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The Beach Bounces Back

I'm on board Apolónia, a 43-foot cabin cruiser, riding in Colonial Beach's River Festival boat parade. River Fest is the city most do and it has been held annually since 1951, come hell or high water, believe me, they have had plenty of both. We have just pulled out of the Potomac from the shelter of Monroe Bay, which forms the city's back door and work our way north, past the Colonial Beach Yacht Center and Gum Bar Point and heading for the once and future municipal pier. To our starboard and extends aft is the famous Kettle Bottom Shoals, historically some of the richest oyster banks in the world. It's about 1:30 in the afternoon and in June the sky is overcast and threatening, but Potomac is flat and happy, at least it feels that way, comfort ofApolonia. Her owner, Paul Bolin is at the wheel, easing us along the parade route in the number two position, just behind the fleet commander and the rest of the flock.

It is just here because I'm beyond six nautical miles across the Potomac and then back to the city famous three-mile beach, it strikes me: it's a good thing I did not run this boat, because if I was at the helm I would be dodging ghosts. You see, just the portion of the Potomac, 60 miles from Washington and 40 from Point Lookout, is positively packed with historical visions, and this afternoon I see them every way I turn. For example, off the starboard shoulder, I see a ghostly fleet of British warships, which bowed with his hand across oyster-thick shoals on the way to capture Washington. It is 1814, and they will succeed. Coming back down the river they will have an extra 25 premium ships in tow, and again crews will relieve everything and dragging ships over shoals by hand. A slow and painful process, to be sure, but still they will make it to Baltimore harbor in time for Francis Scott Key to see their rockets' red glare. And now, there, tearing across our wake, it is a Maryland patrol hot on the tail of a local oyster dredger. Hear machine gun fire? One of them is going to end up dead. Now look in front of us, just crossing the American Route 301 bridge is the ghost of the famous Paddle steamer St. Johns, its rails filled with happy early 20th century tourists bound for Colonial Beach. Yes, from the ring of one thousand one-armed bandits to the creak of an oar as a Confederate spy slips between a pair of Federal warships, the water off Colonial Beach is alarming and charming crowded with ghosts.

Paul Bolin is not distracted. He holds Apolónia steadily on her course. His eyes are not in the past but the future of Colonial Beach, and what this city that has had more ups and downs than a Bobber in a five-foot swell, is about to become. Because Colonial Beach last walloped by Isabel's unprecedented storm surge, is just as safe on the way up the next big wave in life Waterman is in decline.

With us on that Sunday drive in the bark is the parade's grand marshals, Sonny and Dottie Schick, who lives next door to Bolin's Bell House Bed & Breakfast, and their son Kyle and his wife Relda. Kyle and Relda is particularly looking forward to a trip up any wave at all, when Isabel was indeed the the second punch in a one-two combination that left their Colonial Beach Yacht Center reeling.

The largest and one of the oldest marinas in the area, became Colonial Beach Yacht Center first devastated in May 2002 by a fire which tore through the marina's docks, blown up boat after boat as so many harbor mines. Fifty-six vessels some of them irreplaceable wood classics were destroyed. Many of them lost woodi would have been with us today in the boat parade, but instead is now a part of yet another spooky flotilla. After the fire set Schick on rebuilding the marina and made good progress, until Isabel rolled through like a bulldozer and overturned around one thousand pound stones and destroy a second 40 boats, many of them on trailers and cradles.

"What the fire did not take the hurricane did," Kyle Schick had told me when we toured Yacht Center Earlier this weekend in a golf cart, Colonial Beach's new vehicle of choice. Damaged during the storm had Yacht Center's wharf restaurant, ship store, boat house boat-lift area, pump-out area and gas station. "We put things back together, but better," Schick said. "We've had a lot of support from the Community and other marinas, but insurance never covers what you think it will. "

The new docks are broader than the old one and all capped with a phone jack and power enough for even the hottest days and the most demanding boats. The new covered docks will be constructed of galvanized trusses and canvas, forming an arch over each release. They will be fire resistant and keep UV rays while letting in the sun. With a number of new docks will already Yacht Center will soon have 100 open slips and covered with 20 slips. There is space for additional 100 boats on the hard. Currently there are 15 transient slips with plans for the 40th

