchester and Claiborne once prospered.

Before he moved to Queen Anne’s full-time in 2000, resident Jay Falstad had been traveling across the Bay Bridge since 1976, watching mom-and-pop restaurants like Holly’s in Grasonville give way to Royal Farms gas stations and the old Kent Narrows drawbridge get buried beneath an overpass.

“Route 50 used to be a country highway, but it’s not one any longer,” says Falstad, director of the Queen Anne’s Conservation Association, established in 1969 to protect the county’s natural resources and rural character, notably through legal challenges to the Four Seasons retirement condominiums in Chester, which might be the largest subdivision in the Chesapeake Bay’s Critical Areas. “Our biggest fear is not just what a new crossing would do to Queen Anne’s County, but the entire Delmarva Peninsula.”

Falstad first got involved with the Bay Bridge in 2016, when Governor Larry Hogan announced a two-tier, multi-year National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) study, which sought to identify the best site for a new bay crossing from 14 potential locations up and down the estuary, in order to address the current and projected traffic. According to the Tier 1 study, in 2017, the bridge carried about 68,600 vehicles per day with three hours of congestion on non-summer weekdays, and 118,600 vehicles with 19 hours of congestion on summer weekends. By 2040, the state projects those an increase to seven and 22 hours, respectively.

Two years into the process, Hogan let his preference be known, disheartening some Anne Arundel and Queen Anne’s residents already beleaguered by the bridge and relieving other communities who had been scrambling to protect their shorelines: “There is only one option I will ever accept: adding a third span to our existing Bay Bridge,” he tweeted in 2019.

And this April, he got his wish, when the Maryland Transportation Authority (MDTA) and Federal Highway Administration officially chose that 22-mile Corridor 7—just west of the Severn River Bridge in Parole to the U.S. 301-Route 50 split in Queenstown—said to likely be the cheapest, least environmentally impactful, and most congestion-relieving of all the potential routes.

No one will know exactly what that crossing will look like until the end of the multi-year Tier 2 study, which has yet to begin. A third span, a whole new replacement bridge, or even a bridge-tunnel have all been thrown around, estimated to cost up to $13.1 billion, in 2020 dollars. In Tier 1, a high-speed rail line was eliminated as an alternative, deemed too expensive for further review—though the estimated cost is unknown—while rejuvenated ferry and bus service were found unlikely to adequately reduce congestion as stand-alone options.

The latter two, in addition to other alternatives, such as variable toll rates for peak hours or high-occupancy vehicle lanes, could be considered in some combination in Tier 2, though likely still in conjunction with new construction. In the meantime, some improvements have been made, from the removal of Outerbridge’s beloved toll plaza for an all-electronic model, and this fall’s replacement of rudimentary orange barrels with automated gates for contraflow—aka that two-way traffic.

“This has been a very highly seen project for the region and, as you can imagine, we received the gamut of public comments,” says Heather Lowe, MDTA project manager for the NEPA study. “But we heard loud and clear that the congestion at the Bay Bridge now is a problem.”

Environmentalists and community activists don’t disagree.

“The traffic congestion is a problem and it needs a solution, not in 2040, but now,” says Steve Kline, president of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy and Centreville Town Council, whose grandfather was a Sparrows Point iron worker on the first span. “However, we do not believe that a new Bay Bridge solves this problem any more durably than the previous bridge. A two-lane bridge was not sufficient for very long. A five-lane bridge has proven to not be sufficient for very long. If we add more lanes, how long will that be sufficient? Maybe it can make traffic at the bridge half as bad—for 10 years. But then it’s going to be right back to where it is now, and people will be sitting here having this same debate.”

Kline is referencing the economic concept of “induced demand,” which has found that the initial benefits of congestion relief fade within a decade, simply drawing in more cars and filling the new capacity. (See: The Baltimore Beltway.)

“If you build it, they will come,” says Erik Fisher, land-use planner for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, who hopes the state will work to offset a new crossing’s environmental impacts, to be studied in Tier 2, such as habitat loss and water pollution in a region at the forefront of climate change. “We know more roads bring more cars. We need to think more broadly about how to get people where they want and need to go without forever expanding the pavement. We’re not building an interstate all the way to Ocean City.”

