The Back River is an estuarine inlet of the Chesapeake Bay between the independent cities of Hampton and Poquoson in the Hampton Roads area of southeastern Virginia. Formed by the confluence of the Northwest and Southwest Branches, and at just over two miles (3.2 km) long, the Back River is a breeding ground for many of the Bay's prized sport fish and the well known blue crab. The river was once part of an important fishing area that provided the local canneries with the famous Chesapeake seafood that was, and still is in demand throughout the country. Although now used primarily for recreation and as a wildlife refuge, the river remains a great place to spend an afternoon with a fishing rod or a few crab traps. Factory Point, a peninsula that protects the river from the Chesapeake Bay sits at the mouth of the river adjoining the bay.
The Southwest Branch begins as Newmarket Creek, a marshy, tidal creek which flows from its headwaters in Newport News into Hampton where it widens greatly and empties into the river.
The Northwest Branch also begins in Newport News as Brick Kiln Creek and is dammed along with the Hampton city and York County border to form Big Bethel Reservoir. It flows from the reservoir into Poquoson, where it becomes the Northwest Branch.
The Back River Lightstation, or Grandview Light, formerly stood on a windswept beach at the mouth of the river. Constructed in 1829 by Winslow Lewis, with a cost of $4,250, the thirty-foot brick tower displayed its light until 1915, when it was automated and the keepers removed. In 1936, the station was decommissioned and left open to the elements and vandals. Hurricane Flossy in 1956 delivered the final blow and toppled the tower. All that can be seen today is a pile of debris just off the beach.
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A Virginia Jewel: The Smith River
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Rappahannock River ~ Urbanna, Virginia
Transcription
One of the big issues you have with this river is that the water is really, really cold. It comes out the dam at 48 degrees and it's supposed to be 100 degrees today but the water here will probably be- at best it might warm up to about 55. So that pretty much for the fish that are living here, every day is winter. Crank it up! All right, here we are sampling on the Smith River. I'm Scott Smith, I'm a Fisheries Biologist with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. We've been doing this for almost ten years now and a lot of the same people have been doing this every year. So that it is pretty well set up as a pretty smooth running operation. Basically what it does is electricity will stun them and they will kind of come floating up right to you. You can dip them up and put them in the live-well and they tend to wake up within a few seconds. One of the things we see is that there is a kind of a general overall long-term decline in the numbers of really big trophy size fish in here. If you go back to look at citation data from the 70's on through now, you can see that the number of citations while not eliminated, has gone way down. It’s not bad for a 6 inch trout- there is enough food in here to feed a 6 inch trout, they're just trying to eat small insects or something like that- but to feed a 16 inch trout, about the only thing in a lot of this river for them to eat is other trout. One of the issues with this river is that it just doesn't provide the kind of quality fishery we think it could for a lot of reasons but that it still is one of the top two trout fisheries in the state of Virginia and one of the better ones in the whole East Coast.
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37°04′06.0″N 76°20′32.4″W / 37.068333°N 76.342333°W
This page was last edited on 28 May 2024, at 22:47