Where is Brownie's Beach?
Brownie's Beach (also known as Bayfront Park) is one of the few publicly
accessible beaches on
the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. It lies just south
of the village of Chesapeake Beach see Google Maps and is impossible to find if you
don't know where to look. So here are the directions (from the North):
- Get yourself on route 2, which runs south from Annapolis. If you are coming from Baltimore, take the I-97, and immediately exit when it merges with routes 50/301 east, and follow the signs for Solomons Island Rd.
- Stick to the speed limit, there are plenty of patrol cars...
- Stay on route 2, past the round-about which you have to take for 3 quarters.
- Take the exit to Chesapeake Beach, at the (2nd) traffic lights. This gets you on route 260.
- Follow 260 until it ends at a traffic light in Chesapeake Beach, and take a right on to 261. You should have seen the waters of the Bay straight ahead as you drove in. (When you have time, go left here, and enjoy the beautiful board walk and beach in downtown North Beach!)
- Drive all the way through Chesapeake Beach. If you have kids, you could visit the water park on your right first. After your visit to the beach you will be too smelly ...
- Just outside of town you drive down a little hill. At the bottom of the hill is a shoulder on the left hand side of the road, and a road disappears into the forrest, leading to a little parking lot (sounds just like one of the early text-based adventure games). If it is really busy you may have to park on the shoulder.
- From the parking lot it is about 200 meters (650 feet for the non metric folks) to the beach.
- Except when vandalized, there are two "porta-potties" near the beach.
What to bring?
Here is an annotated version of the list we have hanging on our kitchen bulletin board:- Water & Food!
- Especially in the summertime you should bring enough to drink. In the winter you may want to bring something warm: tea, cocoa, coffee.
- Sun-screen
- Especially in the summer. We always wear T-shirts, though we learned that a white T-shirt provides no sun-block at all... ouch! In the mornings there is no shade at all. In the afternoon the cliffs provide some shelter.
- screens
- The tools of the trade. Roughly one square foot piece of 1/4" screen in a wooden frame. The screen can be bought by the roll at any Home-Depot/Lowe's. If the frame is flat, you can use it for scooping. If you have a box screen, you also have to bring a shovel.
- Shoes
- Because of too many broken bottles, and other sharp objects (crabs!) you want to wear shoes when you are walking through the water. Wash them when you get back home, and don't expect to wear them to any party soon.
- Hip-pouch
- Or something else you can put your finds in. Remember that you want to have both your hands free to search.
- zip-locks
- In case your pouch fills up.
- Wash cloth, soap, more water
- Your hands will be really smelly from the Bay, and you want to bring something to wash them with afterwards.
- Towels
- Obvious
- Waders
- When the water gets colder, or there are too many jelly-fish, you may want to own a pair of waders. You can go for the more expensive rubber ones with connected boots, but these are bulky, and it is hard to bend over, which is what you will be doing most of the time. We opted for the cheap nylon waders ($8.- K-Mart, Wal-Mart), which end in socks instead of boots, and we wear our shoes over them.
- Dry clothes
- just in case.
How to search?
Here are a few tips on how to improve your chances of finding shark teeth and other fossils.
never ever dig in to the cliffs!
We have seen parts of it collapse, and you do not want to be near them
when that happens. Depending on their height you want to be
at least 20 feet away. Also, all the land above your head is privately
owned, and if you dig away at a cliff someone's forrest or
garden is going to shrink. If you dig in the beach, fill in
any holes you make, or somebody might sprain an ankle or worse.
Don't get in the way of other collectors or sunbathers. There are no magical spots. Of course you are free to show your great finds to anybody on the beach, or to inform after their finds of the day.
Be patient. The very first time, you still have to train your eyes to pick out any fossils from the thousands of pieces of shell. But after a few finds, you will learn to recognize them pretty easily.
If the waves dump fresh material on the beach, or wash away sand, you can pick up teeth straight from the beach. On Brownie's Beach it doesn't really matter where you search. The entire beach is covered with fossils. In a single summer afternoon the two of us routinely find 300-400 teeth, 50 fragments of ray dental plates, 6 porpoise teeth and a pint of bone fragments. And the next day we can do it all over again.
Except when the tide is very low, most of the fossils will be a few feet into the water, jumbled with all the shells and shell fragments. Shark teeth resemble little shells, so where you find shells, you will find shark teeth! The surf is like a giant sorting machine. If you walk further in to the Bay, you will notice that the bottom is completely clean. No shells and no teeth. The surf has dumped everything nicely near the beach.
Scoop up a pile of shells on your screen, and wash out all the sand and small fragments by gently shaking the screen under water. Stand up straight to relax your back, and see what you got.
Sometimes the surf has replaced the shells with little pebbles. The shape and density of pebbles resemble those of broken pieces of larger teeth, bones and larger porpoise teeth, and you will find more of those between the pebbles. We once found more than 6 one-inch porpoise teeth in a few minutes in such a pebble bank.
Many larger dark objects are either broken beer bottles or pieces of fossilized bone. If you can tell it is bone but you don't know whether it is a fossil or a fresh bone, try to hit it with a piece of stone, or tap it against your teeth (without swallowing anything...). If it feels like rock it is a fossil. There are many fresh bones of recently drowned deer or larger fish. If you accidentally bring one of these home, the smell will make it very clear you made a mistake. Fresh bones are whitish, fossils are brown or black, and stay brown or black when you clean them.
When to search?
If you want to search on the beach, you probably want to get there when the tide is receding. If you are willing to get wet, it doesn't really matter too much when you show up. The average difference between high and low tide is only about 30 cm (1 foot).We use David Flater's great xtide program. It can compute the tides for many shores world-wide, including those for Chesapeake Beach.
You can also find tide information online at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
And when you think 8am is early, you'll be surprised to see people walking off the beach, still carrying their flashlights - when they arrived it was still dark....
When you get home
When you get home, you want to wash your finds in fresh water, to clean them from any sand, clay or smelly stuff. If you found any bones, you should leave them in a bucket with regular tap water overnight. This will wash out some of the salt from inside the bones. If you dry them too quickly, the salt will grow little crystals when the bones dry, and will cause cracks or complete fractures.Don't dry your finds too fast, and keep them from direct sunlight.
If you found a large bone, such as a dolphin vertebra, and notice that it is slowly crumbling, here's one cheap way to consolidate it. Get yourself a family size bottle of "Elmer's Glue-all". Mix the Elmers 50/50 with water in a container that will hold your fossils, and submerge each bone for several hours, so that the glue can seep into the cracks. Carefully take the fossils out; the soaking may have made them even more fragile. Wipe off any excess glue to prevent shiny surfaces or white crud, and let it dry.
Now you can sit down and sort through your finds. Check the pages on shark teeth or on other fossils to help identify your finds.
If you collect from more than one location, make sure to keep your finds in separate containers, boxes, drawer, baggies, and keep track what you found where.