Which brings us to the great paradox: How do you alleviate traffic—including the GPS-stymied sideroads that block emergency vehicles and hinder homeowners from leaving their houses on summer weekends—without increasing development pressure in a place sought out for its rural nature?

The answer is unclear, and fingers get pointed over who created the problem in the first place.

“The bridge is not the problem—development’s the problem,” says Secretary of Transportation Jim Ports, who spend summers driving to the beach from Baltimore City. “I mean, Ocean City becomes the second largest city in the state during the summer. . . . The expansion of Queen Anne’s County, of Anne Arundel County, of other shore counties, as well as Ocean City, is what created the overcapacity problem. . . . And they’re continuing to expand now while they know it’s a problem. It’s not going to stop, whether we build a bridge or not,” emphasizing that land-use planning takes place “on the local level.”

“Land use should begin at the local level, but when the state makes the decision to invest billions of dollars into a transportation system to an area, they’re making a decision for the local folks,” counters Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman. “They’re putting additional development pressure on the localities by doing so, and they know that.”

Still, there are mixed messages from these small towns, who on the one hand want to keep their pastoral charm, and whose local governments on the other make decisions that put that very character at risk. In Queen Anne’s, where more than 70 percent of the workforce commutes out of county, land use for commercial real estate, high-density housing, and transportation has increased by 24, 30, and 696 percent, respectively, since 1973—when the second span was built—taking 21,000 acres of farmland with it. And in 2020, the Talbot County Council (minus Lesher) gave the greenlight to the controversial Lakeside development that would bring 2,501 homes to Trappe, population 1,228. And then there’s Ocean City.

“The question that nobody’s asking, except for maybe a couple Wicomico County commissioners, is can the beaches, which are already crowded, already having an incredibly difficult time finding staff, accommodate or handle induced demand?” poses ESLC’s Kline, who calls the traffic a “16-week-a- year problem.” “How much more can we love these beach communities before it perhaps becomes a problem of loving them too much?”

Ninety-seven percent of buildable land has been developed in Ocean City, which includes more than 10,000 hotel rooms. And updates to West Ocean City’s sewer and water service could prime the former suburb for further spillover.

“I think there’s still room to grow here,” says Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent, estimating that the majority of his town’s now eight million annual visitors come from the Bay Bridge, though others also undoubtedly arrive via the expanded Route 1 in Delaware. “I think the pleasurable culture of the Eastern Shore is affected today by the current capacity issues. . . . [A new bridge] will be certainly more beneficial than it will be detrimental.”

Meehan has signed on to a coalition of officials from 12 of Maryland’s 23 counties, some of whom have specifically asked for a replacement bridge featuring a minimum of eight lanes, larger than the six-lane Brooklyn Bridge and San Francisco Golden Gate.

“Will there be more traffic? There always will be more traffic,” says the group’s founder and Queen Anne’s commissioner-at-large Jim Moran, who owns a concrete company in Crofton. “Going from five lanes to eight lanes with shoulders for safety reasons will allow that traffic to flow,” adding that the number does indeed factor in future growth.

The exact scale of a prospective future crossing will be decided sooner than originally thought, as this June, Governor Hogan announced that he would be fully funding the $28-million Tier 2 NEPA study. “People have kicked the can down the road for literally decades . . . no one ever took the steps to say, how are we going to fix this, and that’s just what we’ve decided to do,” says Hogan. “This really has to do with the health of the entire state.”

Hogan, who is nearing the end of his final term, has made the bridge corridor a top priority of his administration, paving the way to the beach through Route 404 expansion, Salisbury bypass upgrades, and funding for the congested Ocean City Expressway. For the record, his Annapolis-based real estate company, currently owned by a non-blind trust and run by his brother, Timothy, also has multiple development projects in Anne Arundel County and on the Eastern Shore, among other locations.

“You have to ask yourself: With so many unanswered questions, why the rush?” says QACA’s Falstad, who hopes that the state will exhaust its transportation management strategies and non-car alternative options before constructing a multi-billion-dollar crossing. “There are other projects in Maryland that I’m sure Larry Hogan can put his name on. This doesn’t need to be one of them.”

