Live on the Chesapeake and although there have been vast improvements in protecting our fisheries, the evidence here is that the damage is done and not likely to get any better in my lifetime. Maryland's largest industry is agriculture, so is New Jersey's for that matter, and this tends to surprise folks. Unfortunately that just means that we have an abundance of agricultural pollution to go along with our industrial and consumer pollution.
Between the chicken waste, hog waste, lawn fertilizer, waste water treatment plants and chemical processing we do everything we can to keep the Bay dead. Algae blooms, heavy metal poisoning, oyster and fish killing bacteria have made the eating of the Bay's offerings a very dicey affair. Personally I'd rather risk Gulf oil absorbant poisoning than eat anything out of the Chesapeake.
Thirty years ago I used to fish the Bay commercially. We harvested crabs, oysters clams, and fish in relative abundance. Today those same beds are all gone. Crabs that I used to catch in an hour now take a full day or more to find. Oysters...forget about it. Even the ever optimistic State government has finally begun issuing more realistic warnings about the safety of eating not just too much, but anything from many of the Bay's tributaries. You don't have to be a marine biologist to understand it all. Just look at a map.
Major drainage basins such as the Mississippi, the Delaware, The Hudson, the Potomac and the Chesapeake all empty some of the most heavily populated and industrialized areas of our country, not that the No Till agricultural run off gives them much of a break. The Chesapeake suffers more than most because it is reliant on tidal action to flush it out. Unfortunately that outflow only occurs a couple of times a day, unlike the constant flow of a river. Just look at a map and think of all of the crap that people have been throwing and pumping into your waterways and you'll get a pretty good idea why farm raised cats and northern glacial lake walleye taste superior to the wild mutants from the giant cesspools.
Eating channel cats of any size from the Bay is not just a risk but a guarantee that you're eating toxins. About the only thing around here that most people will risk are the striped bass since their migrations and natural ranging for food regularly takes them out of the Bay and into open water for a big part of their life.
Maryland seafood used to be some of the finest in the world and today the majority of it is a heavy metal, bacteria laden crap shoot. But hey, I wouldn't worry about it...the gubmint's got it all under control. We just need to keep giving them more and more money so they can fix our water and air the way they've fixed our schools and economy.
Sorry for the O.T. rant (and I'm new here) but it just straight pisses me off that I used to be able to feed my family with what I could catch at the end of my pier and now I'm afraid to dip a toe in it.
Catfish is terrific though and anyone who hasn't tried it is really sellin' themselves short. Usually a relative deal too compared to the oft available alternatives.
