Chessie Seen by 25 or More People on a Fishing Trip off Smith Point, Virginia

By the autumn of 1980, the Chesapeake Bay had a monster with a name. Chessie. That summer the reports came one after another. In July, Laura and Norris Perry and their guests on the Magothy River saw three humps, perhaps 20 to 30 feet in all. In August, Rosamond Hayes reported something in Prospect Bay. In September, G.F. "Buddy" Green III and his family watched a creature near Coles Point on the Potomac. They put it at "25 feet long and 5 to 6 inches in diameter."

Two years earlier, Donald Kyker had described a creature on the Virginia side of the Potomac that "stuck its head out of the water and moved in an undulating fashion." Chessie already had a reputation. Then came October.

A fishing trip off Smith Point, in Northumberland County, Virginia. Smith Point marks the south side of the mouth of the Potomac River, where it opens into the bay. Everyone aboard saw it. A total of 25 or more people. The captains described "a serpentlike thing." Its head "was not larger than a football."

Someone raised the obvious answer. A turtle. Captain Bill Jenkins disputed it. Nothing else of their description survives in the accounts available today. No length. No colour. No word on how it moved, or for how long it was seen.

On 9 October 1980 the Richmond Times-Dispatch carried Albert Oetgen's story under the headline "Fishermen Report Seeing Chessie." It is the only primary account of the sighting. Today the story survives through a summary by the Library of Virginia. The exact day of the trip, the name of the boat and Jenkins's own words probably lie in that original article.

The report hinted at more. "It was also clear there had been more reports by people who did not want to talk publicly about it."

The turtle was rejected on the spot. Other ideas circulated in the same period. One, nicknamed "the Anaconda Syndrome," held that witnesses were "most likely seeing South American anacondas that traveled on commercial sailing vessels to Virginia, where these snakes escaped and made the Chesapeake their home."

The manatee has been offered for other Chessie reports. Trudy Guthrie's September 1980 sketch was later identified as a Florida manatee, and a real stray manatee nicknamed Chessie arrived in 1994. Neither answer has been applied to Smith Point. No official body looked into this sighting. The Smithsonian review often cited for Chessie concerned only the 1982 videotape from Kent Island, which George Zug and colleagues found "animate" but could not identify.

Eric A. Cheezum, author of Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, links the sightings to "rapid cultural transition" on the bay. As Tom Horton summarised it in the Bay Journal, "The real monster… may have been the rapid development that was swallowing Kent Island." Horton adds that Chessie was "almost exclusively… reported by recreationists, not watermen."

Smith Point sits awkwardly in that picture. The voices quoted here belonged to boat captains, speaking for a group of 25 or more on a single trip. It remains the largest group sighting of the 1980 wave.