Calvert Maritime Museum

Solomons is in Calvert County Maryland hence the name of the museum and the cliffs.  We wandered around the more southern end of the bay but came back to tour the museum as planned.  It was well worth the trip!  The museum has a comprehensive paleontology section and aquarium along with the usual assortment of Chesapeake fishing vessels.  They also have a model carving and boat building works.

This interesting looking boat had a story.  It was built as a fishing boat then
restored and reshaped into an ark and turned into a floating missionary vessel.
It's next life was as a wedding chapel and now a museum  display.

As most maritime museums, Calvert had a large collection of Chesapeake Bay
fishing boats.  The one in the foreground was a log fishing boat.

What made this fishing boat rare was the joinery used.  Instead of the usual
metal pins, the logs were joined with mortise and tenon  bits of wood. 

It always amazes me to think of the tremendous effort required to shape
a dugout canoe buy they were once quite common on any river in the hemisphere.

These 20 foot canvas canoes were from a local summer camp.
The picture showed a group of eager learners with 2 experienced
campers as teachers.

This was something we hadn't seen in a museum before.  It was yet
another way to quickly extract the oysters from the seabed and get them
aboard.  Sadly, the watermen's capacity to remove them far outpaced
the oyster's ability to reproduce leading to a massive decline in the industry.

This screwpile lighthouse is similar to the one at St. Michael's but
this one had been outfitted with household  pieces from the time it was
in use and the entire living area was open for touring.

This is an extremely rare Megalodon Shark.  Since sharks have cartiledge
instead of bones, it is rare to find many fossils from ancient sharks.  This
replica is based on the size of the teeth and some smaller bits of cartilage found.
There is only 1 other model in the world.  The entire paleontology section of
the museum was astounding in it's scope and explanations of how fossils are formed.
There were many on display but this was definitely the most dramatic.

David wanted in on the shark action.