High Tide

THE CONSUMER confidence index fell 9.1 points in October, to 117.3, the lowest in nearly two years and the fourth straight monthly drop, according to the Conference Board, a private research group in New York.How important is the consumer confidence index?As the holidays approach, what does the drop mean for retail sales, home sales and sales of big-ticket items?Tim MartinSenior economist, NationsBankOne way to put it into perspective is that the level it is now is close to as high as it got in the 1980s, when the economy was doing very well.

TILGHMAN ISLAND - Darrin Lowery held a black bit of stone that he found on this Tilghman Island beach 23 years ago. It is triangular and smaller than a nickel, with two smooth sides and a fine edge.It was part of a tool used about 11,000 years ago, he said, when the Chesapeake Bay did not exist and early Marylanders shared a frigid climate with woolly mammoths, mastodons and the occasional saber-toothed tiger.Lowery has found dozens of Paleoindian artifacts in this overgrown patch about the size of a city block.

ECOLOGICALLY appropriate, elegant, useful and cheap -- here is why this columnist gives friends who explore the Chesapeake copies of Tidelog for Christmas year after year.Bay boaters are inescapably shallow water boaters. At about a million feet long, about 100,000 feet at its widest point, with an average depth of 21 to 22 feet, the Chesapeake spreads far and wide, but exceedingly thin.Much of this estuary's essence flows from its bottom being close to its surface, from the shoal draft design of skipjacks to jungles of light-loving underwater vegetation, and the surfeits of waterfowl and soft crabs, and water-fowlers and crabbers and crab-towns -- all linked to these grassy, fecund shallows.

With the full moon coming Saturday, wildlife watchers can catch a glimpse of nature at work along the Atlantic shoreline of Maryland and Delaware, as the horseshoe crab comes ashore with an age-old purpose.At the full moon of May and June each year, the horseshoe crab ride the high tides onto the beaches to lay and fertilize their eggs, and when the eggs have been laid, numbers of migratory shorebirds congregate to feed.The birds are on their way from South America, where they have spent the winter, to the Arctic, where they will summer and breed.

Flounder came alive in Ocean City last week. Many of the flounder were too small to keep, "throwbacks" under the legal size limit of 14 inches, but the action was there. The bay party boat Tortuga, out of Bahia Marina, had several morning trips with over 100 flounder caught. The "keeper" to "throwback" ratio was approximately 1 in 5.Anglers found that the high tide produced most of the flounder catches. Two hours before and two hours after high tide is the key time to go fishing. Fishing between the inlet and the U.S. 50 bridge was an excellent area to drift.

It's been two years now, a hundred weekly columns; more rare opportunities for acquaintance of the Chesapeake region than many folks get in a lifetime.There have been people who expressed nature so eloquently:Mitchell Byrd, a Virginian who showed me more bald eagles in an hour on the James River than you might see in the Alaskan wilderness.Halcyon days on the Choptank with that rare bird, Paul Spitzer, a free-lance Ph.D. whose study of loons is as poetic as it is significant.Rambling through the central Maryland countryside -- and through history -- with Mac King, a pioneer in Maryland's conservation movement, who passed away just a couple of weeks ago.And an eerie, fog-enshrouded voyage with I. T. Todd, the last baby born -- some 70 years ago -- in the lost community of Holland Island, now marked only by an ancient cemetery in the marsh, fast eroding into the bay.There have been sights:Legions of limulus, the horseshoe crab, crawling from the water to spawn on sand beaches beneath a full moon -- a creature and a scene so ancient they predate even the evolution of trees.

SMITH ISLAND, Nov. 28 -- It's 7 a.m., and something both ominous and lovely, as regular as clockwork yet quite unpredictable, is beginning to happen here.The tide is coming up.Normally, that's not a big deal.Twice every 24.8 hours the pull of moon and sun, and Earth's rotation, knead and mound the oceans into great, elongated waves that break on the coasts, not as surf but as tide.So lengthy is the travel time of such waves up the Chesapeake Bay that by the time one crests at Havre de Grace, another wave -- the next high tide -- is entering the estuary's mouth.

Ocean City has seen its first flounder. Bob Coolick, from Ocean Pines, picked up three flounder up to 16 inches in the Thorofare area last week. He was drifting in his boat with strips of mackerel. Another man had a catch of four the same day.Barbara Glinka of Bahia Marina was surprised when a rental boat came in with three "keeper" flounder on Saturday. The anglers were drifting outside the commercial harbor with shiners.The first flounder of the season are always caught in the deeper water.

At the end of last season, Towson State women's gymnastics coach Dick Filbert bid farewell to three of the top six scorers in Tigers history and wondered aloud how his program would remain in the national picture.Senior Wendy Weaver, the Tigers' best all-around performer ever, and junior Gabby Linarducci have overcome injury and illness, respectively, to put together career-best seasons. Towson State, however, wouldn't be ranked No. 11 in the nation, breaking records every time out and seeking its sixth straight Eastern College Athletic Conference title tomorrow, if Wendy Chalmers had not transferred in from Alabama.

OCEAN CITY -- Storm-driven surf subsided today after a day of snapping at the sea wall, surging up to the boardwalk, nipping away at dunes, dune grass and fences dedicated just this week as part of a $44 million beach replenishment project.Tides surged 4 to 5 feet above normal highs yesterday afternoon, flooding much of the south end of Ocean City, the Inlet and most of the streets along the length of the bay side."It's the worst high tide since the 1962 northeaster," said Terence J. McGean, acting city engineer.