Bay Facts

The mouth of the Chesapeake Bay is about 12 miles wide between its northern point near Cape Charles, Virginia, and its southern point close to Cape Henry, Virginia.

The Susquehanna River watershed includes nearly 50 thousand miles of rivers, streams and creeks.

Healthy forests can capture more than 85% of the nitrogen that falls onto them from the air.

The surface area of the Bay and its tidal tributaries is approximately 4,480 square miles.

There have been 10 U.S. presidents from the Chesapeake Bay watershed, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Woodrow Wilson, James Buchanan and Joe Biden.

In 1524, Italian Captain Giovanni da Verrazano became the first recorded European to enter the Chesapeake Bay.

The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village "at a big river." In 2005, Algonquian historian Blair Rudes helped dispel the widely-held belief that the name meant “great shellfish bay.”

The Bay is surprisingly shallow. Its average depth, including all tidal tributaries, is about 21 feet. A person who is six feet tall could wade through more than 700,000 acres of the Bay and never get his or her hat wet.

Nine in ten watershed residents never toss food wrappers, cups or cigarette butts on the ground. Almost eight in ten watershed residents pick up litter when they see it.

The area of the watershed is about 64,000 square miles.

Blue crabs have a rapid growth rate and short life span. Few blue crabs live longer than three years.

Captain John Smith and his men sailed the Chesapeake Bay in a modest wooden boat called a shallop–an open wooden workboat such as a barge, dory, or rowboat that was small enough to row but also had one or two sails.

Mallows Bay is the final resting place for more than 200 historic shipwrecks dating back to the Revolutionary War. Commonly referred to as the “Ghost Fleet” of Mallows Bay, it is the largest collection of shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere.

There are nearly 1,800 local governments in the Bay watershed, including towns, cities, counties and townships.

While one-third of watershed residents have volunteered their time or donated their money to a charitable organization, less than two in ten volunteers have done so for an environmental organization.

There are as many as 200 invasive species present in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that are causing some serious issues in an already-stressed ecosystem. Some examples include blue catfish, snakehead, zebra mussel, purple loosestrife, and nutria.

The Bay produces about 500 million pounds of seafood per year.

The Bay and its tidal tributaries have 11,684 miles of shoreline—more than the entire U.S. west coast.

Water temperatures in the Bay fluctuate widely throughout the year, dropping as low as 34 degrees in winter.

More than 1,800 vessels have met their end in Bay waters, lying broken and battered on the Bay's floor.