Poplar Island

POPLAR ISLAND - Presidents and their Cabinet members once played on Poplar Island. Bootleggers made moonshine there, and a man who raised black cats for their pelts was wiped out when the Chesapeake Bay froze over and thousands of cats scurried to freedom.Those days are long gone. But then, so is most of Poplar Island.There is almost nothing left today of the Talbot County island that covered 1,100 acres in 1847. Erosion has eaten the island away ever since and has broken it into several pieces, only one of which is bigger than an acre.

The Energy and Water Appropriations Act, signed into law recently by President Clinton, provides more than $50 million for construction of Poplar Island and improvements to the port of Baltimore's shipping channels.The funding includes $25.6 million for Poplar Island, which will use dikes and breakwaters to contain about 38 million cubic yards of dredged material.The project will create a wetland habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife and halt further erosion of the once-popular Talbot County resort, now tidal marshes and mud flats.

Upper Chesapeake Bay: Rockfish angling has been good recently, with trolling, chumming and drifting eels producing at many locations. Chummers have done well at Love Point, Hickory Thicket, Hodge's Bar, Podickory Point and Baltimore Light, with keepers ranging mostly in the 18- to 22-inch range. Eels drifted in the same areas have been catching fewer, but larger fish, with some ranging to 36 inches. Bucktails and spoons have worked well for trollers at Worton Point and Poole's Island and along the channel edges.

A House appropriations subcommittee in Washington has approved $15 million to begin restoring the Chesapeake Bay's Poplar Island, a highly expensive project that could become a national model for beneficial use of dredge material.The plan to restore Poplar Island is one of several solutions proposed by Maryland officials to deal with the state's dilemma about where to put the mud and silt scooped from its 126 miles of shipping channels.Gov. Parris N. Glendening, hoping to secure federal funds, budgeted $35 million this year to develop the first half of the 1,100-acre project.

The Clinton administration has earmarked $22 million in its fiscal 1997 budget to help restore the Chesapeake Bay's Poplar Island using mud and silt scooped from Maryland's extensive shipping channels.With ports across the nation struggling to find dredge disposal sites, Poplar Island would become a national model as the first large-scale project to beneficially use dredged material."The project demonstrates that clean dredge material can be a resource rather than a waste," Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes said yesterday.

Glendening administration officials said yesterday that they would propose two options by this summer for an Upper Bay dredge disposal site, but they cautioned lawmakers that political opposition and regulatory hassles could delay such a facility up to 10 years, twice as long as lawmakers want.Nevertheless, members of a House committee warned yesterday that failure to move quickly on an Upper Bay facility, similar to Hart-Miller Island, could force the legislature to begin work on an environmentally controversial plan to pump clean dredge material into an area of the Chesapeake Bay known as the Deep Trough.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening, hoping to offset doubts about his commitment to a comprehensive dredging strategy for the port of Baltimore, is expected this week to outline more specific plans about an Upper Bay containment site.In addition, the governor hopes to announce that the Clinton administration will include federal funding to restore Poplar Island using dredge material and make it a national demonstration project for beneficial-use programs.The Glendening administration wants the General Assembly to sign off on a comprehensive dredging strategy for the next 20 years.

State officials yesterday underscored the urgency of finding dredge disposal sites, but they quickly discovered that, among lawmakers, the perennially unpopular subject is still fraught with political, environmental and financial concerns.A key element of the Glendening administration plan for dredge disposal -- the restoration of Poplar Island -- ran into immediate trouble when lawmakers were told the cost ultimately could reach $350 million.But even a far less costly solution, to pump dredge material into the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, also encountered sharp hostility from environmentalists, watermen and Eastern Shore lawmakers.

An innovative plan to restore a vanishing island in mid-Chesapeake Bay to its turn-of-the-century shape would use material dredged from shipping channels leading to Baltimore's harbor.Advocates include an array of state, federal and private organizations. They say the plan could become a national model how to turn environmental lemons into lemonade by providing an ecologically positive use for the material created by channel maintenance."This will be an example for the rest of the country," said John Gill, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, one of the agencies involved in the project.

The body of a 47-year-old Annapolis man who fell off a sailboat near Poplar Island Friday night was recovered from the Chesapeake Bay south of Tilghman Island's Blackwalnut Point late yesterday afternoon.Stephen A. Bickell was one of nine people on the 40-foot sailboat Electra when he fell overboard about 7:45 p.m. Friday. Authorities said the Electra had been cruising near Poplar Island, in Talbot County, more than five miles north of where the body was found.Natural Resources Police, state police and the Coast Guard conducted a two-day search for Mr. Bickell's body.