doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Happy New Year

Happy and Healthy New Year to one and all 🦫

Wishing everyone here a safe and Happy New Year!
Karl

Happy Huntin' in the New Year

Happy New year to everyone.

Happy New Year:
1) Chincoteague map
2) Oysters and Smith Island cake
3) 0630 Nautical twilight
4) 0700 Civil twilight
5) 0717 Dawn 2025 in North America

Happy New Year to all my friends here, and my friends yet to be. May God bless us all in this next year.

Day is dawning on a new era!

That map brings back so many memories. I grew up near Princess Anne and Salisbury Md. Hunted on family and friends land from Seaford DE, just north of Laurel DE, down to Chincoteague VA, over to just above Cambridge MD, back east to Fenwick Island and inherited three very small islands in the Chesapeake Bay, which no longer exist. Fantastic diver duck hunting and more than as few black ducks were taken off those islands. I could hunt every day, every bird, every wind condition without fail. I could name every river, creek and gut from the top to bottom of that area. I was so blessed and never even knew it at the time. So much has change and been built up in the last 60 years like everywhere else. The area is more like fully developed New Jersey than the wonderful places of my youth.

In fact if you were to zoom in on part of the farm I grew up on you would see 26 monster chicken houses. You can see them without much effort on a Google Earth photo. That area of the farm was five modest fields, separated by hedge row, not the million plus chickens, growing there today. I wish my father never sold off those fields, to his friend who just wanted to build a house. He passed and the next owner had other plans. They wont allow him to build anymore chicken houses because they figured out if a avian flu outbreak occurs the entire poultry industry could be decimated. Do you have any idea how big a hole you need to bury 60,000 dead birds? I have seen that happen. A million plus would be a mini Grand Canyon.

It was a fantastic place to grow up in the 50's and 60's. Every bird but turkeys, ducks and geese, deer, rabbits and land could be hunted with just a simple asking the owner. I loved quail, dove, ducks and geese hunting. Limits filled before the sun was fully up, or quail taken over bird dogs with little formal training but still a pleasure to watch. Walk out the rear of the house and hunt in any direction for several miles. Now every farm is posted and most new owners are appalled about nasty guns in hands of hunters who they think want to kill everything in sight. I have nurtured more quail in the last 50 years, trying to establish hunt-able wild populations than the tree hungers every will. Fighting mother nature, predators on land and in the air, evolving land use, changing crops, efficiency that left field devoid of anything to support a mouse, much less a covey of quail and then fighting the State of Maryland game department. All they, the state, are interested in are deer and turkeys, plus mismanagement of every other game species. Trust me deer need no help and turkeys are a pestilence on my land.

My best day of quail hunting I killed three legal limits of quail, in a single one day, in three different states when I was 16. But in those days we had quail in every hedge row and weed patch you came across. Today you would be lucky to flush three limits in a month of hunting. It makes me sad to go back there and see all the changes. My home farm has two covey of quail today, instead of the dozen plus in my youth. But I guess every old fart since 1492 has had the same regret.

My Dad was stationed in Salisbury and I started elementary school there. I remember a few weekend trips to Ocean City. My Dad deer hunted somewhere in that part of the world, and in New Jersey, somewhere in Morris County. I was too little to participate.

Development is the machinery of civilization, and is pretty much unstoppable.

Best,
Ted

Gene,
That map shows what appears to be a wreck marker for the USS Cyclops. I wasn’t aware that it had been found.

Terrible tragedy. Mostly forgotten, today.

Best,
Ted

The Eastern Shore (Delmarva peninsula) is really a world unto itself. Michiner's novel "Chesapeake" describes it pretty well. For years it had its own accent, . . .very Scottish with "house" pronounced 'huse"... though this seems to be dying out.

I take back roads down to Chincoteague and try to pass through Snow Hill to get an idea of the past prosperity of the place. The grandiose turn of the century houses in that little town are impressive (as is the sheriff's office trying ticket every car passing through). The peninsula was and still is a major truck farming area but much of it is returning to wilderness as the small towns slowly crumble. Wild life abounds and the birds seem plentiful. Long bare fields with corn stubble and in places bits of green from some winter planting along with khaki colored tufted cattails making a 10' soft mattress like left-over of some sort of crop dot the landscape interspersed with woodlots and forests. Some large agri-businesses have a few factories, storage siloes but most of the small industries have withered except a small number of sawmills. Signs pointing to boat ramps are ubiquitous.

There used to be a rail line connecting Cape Charles - where rail cars were barged across the Chesapeake to Norfolk - connecting to Philadelphia and NYC. There still are several small branch lines running from the Virginia line up through Maryland into Delaware....there were two diesel engines with 8 cars for hauling produce on a track near highway 13. The bartender in Chincoteague....and this time of year it's only the locals, watermen mostly, hanging out there - recalled his great-grandfather loading up wagons of oysters to take to the tracks for shipment north. He mentioned that the Virginia part had stayed occupied during "the War."

People who grew up near the Eastern Shore or "the Shore" (and "Old Colonel" is one of them) clearly understand what a unique environment it is. Incidentally, the national park police on both Chincoteague and Assateague (Maryland side of the line) are the heaviest armed park police I've ever seen. Every Park SUV has an M-4 5.56 with the full auto switch activated and a Remington Marine Magum 870 striped to the roll bars and most carry two sidearms. Either they are expecting an invasion, the local stills are a problem, or major smuggling operations cross those deserted beaches.

As for government for 120 years Maryland has been regarded as the most intrinsically corrupt state on the East Coast. I can't imagine they efficiently manage anything. But. . .you get what you vote for...or what is gerrymandered.

Here is a close up of the sunrise which gives a better feel of what one sees. The colors are nature's. (Looks like a Whistler painting "Symphony in Grey and Orange?", or perhaps more like Turner).