
DATE: Monday, November 17, 1997             TAG: 9711170088

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY MARY REID BARROW, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:  153 lines

MARINA MAKE-OVER SHOWING ITS AGE, BEACH INSTITUTION TO GET NEW OWNERS, $5 MILLION FACE LIFT.

One afternoon recently, thousands of pounds of croaker were slip-sliding up a conveyer belt from the hold of the ``Miss Margaret,'' to be packed and iced in fish boxes lining the dockside at Lynnhaven Waterway Marina.

Other fishing boats, industrial and sturdy-looking, awaited a turn to deliver their catch to R&B Fish Co., whose presence is seen in stacks of wooden whelk traps, piles of fish net and hundreds of plastic fish barrels on the wharf.

On most fall days, the marina also hums with recreational fishermen and their sleek sportfishing boats. They come and go from the gas pumps, loading ramp, and bait shop, but they aren't after croaker. They seek the local angler's autumn challenge - the more elusive striped bass or speckled trout.

For 40 years, Lynnhaven Waterway Marina, with its 215 boat slips, has been bustling with activities of fishermen. One of the oldest marinas in the city, it sits on Long Creek, offering easy access to Lynnhaven Inlet and prime fishing grounds around the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel islands.

The top-notch location has served resident watermen well for centuries. Virginia Beach's early settlers harvested huge, tasty oysters from the pristine marsh and waterway. Today, the best that local waters have to offer passes across the docks, to be shipped around the world or to be cooked on someone's backyard grill nearby.

Next year, the place will be transformed from a down-at-the-heels, old-fashioned marina into a state-of-the art facility.

Charlie Cashman, who has owned the marina since the beginning, and his partners are selling the property to developer Paul A. Galloway.

``The main reason we're getting rid of it is we're getting old,'' Cashman explained, ``and it needs a face lift. It deserves better.

``It's been good to all of us. We've had a success financially and otherwise.''

On a recent morning, Cashman was manning the bait shop for co-owner Thomas Trant, who was ill. Cashman, buddy Lee Gregory and other marina long-timers were sitting around the rustic shop, remembering how Cashman built the marina piling by piling, boat slip by boat slip.

``I had my own pile driver, had my own crane and my own pumps,'' Cashman said. ``The work was done by all these boys around here. It didn't cost us any money, just lumber.''

``And,'' Gregory added, ``beer and Cokes, sardines and cold beans.''

Now Cashman's handiwork is beginning to show its age. Snappy-looking fishing boats with their tall flying bridges, docked in rows in just about every slip, don't match up with the asphalt parking area, which is cracking and caving in places, and wooden pilings that are breaking down.

The marina will get its renovation before too long. Galloway will close on the property when he has the required environmental permits in hand, which he hopes will be in about six months. Then work will begin to rebuild the bulkheads, riprap and paving.

The 7 1/2-acre site will become a $5 million home to a new marina, complete with restaurants, shops and a private club. A special area will be set aside for commercial fishing boats, Galloway said.

Galloway will continue a long fisheries tradition at the site. When his lawyers searched the title, they traced ownership back to Colonial times, when English settler Adam Keeling was granted the land along the north side of Long Creek and all the marsh abutting it for an oystering and fishing operation.

Even then Keeling was aware of the Chesapeake Bay's resources, and he was said to have dug nearby Lynnhaven Inlet so fishermen could gain quicker access to those rich waters. Historic Adam Keeling House, his home, still stands across Long Creek in Great Neck Point, a stone's throw from the marina.

At one point, the land was part of a huge tract owned by the Cape Henry Syndicate that included what is now First Landing/Seashore State Park and Fort Story. Later, a small southern piece of what is presently the marina property was developed as Long Creek Marina by Raymond Fentress. The larger piece was owned by Judge Richard Kellam, Clyde Absalom and others who developed Lynnhaven Colony in the 1950s just to the north of the marina.

About that time, Cashman and friends entered the picture. They purchased Long Creek Marina, complete with the Dockside Restaurant, which old-timers will remember as the place ``where all the old salts used to hang out,'' Cashman said.

He and his partners leased the rest of the land from the Kellam group, later purchasing it. Cashman, who owned London Bridge Machine and Welding at the time, would go on to build the Lynnhaven Fishing Pier, which he continues to own.

In the early days of the marina, boats had just become powerful enough that charter captains, like Ray and Earl Richardson, began to brave the odds and travel 60 miles offshore to go after big fish such as marlin and tuna. Charter boats, daring to make the long run to the Gulf Stream, gave the new marina a jump start.

``We'd leave at midnight to go marlin fishing,'' Cashman said, ``And get just about where we wanted when the sun came up.''

``We used nothing but a compass,'' Gregory said, ``You flew by the seat of your pants when you went out there in those days.''

Now, most offshore fishing boats leave from Rudee Inlet. But Rudee Inlet's development didn't hurt the marina because the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel came along in the early '60s. Its rocky islands became ideal fish reefs.

``When they put the bridge-tunnel in there, it located the fish,'' Trant explained in an earlier interview. ``Before, you had to go over hell's half-acre to find them.''

Fish such as striped bass that congregate around the tunnel islands and speckled trout that lurk in holes up the Lynnhaven River, along with a thriving commercial fishery, are the marina's mainstays now.

Some days, as many as 60,000 to 70,000 pounds of fish a day are brought into the docks by commercial fishermen. When croaker and other fish make their seasonal migration through the area, gill netters from up in the Bay and down in North Carolina converge here.

After the fish are unloaded with R&B Fish Co. at the marina wharf, packed and iced down, wholesalers from Virginia and North Carolina pick up the harvest and send it on its way, sometimes up and down the East Coast, sometimes to Europe.

When croaker move on, commercial fishermen look forward to the spiny dogfish migration. A lucrative market exists abroad for the small sharks. Their fins are sent to the Orient and their meat to Europe for use in such items as fish and chips. The same goes for whelk. Caught in the spring in traps baited with horseshoe crabs, whelk is sent overseas to be used in much the same way conch is used, in chowders and fritters.

Some of the commercial fishermen, like Ronney Reid, who owns R&B with Bill Newell, have been hanging around the marina since they were youngsters. Trant remembers Reid when ``he couldn't even see over the washboard in the rowboat.''

Joe Brown, who stopped in to pay his monthly rent, has been docking his boat there since 1968 when he drove down from Richmond to fish. He would fish all weekend long no matter what the weather.

``Those were the glory days,'' he said.

Now retired, he lives here and just goes out on clear, calm ``bluebird days.''

Other relationships at the marina are short-term. That morning two folks from out of town, one driving a vintage Mercedes, stopped to check on docking fees. During striped bass season, avid fishermen will bring their boats from as far away as Washington, D.C., and rent slips for six to eight weeks at a time, Cashman explained.

``Then they carry it back to where it came from,'' he added.

The marina has been around so long that many folks take the fishing frenzy there for granted.

``Half the people don't even know we're here,'' Trant said.

And the other half are fishermen. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Charlie Cashman

Photo

PHILIP HOLMAN

Scott MacDonald, dockmaster at R&B Fish, which operates at Lynnhaven

Waterway Marina, checks the conveyor belt as he loads cardboard

boxes. Most of the fish will go to distributors in the Carolinas.

Color Photo

PHILIP HOLMAN photos