Chicken Stealing Chesapeake Bay Retriever

During the summers in Maryland, one of the favorite pastimes of many people is 'fishin' and 'crabbin'. On the weekends, you have literally hundreds of thousands of people heading towards the Eastern Shore of Maryland, most heading for Ocean City but many heading down to the 'sho' for some 'crabbin'.

On many weekends, I was one of those looking to go down and do some recreational crabbing. On one particular weekend, Frank Curzi, my brother Dave and I decided to go down and try our luck at one of the piers down in Oxford. They had some pretty decent piers down there to crab from. Since I didn't own a boat, it was either crab there, or rent a boat. I preferred to do it off of the pier anyhow, just me.

Having been down there a few times, we got accustomed to seeing some regulars, and two of them were a pair of dogs that used to pal around together; a Chesapeake Bay Retriever and a Black Lab. They no doubt lived close by, and several times during the course of the day, they would wander down to the pier to check things out, and take a swim. The Chesapeake Bay Retriever usually took the lead, but once in the water, they usually did there own thing.

Well, this one particular day was typically hot, probably about 90 degrees. Since the crabs weren't really biting, we were sort of half paying attention. We were just sort of hanging out, when my brother dave shouted "what the h..., look at the line". One of the lines was going straight out and being tugged on like we had a shark on it. We jumped up and ran over to the edge and looked and there was the Chesapeake Bay Retriever chomping down on our bait- a nice sized hunk of Chicken. We tried to get her away from it by shouting and pulling on the line, but she wasn't having any of it. Finally, we let her have the Chicken, but kept an eye on the rest of the lines. When she swam a little too close to the others, we quickly pulled them in. After about a half hour, she tired of the game, and she and the Lab mosied on out and back to wherever they lived.

I haven't been back to that spot in years, and I would imagine that both of the dogs have since moved on to Dog Heaven. Looking back on it, she provided the highlight of an otherwise uneventful day. A memory for the three of us. The day we caught the biggest crab on a hand-line ever!

Buck..Boxer on Steroids