Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Elite '09

158

251

Mary Kay S.

Washington, DC

6/30/2008

This place is huge -- they say it covers 18 acres and has 10 buildings.  We speculated that some of those acres may actually be in the water, but even so, it's big.

I allotted a half-day for us to enjoy the many exhibits here, but it really didn't take us that long to cover it.  It was reaaaaaaallllly hot, and the walk in between buildings was enough to get me sunburned, but most of the buildings were blessed with air conditioning.  Truly blessed.  

There's a lot of information to be found here.  The history of the bay, oystering, hunting, the development of the bay from a fishing center to a recreational area (I liked the older recreational boats in here). There is a large warehouse with lots of old bay boats once used for fishing and oystering.

Truth be told, though, we were left a little uninspired.  In part that's because some of the cool stuff wasn't described very well.  For instance, in the Steamship building, there is a giant steam engine.  Where is it from?  When was it in operation?  How did it work?  I can't tell you, because none of that information was provided.  The building was mostly fancy boat signage, and a display of a rather eclectic collection of stuff that had been donated to the museum.

The other part of our disappointment was that none of the demonstrations were manned when we were there.  There is a boat-building workshop that looked really interesting, and could have been really cool if someone had actually been in there working. There was a demonstration shack out on the pier where you could learn how to shuck oysters, try your hand at crabbing, etc., but there was no-one there.

We bought tickets for a forty-five minute tour on the "Mister Jim", which was built to look like an old working boat.  But Mr. Jim wasn't feeling well, and in fact didn't leave the dock all day.

Maybe we caught the museum on a bad day?  (The Saturday before the fourth of July?  When would a good day be?)  At any rate, if you'd like to come out to St. Michael's to see this museum, you probably won't need more than a few hours here.  Or, you might get lucky and find the interactive exhibits more.... active.

• Add owner comment
• Bookmark
• Send to a Friend
• Link to This Review