Bay Facts

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

Forty-six percent of watershed residents never use toxic pesticides in or around their homes. You can evaluate a pesticide’s toxicity to judge the risk in using it, or make your own non-toxic pesticide with garlic, vinegar, cooking oil and other common household items.

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

The 195-mile-long Rappahannock River is the longest free flowing river in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

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.

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

The widest point of the Chesapeake Bay measures 35 miles, and is located near the mouth of the Potomac River.

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 deepest part of the Bay, located southeast of Annapolis near Bloody Point, is called “The Hole” and is 174 feet deep.

At 4,863 feet above sea level, Spruce Knob is the highest point in the Chesapeake watershed.

The Bay receives about half its water volume from the Atlantic Ocean in the form of saltwater. The other half (freshwater) drains into the Bay from the enormous 64,000-square-mile watershed.

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.

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

Most of the water in the Bay, including in the middle portion of the Bay and its tidal rivers, is brackish–a mixture of salty and fresh, with a salinity level of greater than 0.5 ppt but less than 25 ppt.

The Chesapeake Bay holds more than 18 trillion gallons of water.

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

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

Legislation proposed by Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative John Sarbanes to incorporate the bay into the nation’s park system.

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