The NEPA study’s final results will come down to the consideration of Maryland’s next governor, but in the meantime, Secretary Ports says managing the bridge, now and in the future, boils down to sheer volume. These days, 91 percent of commuting adults use a personal vehicle, and car ownership, increasingly electric or self-driving or not, continues to outpace people. The affordable $2.50 base toll—compared to the $5 Delaware Memorial or the $14 Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia—likely doesn’t hurt, either.

“It’s a difficult task and you get a lot of criticism, but at the end of the day, we could do nothing, and it would really back up,” he says. “As I’ve told people on both sides of the shore: If you can tell me how to put eight gallons of water into a five-gallon bucket, I’m all ears. That’s the traffic problem that we have on the bridge—there’s just too many cars trying to go at the same time for two or three lanes of traffic. Period.”

All the while, amid the clamor, the 70- and 49-year-old bridges stand quietly above the Chesapeake. This Memorial Day weekend, sailboats passed between the spans below and watermen loitered around the piers while a projected 330,000 cars drove across the top.

A stone’s throw from the old ferry pier sits a brick MDTA building just south of Sandy Point, and inside, the office of Bay Bridge administrator Richard Jaramillo faces that incessant flow of traffic.

From this vantage point, Jaramillo conducts the round-the-clock orchestra that is keeping both bridges as safe and operational as possible. He coordinates with some 100 colleagues—from police and emergency response departments to maintenance and construction teams to the 24/7 operations command center—who together oversee everything from clearing debris to cleaning up accidents to inspecting the superstructure from top to bottom. At all hours, they assess weather and wind conditions, control navigational lights for ships and airplanes, and monitor more than 14 video surveillance cameras.

“It’s a juggling act that goes on constantly, every day, by the minute,” says Jaramillo, who sometimes gets stuck in the backups himself while commuting from Kent Island, “just like everyone else—we all share the pain.”

It’s a polarizing position, he knows, being at the helm of this bridge, even recalling one woman he dated before her father found out his job title: “We’re not seeing each other any longer.”

Despite his intimate knowledge, Jaramillo has no official preference for its future, though he regularly attends meetings for the Bay Bridge Reconstruction Advisory Group between state officials and community members, certain to be involved in whatever comes next.

“Richard is just here to make sure the traffic gets through safely and efficiently,” he says with a broad smile. “You deal me the cards and I’ll figure out how to make it work.”

For now, both spans are in fine condition, as they should be until 2065, says Jaramillo, who even once climbed the suspension cables all the way to the tippy-top.

“It was an experience, everything was moving, and it’s supposed to,” he says. From way up there, “it gives you a whole different level of respect and appreciation—for the people who built it, who designed it, who work on it today.”

People like photographer Timothy Hyman, who stood there more than 70 years ago, before that bridge had become the bridge.

“When I tell people what I did, they don’t believe me, then I show them the pictures,” says Hyman, sitting amongst them. “I walked with my camera, and there I was...”

The fish that won Glen Frost $1.65 million had probably been hooked before. Caught 55 miles off the Maryland coast, on the edge of a deepwater shelf along the submarine Baltimore Canyon, the white marlin was huge—close to 8 feet from its rapier bill to its forked tail fin—tipping the scales when it was brought back to the docks at Ocean City’s Harbour Island Marina at nearly 100 pounds. Pulled in at the 11th hour of last year’s White Marlin Open, it was the third-largest white marlin landed in the tournament’s nearly four and a half decades, and its girth indicated it had been around for a while, maybe 25 or 30 years, and knew how to get off a line. “Certainly not a dumb fish if it had grown that big,” Frost says. “And it did everything it could to get away.”

A successful Annapolis-based tax attorney who grew up fishing the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County, Frost is a serious outdoorsman. He lives at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on Kent Island and has fished the Pacific off Costa Rica and Panama. He estimates it took him 20-25 minutes to reel in the prize-winning catch, which he caught in the final afternoon hours before the official end of the five-day tournament. “It jumped [out of the water] several times. I saw right away it was a white marlin,” Frost says. “I knew I had to keep the line as tight as I could. Otherwise it would shake its head until the lure came loose. I just had tunnel vision. Nothing else in the world existed for those 20-25 minutes except me and that fish.”

