UMCES Pier, Solomons, MD

In Albums: water Chesapeake Bay

May 30th, 2002, by Alex Zorach

This photo shows a pier which was part of the UMCES lab in Solomons, MD. UMCES is a research laboratory on the Chesapeake bay, associated with the University of Maryland (but quite far from their main campus). I thought that this pier, and the part of the lab visible in this picture, were very cute...the neatly-maintained white building on the pier, and the old, brick building of the lab (I actually worked in the main building visible in the picture, when I spent a summer here).

There was a fishing ban within a certain radius of this lab, in order to make it easy for the lab to easily gather what it needed to conduct research, from the waters surrounding it. The impacts of this fishing ban were immediate evident. If you sat on this pier and watched, you could see schools of fish swimming about. I once saw a huge school of stingrays swim by. Lab employees would sometimes fish off this pier for their own personal consumption. Once, a student caught a fish which we ate for dinner, by simply grabbing it in a small net that she reached off the edge of the pier.