Colonial Beach Yacht Center's position at the entrance to Monroe Bay has long made it attractive for large ships coming and going from Washington, DC, but at the same time it makes the marina more vulnerable to storms than hidden them into Monroe Bay. The facility was originally an oyster packing house established in 1930. During the great hurricane in 1933, floated the building off its hands, but it was overtaken back and a concrete slab was poured to keep it in place. In the 1940s, when the marina was developed with about 200 slips, oyster packing house became a restaurant. Isabel failed to move it, but she did destroy the interior. It has since been restored, and on the quayside restaurant reopened earlier this spring.

Two other popular Colonial Beach restaurants on the water also were destroyed-the Happy Clam and Wilkerson's Restaurant, both at the north end of town. Wilkerson's, since rebuilt, reopened several months ago with fresh fish, piping hot hush puppies and a wall of windows on the Potomac. But Happy Clam has yet to make his comeback.

Although Yacht Center was the only marina in the area to lose both in a storm, others felt the impact as well. January Swink of Nightingale Motel and Marina on Monroe Bay is at the center of her new kitchen to show me where she stood that night, knee-deep in water, see minnows swimming between her toes. "Our docks looked like an accordion in some spots, "she says. In Nightingale's motel rooms, the water rose above headboards, all six units would be completely undone. But as hundreds of other across town, got Swink and her husband Bob to work and was ready to reopen in time for the 2004 sailing season. "And I got to make some changes I wanted, anyway, "she adds, to open doors to show me two new bathrooms and showers for boaters.

Just a little way up the bay from Nightingale Colonial Beach is the last marine railway and a must-see stop for any boat lover. There is doyen of Colonial Beach's marina owners, Mary Virginia Stanford of Stanford's Marine Railway, sits in the ship's store "living room" and shakes his silver head slowly when I ask about the damage from Isabel. "So many people had trees fall on their houses, "she says sadly." In the car the next day, I'd ride a little bit, then cry a little bit. "For the railroad, where for more than 60 years her husband Clarence built boats that are still in use today, wind was blowing from a portion of a roof and the water rose halfway up the shop building. But it did no serious damage, since all the electrical equipment had been moved earlier to higher ground. The slides survived, like the covered bridge, which house both Hermione, a carefully restored 1927 Elco, and Pathfinder II, built the last boat Clarence Stanford.

Back in the city center at Doc's Motel, Ellie Carruthers and her husband, "Little Doc," simply went to bed when it became too dark to take pictures more storms and power failure. "The next morning, I said 'Oh, my God! "Ellie says. The last wave of water had lifted debris into the four-foot fence that separates the city's oldest motel from the Potomac and left it strewn between the two wings of rooms. "We filled eighty big bags," she says. "All set. It was like being in a parade to the dump. Finally they had to close the landfill. "

North of Doc's, the town pier lay in ruins the day, as did a nearby charter boat dock. When I visited place before the boat parade, I could see that the charter boat dock was back in place but the town pier still needs a few more planks to be finished.

Doc's Past and piers stretching Colonial Beach's famous boardwalk once alive with holiday families who needed a wooden footbridge and food stalls. Today it is a concrete pavement snaking through the sand, surrounded only by two or three food dispensers survivors. Buy an ice cream and stroll along the seafront, though, and you will not be alone, will you should be in the company of some of the beach noisiest ghosts-the gambling casinos and dance clubs that drew tens of thousands of eager summer visitors from the late 1940s through the 50s. But sometimes, anti-gambling laws, a fire in 1960, and several past storms took their toll, and Monte Carlo, Jackpot, Joyland, Little Steel Pier and their peers had gone years before Hurricane Isabel was so much as a zephyr in the Sahara. Only Riverboat (once Lille Reno) back, sat down over Maryland-owned Potomac and offer off-track betting, keno, two state lotteries and lunch for a quiet summer crowd. But Riverboat is gone, also once a victim of Isabel. Unlike the others, however, will Riverboat be back.