Winning the “Super Bowl of Sport Fishing,” as the White Marlin Open is sometimes called, in such dramatic fashion was a thrill beyond Frost’s wildest dreams. Getting strapped to a polygraph machine the next morning inside a claustrophobic hotel room on Coastal Highway, not so much. “It was an interrogation,” says the 33-year-old Frost, adding he won’t be competing in the tournament again this month—or, most likely, ever. “They were very aggressive.”

Here’s the catch with the White Marlin Open—the largest and richest billfishing tournament in the world—and similar big-money fishing events: The stakes are so high, the cheating so widespread, that organizers must institute protections to maintain the integrity of the competition. Back in the early 2000s, the WMO implemented polygraph tests for winners for the first time, and now anyone winning more than $50,000 is basically required to submit to a lie-detector screening before they can collect their dough (the total purse for this month’s 45th annual tournament is expected to exceed $5 million).

Those polygraphs are to ensure anglers play by the rules, that they don’t rig illegal lures or stuff their catches with ice, smaller fish, or lead sinkers—all of which have been done at other tournaments—to add weight. Or that the winning fish hasn’t been pre-purchased from a commercial trawler—which, yes, has happened, too—and packed in ice before the tournament. Or that the winning boat didn’t drop lines in the water prior to the official start time, which is the rule the 2016 White Marlin Open winner was actually found guilty of violating. That federal case, The White Marlin Open, Inc. et al v. Philip G. Heasley, the most expensive scandal in sport fishing history, was finally decided a couple of months ago in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. It cost Heasley, the CEO of a Florida-based financial company, all of his $2.82 million in winnings—more money than Tiger Woods ever took home for winning the Masters golf tournament.

In fact, it cost him more than the $2.82 million in winnings. Heasley spent, “conservatively”—his word—$3 million in legal fees trying to win back his title.

If this all sounds a little crazy, it’s about to get crazier: While Frost was out hooking his award-winning marlin last August, he was also a lawyer involved in the litigation surrounding the contested 2016 results. Some members of the crew he was representing—anglers who stood to receive additional purse money freed if the courts ruled Heasley’s team had started fishing too early the year before—had invited him to cast lines with them.

In other words, Frost caught the 2017 winning white marlin in the Atlantic as he was helping take down the 2016 tourney winner in a Lombard Street courtroom.  But hold on. This is a fishing story, so there’s always one more twist. Frost did not pass his initial polygraph last year.

The White Marlin Open issued a press release immediately after the contest last August stating one winner had failed their polygraph—nine fishermen who stood to take home more than $50,000 in purse money were tested—and another winning angler’s initial exam had come back “inconclusive.” In June, WMO founder Jim Motsko confirmed to Baltimore that last year’s inconclusive result, which wasn’t made public, had indeed come from Frost, who did later pass a second polygraph and receive his giant check after a two-month-long investigation. (Motsko noted Frost had been the only member of his boat who hadn’t passed his initial polygraph; in Heasley’s case, all four of the crew members failed.)

When asked about the details of his lie-detector test, Frost declined to answer. Nor did he wish to respond to queries about the follow-up exam or the nature of the questions he was asked while attached to the machine. He would only describe the whole thing afterward as “very bizarre.” “It should be named the White Marlin Fishing Open and Polygraph Tournament.”

WHITE MARLIN OPEN FOUNDER JIM MOTSKO. -AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

According to a long-ago history penned by James Edward “Scoop” Collins, an Ocean City businessman and World War II Navy veteran, it was a Florida angler, Capt. John Mickle, who caught the first recorded marlin off the Maryland coast, hooking a single white in 1934. A year earlier, the Great Hurricane of 1933 had dumped a week of rain before driving 80-mph winds and a 7-foot tide to shore, unexpectedly carving out a natural inlet over the worst of its 36-hour span. The monumental disaster turned Assateague into an island and, fortuitously, it turned out, opened a gaping passage to the Atlantic from Ocean City, a boon to the town’s fishing and resort economy.

