ON THE CHESAPEAKE BAY - Motoring through lifeless waters, charter boat captain Richie Gaines suddenly ran into a patch boiling with hundreds of silver-bellied rockfish, packed together so tightly they were leaping out of the water.
Tails thrashed. Seagulls shrieked and dove at the feast near the mouth of the Chester River. Gaines unholstered his fly rod, plucking out 27 fish in just a few minutes, reeling in another with nearly every cast.
He might have been delighted - but instead he found the thicket of fish disturbing. This summer has been one of the worst in the Chesapeake Bay's history for low-oxygen "dead zones," which force fish to flee into the few remaining areas where they can breathe.
"We call it `the squeeze,'" said Gaines, president of the Chesapeake Guides Association. "Eighty percent of the fish get squeezed into 20 percent of the water. Getting them is like shooting fish in a barrel. That's good for fishermen, but the bad news is that all the charter boats are annihilating them. It's a sign that the bay is dying."
These dead zones occur when farm fertilizer and other pollutants mix with warm water to feed algae blooms, which rot and consume oxygen, making it hard for marine life to breathe. The wind blows this bad water around the bay, and fish and crabs move into the few remaining high-oxygen areas. Oysters can't escape, so they often die.
"People tend to think of the dead zone in real stark terms, that it kills everything in it," said Bill Goldsborough, senior fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "But it's actually a very subtle thing. Of course, fish can move, and you see lots of fish and crabs being herded and crowded by the moving dead zone. Fishermen can have a phenomenal day if they hit it just right."
Early last month, about 41 percent of the bay's main section had less than the 5 milligrams of dissolved oxygen per liter of water needed for healthy fish reproduction, the second-worst August reading in two decades of monitoring, according to the federal Chesapeake Bay Program. By late last month, as the waters cooled, the number was 28 percent.
David Jasinski, water-quality data analyst for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said water with slightly less than 5 milligrams of oxygen wouldn't immediately kill a rockfish or crab. But it would stress their health, retard their growth, harm reproduction and force them to keep moving in search of good water.