Peggy Browning Linthacum and Laura Raley, who are sisters preside over a small construction trailer on the beach end of Riverboat's mutilated finger. Their job is to ensure curious-me, for instance, that Riverboat actually being rebuilt. "We had to go all the way through the permit system process which has taken a long time, "Linthacum tells me." But Riverboat was pretty much grandfathered in, so it's finally okayed. "Linthacum and Raley are sisters by Peggy Flanagan, who with her husband Tom have owned the Riverboat since 1992. The new Riverboat, which must adhere to the same footprint as the old one, will actually resemble a riverboat this time Linthacum says, complete with a working paddle wheel. "We were number one lottery sellers in Maryland," Raley says proudly. "Customers want to buy a Virginia lottery tickets and then a Maryland ticket just steps away. "

It was the ability to take the few steps from the Virginia coast to casinos, who sat at long fingers Maryland Potomac, to set the neon blazing and the common a-Jumpin 'from 1949 to 1958, when the one-armed bandit was king of Maryland rides. After completion of U.S. Route 301 bridge across the Potomac in 1941, Colonial Beach was no longer such a long drive from Washington and Baltimore, and the city's hundreds of slot machines, casinos, dance halls, inviting beaches and a boardwalk jam-packed with entertainment gave people plenty of reasons to come.

"We used to open the motel in May fifteenth and stay full all summer, "Ellie Carruthers recalls." If we were full by midday, we wondered what was wrong. "Carruthers himself first came to Colonial Beach, when her father, a bricklayer Washington finally found time to take the family on a precious two weeks vacation. "When I came in 1951, there were slot machines everywhere. It was crazy! "She met Little Doc (his father was Doc) on Riverside and never returned." You would go up on the boardwalk at night, with mothers and fathers and children in all ages, all having a wonderful time, "she tells me as we sit in her small but comfortable motel office. Now in her 70s, Carruthers recently broke her hip, but, unperturbed by the experience, she puts me in her wheelchair to chat while she was lying in the office chair. "I have guests who met on the boardwalk, and other couples who make their reservations about the meeting here at the same time each year. Some of my clients have stayed with me every year for fifty years. I make reservations for them before they even call. "
Watching this year's boat parade from Doc's is one of the motel's first guests there is now a frail old gentleman in his 90s. With him is his daughter, his granddaughter and his great grandson and their families. They have taken six rooms for the weekend. Mary Virginia Stanford is another long-ago come-here to Colonial Beach, who fondly remembers his wild and crazy decade. She met was-here Clarence during World War II while he was in Apalachicola, Fla. on a menhaden fishing expedition with his father. She and Clarence back to Colonial Beach and in 1945 built a marine store and boat works as she says: "We have worked in all our lives. "They are both now in their 80s, and while Mary Virginia is still active, Clarence restricted to a wheelchair.

Mary Virginia had no objection to the old slot machines, though. "I'm all for gambling. Live and let live." She played nickel machine once, she says. "I put one and sixteen got out. I put them in my pocket, went home and bought curtains. "She remembers boardwalk, the old home and the time singer Jimmy Dean," before he became famous, "Came to Colonial Beach to perform." My head came to his belt buckle. "

Stanford also remember Oyster Wars of the 1950s, as Maryland marine police would give chase to the Virgin IANS that was cleaning up Maryland oysters (in the Potomac they were all Maryland oysters). Power dredging had long been known illegal in Maryland, because it tore up that already has fallen oyster beds. Only hand-tonging, slow and labor intensive, was permitted (And on some days, could skipjack scraper under sail). A tong oysters pulled up with what looks very much like a Brobdingnagian post hole digger, bringing only enough for one moderately hungry party hors d'oeuvre. But dredging (or pull) the beds could bring in many more bushels of oysters than tonging. If the illegal dredgers hightailed it, it was not uncommon for the marine patrols to open fire when they drove, sometimes all the way to Monroe Bay.