It was also in 1934, in the storm’s aftermath, that angler Jack Townsend, fishing with his brother, Paul, first discovered a mother lode of white marlin offshore—at a destination still known as “The Jackspot”—that would later earn O.C. the title “White Marlin Capital of the World.” On July 29, 1939, a record 171 white marlin were boated at Townsend’s favorite spot—at the time, the greatest single-day haul of white marlin ever recorded anywhere. Attracted by the burgeoning publicity surrounding the billfishing hotbed, celebrities from all over the East Coast had started making forays to the Delmarva Peninsula. President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived too late from Washington that record-breaking Saturday to land any white marlin, but he caught two the next day.

Those halcyon days peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when an average of more than 2,200 of the fast-swimming fish were caught each year. (No period since has remotely approached those figures, largely, it’s suspected, because of inadvertent killings by commercial trawlers.) It was on the cusp of that era, in 1966, that Motsko, then a 20-year-old College Park student with a love for fishing, came down to Ocean City and got hired as a mate on Capt. Fred Kerstetter’s boat, Katherine.

After finishing school and trying his hand at banking and real estate, Motsko continued to pull summers as a mate on various boats. Still wiry and perpetually in motion at 71, he explains that he desperately wanted to find a way to stay in the fishing business year-round. “I had one job [working on a boat] that I loved but didn’t make any money; another I didn’t like [in a bank] and didn’t make any money; and another [in real estate] that I hated but made money,” Motsko recalls. “I remember telling my wife, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do something that you liked and also make a little money?’ But I really started the tournament so I could fish it. I couldn’t afford to pay a charter and enter one of the events that were around then.” (For the record, Motsko fished his tournament for the first 34 years, winning money—$4,000—once.)

In 1974, the first tournament drew 57 boats vying for $20,000 in prize money, and Ocean City Mayor Harry Kelly presented a $5,000 check (which thankfully didn’t bounce) to the winner. The week was plagued by wind and rain, and when it was over, Motsko had lost money. “The first two years, we had to get a loan to pay the winners. The third year, we broke even, and I thought we were on our way because we didn’t have to borrow money to pay out the prizes,” Motsko says with a laugh. Right about that time, Motsko also purchased Paul’s Tackle Shop, which had been open for 30 years and was the center of big-game fishing in the area. With the tackle shop serving as base of operations, the tournament drew 147 boats in 1977, surpassing all other billfishing tournaments in the world—an honor it has held ever since—and becoming a family enterprise in the process when his two daughters joined the business. Last year, nearly 3,000 anglers in 353 registered boats entered the fray, many paying up to $30,000 to participate in the tournament’s big betting pools, which are known as calcuttas and generate the huge payouts. “We took it year by year,” Motsko says. “Never in my life did I dream this.”

By “this,” Motsko means the biggest week of the year in Ocean City, when hotels and slips are booked solid; when the restaurants, beaches, and boardwalk are packed; and the invasion of hi-tech, 60-foot-plus boats, and gigantic dead fish draw thousands of fans to the daily weigh-ins.

And, now, of course, the controversy and litigation.

“It’s been a miserable two years,” Motsko admits. “But we were backed into a corner.”

the official weigh-ins at Harbour Island, WHERE PARTYING CROWDS watch the anglers bring in their DAILY CATCHES. -getty images

If you are not a sport fisherman, if your only contact with sea life comes via a menu or the National Aquarium, it may be difficult to get a feel for the White Marlin Open. It’s kind of like NASCAR on the ocean. “A battle of redneck pride,” Frost says with a laugh. The biggest, best, and fastest boats here generally cost in the $2 million to $5 million range—so it’s mostly a lot of rich guys who own these vessels, which, with their air conditioners, flat-screen TVs, granite-top kitchens, and stately bedrooms, feel more like luxury yachts than your pal’s little powerboat. (From a distance, when these boats take off together in the morning, they look like an armada of massive white Chevy Suburbans hauling ass across the water.) Some contestants simply hire charter boats for the tournament. Private owners, on the other hand, typically hire a captain and a pair of mates, similar to a pit crew, if you will, that enable the boat’s owner and friends to focus on fishing. And drinking beer. As with NASCAR, the politics of the participants and their fans also hue pretty conservative, which has occasionally sparked controversy. In 2016, “White Lives Matter” T-shirts produced by a local vendor mocked the Black Lives Matter movement with a nod to the namesake fish of the tournament.

The names of some boats, too—Skirt Chaser, for example—also evoke a culture closer to say, Mad Men, than the 21st century.

But not every competitor is a financial-industry CEO or high-priced lawyer; more seem to have earned their fortunes in traditional, old-school family businesses—printing, construction, government contracting, manufacturing. They all, however, have modern advantages onboard: global-positioning technology, up-to-the-minute satellite weather information, current and mapping systems, and dual-dredge bait operations to attract their prey.

Sport fishing is still sport fishing, and even with all those fancy amenities, or maybe because of them, there is lot of sleeping-off hangovers on the way out to sea (runs to the nearby canyons take 4-5 hours, translating into 4 a.m. launches), and then waiting in the sun, sipping Coors Light and noshing sandwiches while hoping something takes an interest in one of the colorful plastic lures trailing off the back of the boat. “You’ve seen Jaws, right?” angler Frank Massa joked mischievously with a pair of fishing buddies as he cranked a big reel in super-slow motion last year aboard a boat up from Mobile, Alabama, imitating the foreboding click-click-click from the grizzled fisherman Quint’s first encounter with the movie’s infamous shark. In the 1975 film, that click-click-click served as the ever-so-subtle signal that the killer fish had grabbed the bait and was readying for an epic run.

Around the Alabama boat, however, all was calm for nearly their entire second day out. “That’s fishing: hours of boredom, interrupted by moments of chaos,” one of Massa’s crewmates chimed in after an early-morning catch, the only bite of the day.

Along with the top prize at the end of the week for the heaviest white marlin—the biggest payout—and for biggest blue marlin, tuna, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and shark, there are smaller daily prizes. Despite their names, the blues and the whites share the same color schemes: royal blue on top and a whitish-silver underneath. What sets them apart is their size. Blue marlin can grow to more than 1,000 pounds, 10 times the size of their white cousins. Blues are so enormous they generally aren’t afraid of anything, including biting on a line—the problem is getting them onto the boat. Whites are more cautious, and pound-for-pound extremely tough fighters, which is what makes them such a great challenge.

Certainly there is something primal to big-game fishing in what feels like the middle of the ocean. It’s tempting to say masculine as well, but more women, though still a tiny overall percentage, are fishing the tournament each year. (Cheryl McLeskey, of Virginia Beach, won in 2015 with a 94-pound white marlin.) There is also something disconcerting, to an outsider at least, in watching winners grin and pose for photos alongside the enormous, gorgeous fish they’ve just taken from the sea for sport and trophy.

The packed ritual weigh-ins at the Harbour Island Marina each afternoon and evening are also a little disconcerting. They are a strange blend of reality TV and spring break for sunburned, middle-aged adults. Bon Jovi, Tom Petty, and George Thorogood blare from the speakers. Local journalists (this is the stuff of front-page news in Delmarva) inevitably descend with notebooks and cameras for interviews as the hunters unload their catches and bask in the anticipation and attention of the crowd. Witnessing the slightly inebriated audience cheer and applaud while one of the huge animals is strung up by its tail overhead—its weight and length called out by an announcer—adds to the surreal spectacle.

The fact that these animals have been considered for the U.S. threatened species list—though commercial fishing lines, which inadvertently catch the marlins, are the overwhelming culprit—doesn’t dispel the feeling that sport fishing is more akin to a safari than fishing the local trout stream for recreation (and maybe dinner, if you’re lucky). The thousands of gallons of diesel fuel burned each tournament cannot be good for the marlin’s survival, either. The use of circle hooks, which are more difficult for fish to swallow, does make successful catch-and-release efforts for commercial and sport fishermen more likely and should help rebuild the stock of marlin and other fish. Motsko says that 98 percent of the billfish caught during the tournament are released.

“We’ve been at the forefront of conservation efforts,” Motsko says, adding that he’s also proud that hundreds of pounds of meat each year from the competition get filleted on the docks by a volunteer for the Maryland Food Bank.

An aerial view of the boats coming in at the White Marlin Open in Ocean City. -MARYLAND COAST DISPATCH

The most pressing concern facing the White Marlin Open is the continued use of so-called lie-detector tests. It’s a 1920s technology that, as most people know from TV detective shows and movies, measures physiological indices, including blood pressure, pulse, and respiration, as an individual, i.e., a likely suspect, is asked a series of questions. The underpinning theory is that false or deceptive responses generate physiological responses different from those associated with non-deceptive responses. Yet, no specific physiological reactions are associated with lying. Confounding matters, each polygraph examiner uses their own scoring method.