"I stood in the back with a baby in my arms," Stanford recalls " when police followed a boat into the bay. The two boats came flying into bullets were ricocheting all around me. "Carruthers, also remembers the sound of machine guns at night." The young men would just come up on the beach to be in Virginia, Maryland, where police were after them. I saw a young man walking out of the water and call back, 'You can not get me. "They sat there and waited for him."

17 April 1959 finally bullets found a target and left Colonial Beach resident Berkley Muse died. Road deaths prompted the governors of Maryland and Virginia to reach a compromise and Oyster Wars, which had been led out and on for a century or more less ceased.

But which oysters slackened harvest and slots disappeared, vacation habits changed, too, and for the next 40 years, Colonial Beach was a calm place, yes, "a dream of a colorful past," as Frederick Adapted called it in his 1978 book, it was Potomac River.

In 1985, residents discovered a few ghosts they had not even known. One morning after a bad storm, strollers come in several skeletal feet sticking out of a sandbank at Gum Bar Point. When excavated, the bodies all showed they had received a blow to the skull. "They probably were immigrants forced out of Baltimore bars in the late 1800s to work aboard a skipjack oystering, Kyle Schick "tells me that Apolónia crossing what is now often called Ghost Points." This was their payoff. "

Now it seems that Colonial Beach is about to receive a payoff of a very different kind. In the past year, have real estate prices grew wings, and real estate agents as Bob Swink of Colonial Beach Realty can not keep enough listings to meet demand. Homes selling now often within a week come to market something of a novelty for the home – owners of Virginia's Northern Neck. Michael Wardman, who recently invested in a block of downtown real estate of his own, told me that for the price he bought his Colonial Beach home for a few years since he could not even buy a lot now. Housing starts are way up as well. "In the last two years we have built about ninety new homes. Before that it was less than ten years, "Town Manager Brian Hooter said." beach has been rediscovered. "

Colonial Beach's Planning and Zoning Commission also granted preliminary approval to two large development projects. The bigger would put an 18-hole championship golf course and around 900 homes on 600 acres near Wilkerson's Restaurant. The second, more controversial because it includes a proposed marina will provide 250 homes, mostly town houses and boat slips for residents on 50 acres borders Monroe Point. "With all this growth, the city the biggest challenge now is maintaining its charm," Wardman said. "It is a great opportunity."

It is a challenge much on the mind of Brian Hooter, so good. About 10 years ago, the city bought up all the boardwalk's neglected and abandoned properties and then demolished them. Now the city has put these four acres of land next to the bid, hoping to draw an offer to develop the area with tourist-friendly businesses. Once you've done this twice, "said Hooter, the city is still not satisfied. "These proposals have been weighed against residential," said Hooter. "We want commercial software, used by tourists and residents-like restaurants and ice cream parlors. "The proposed housing projects are also multi-story, as both Hooter and Wardman against." I am against high-and mid-rise buildings here, " Wardman said. "I do not think it would be a good decision because it would make Colonial Beach look like everywhere else."

Paul Bolin, also a prime mover in Colonial Beach's renaissance. He is president of the Chamber of Commerce in addition to operating time House Bed & Breakfast with his wife Anne and guests at Apolónia four-course dinner cruises. He is also a pioneer "Vision 2015" which he says will develop a consensus among the residents of the city's leadership and growth. "I think the town will change," he tells me that he keeps Apolónia off the town pier, so we can see the rest of the parade. "But when you start to develop it hard to control where it goes. There is no rheostat. "

"In this city, it is often the older residents, those who were young in the 50s, there want to see the city get crazy again, "said Relda Schick coming up to sit beside me on Apolónia's flying bridge, as we see it Elco slide elegantly by." And it is the young who want to preserve its cozy charm. It is one of the irony in Colonial Beach. "

There are at least one occupant, how ever, who would like have it both ways. "I would like to see some progress, but I would hate to see things change," Mary Virginia Stanford had said to me as a duck walked in the front door the ship's store at Stanford's Marine Railway. And the mallard, at least, was no ghost.

About the Author

By Jody Schroath, Senior Editor for Chesapeake Bay Magazine. For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

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