The FBI, the CIA, and many police departments may still use polygraphs in interrogations, but polygraphs are not admissible in prosecuting criminal cases because of their fallibility. They can, however—although it’s rare—sometimes be introduced as evidence when both parties have previously agreed to their use in the form of a contract, for example, as participants do in signing up for The White Marlin Open. A 2003 National Research Council study found “little basis” that a polygraph test would demonstrate an extremely high accuracy.

Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett ruled the polygraph exams could be admitted in the Heasley case and that the WMO complied with its obligations under tournament rules. He also went by more than polygraph tests in rendering his judgment: During eight days of testimony, Bennett looked at GPS reporting, photography and logs, as well as the crews’ conflicting accounts in concluding that fishing lines had been dropped prior to the official start time.

Heasley, for his part, told the court that “he never wears a watch” and that he had trusted his hired crew to follow the rules. He doesn’t believe, based on the evidence, that his team did anything wrong. He also says he defended himself in court against the tournament to protect his personal reputation and prove he had won the largest billfishing tournament in the world—an accomplishment, he acknowledges, he could hang a hat on for the rest of his life.

“Do I have regrets about spending that much money to fight this thing?” Heasley asks. “Absolutely, I do. I’d promised my crew half of anything we win, and I could’ve just given them each the share that I feel like we rightly won instead of spending it on lawyers. I also could’ve given the money to charity.”

Heasley, 69, one of nine children, grew up fishing on Long Island Sound with his grandfathers and dad. He referred to the polygraph testing as a dehumanizing experience. “They asked me if I had ever lied to my parents,” he says. “And if I had ever lied to my wife or would I. Of course I had lied to my parents, but I don’t want to answer those kind of questions in front of people I don’t know.”

Heasley has no intention of stopping fishing, but he is ambivalent about entering another high-stakes derby. Although, he did attempt to enter the White Marlin Open again last year. “They sent my [entrance] money back.”

He also is ambivalent regarding future legal action. His last appeal in federal court was denied, but a civil suit remains a possibility. “I’m in the ‘no’ camp,” Heasley says of further litigation. “But I have a lot of people around me in the ‘yes’ camp.”

Motsko maintains he has never accused Heasley or his crew of anything other than failing the polygraph tests. Once that happened, however, he was left with little choice but to strip their winnings—otherwise he faced lawsuits from other winners, who would inevitably demand their full cut of prize money.

“We started using it [the polygraph exams] because of rumors that kept flying around each year about cheating,” says Motsko. The 2016 and 2017 tournaments were not the first time for failed tests at the White Marlin Open. After the 2007 tournament, a second-place winner in the blue marlin category failed a pair of polygraphs, losing out on several hundred thousand dollars. “A lot of tournaments were already using them by the time we started [in 2004].”

The tournament has tried different refereeing approaches, including putting observers on boats, which is a practice used elsewhere. Motsko found it unworkable logistically. “With the early start times, boats deciding at the last minute which days to fish because of the weather, observers getting seasick, and other issues, it was impossible,” he says.

It should be noted that cheating in sport fishing is hardly limited to Maryland. In particular, it appears to be endemic to bass fishing, which has been plagued by black market networks that sell and deliver prize-winning fish to anglers. In Alabama, two men were sentenced to jail time for cheating in a tournament after being charged with tampering with a sport contest. Other states have enacted laws to combat the problem.

Some White Marlin Open participants have suggested placing video equipment on boats to expose cheating or deploying surveillance helicopters. The tournament’s boundaries are considerable, however, from Central New Jersey to Virginia Beach.

Motsko says he has no plans to make any changes.

Although Frost won’t be competing at this year’s tournament, he has no intention of missing it.

“I’m not fishing, but I am going down there this year,” Frost says, adding that the publicity from the trial has been great for his law business. “It’s still a great party all week. And who knows? I may even pick up another client.”

Because, as a trophy-hunting angler and tax attorney would understand better than anyone, greed and the desire to win are primal urges, too, as big as any marlin.