For sailors, the Francis Scott Key Bridge has always been a waypoint, marking the beginning — or the end — of journeys. It is the symbolic entrance to, and exit from, Baltimore, its waterborne threshold.
Even as wreckage, it still is. Six months ago, the span collapsed as the Dali cargo ship lost power and struck a support pier. But the Key Bridge’s powerful symbolism to sailors remains.
At the bridge, the weather conditions and sea state change. So, too, does the scenery. On the inside, smokestacks, silos, and cranes, and other clear cues of the city. On the outside, mostly open water.
I arrived in Baltimore by water in the fall of 2021 aboard a 39-foot sailboat, at the end of a segmented journey that started in New England weeks earlier. I entered the Chesapeake Bay through its backdoor, the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal that connects Delaware Bay to ours.
Baltimore was my offramp, and the Key Bridge was the big exit sign that signaled the end of the journey.
Passing under it gave me my first glimpse of Baltimore, confirmation that I was no longer in the wilds of the bay. Here, the wind eased, the water flattened, the smell of the air changed, and the temperature seemed to rise slightly.
The sight of the steel truss bridge and the industrial waterfront clearly conveyed that I had arrived. The bridge looked like Baltimore: functional and unfancy, riveted and forged. It was no tourist attraction. It was simply the way to work.
Buoys appeared with more frequency, including one that serves no real navigational purpose: the red, white and blue Francis Scott Key Memorial Buoy. The U.S. Coast Guard removes it every winter and sets it every spring to mark the spot where Key was detained by the British aboard an American ship and observed the bombardment of Fort McHenry.
When I departed Baltimore the next fall for the Florida Keys, I took a photo as I passed beneath it to mark the beginning of my transit and my farewell to the city, not knowing it was the last time I would sail under the bridge intact.
Most local sailors remember their last bridge day and many of their passages under it.
The bridge was built in 1977, about the time sailor Bobby LaPin was born, so his memories of it are lifelong.
“I remember going under the bridge in my grandpa’s little boat,” he said. “When you go under it, you hear the tractor trailers rumbling. It was exciting and scary, and you have sensory overload, with the sounds and the smell of the water. Then when I became a sailor, when I would go south on long cruises, the Key Bridge was the starting point.”
Years ago, he and his wife Alicia took their first cruise together as a new couple into the southern Chesapeake. As they passed under the Key Bridge, he turned to her and said, “The journey begins,” which he meant figuratively and literally. The memory still makes him teary-eyed.
“I’ve had this conversation with so many other sailors. The Key Bridge was the beginning of the adventure, and when you’re coming back home and you’re cold, and you’re hungry and often wet, when you see the bridge, and get closer to it, you know you’re close to home,” he said. “It’s the starting line and the finish line.”
The novice sailors of the Downtown Sailing Center learn their first maneuvers in the protected confines of the Inner Harbor, where wind is light.
At the first bend is the Sagamore Pendry hotel in Fells Point, a sign that sailors have made it about a mile; the sailing center’s docks near the Baltimore Museum of Industry are still in sight. Reaching Fort McHenry requires more skill and, usually, patiently tacking into the wind.
The new sailors’ goal is less than six nautical miles to the south and east, down the Patapsco River. Making it to the Key Bridge means they can count themselves as real sailors.
The Chesapeake is the nation’s largest estuary, and its scale becomes apparent if you attempt to navigate it. Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, is a journey of hours. The Chesapeake is one of days. It is a small sea with conditions that can match it.
The Baltimore Harbor Cup, a race held every October from the Baltimore Harbor Lighthouse at the mouth of the Magothy River to Fells Point, is nicknamed the “Horrible Cup” by many sailors because of how often conditions turn ugly on race day.
Last year’s event started in a near gale, with sustained winds of 25 knots and gusts of 40.
Nat Moore was the skipper of a 1984 Express 30, a sporty Canadian sailboat built for racing. Erring on the side of safety, he opted not to compete. The Inner Harbor was home port, so the crew sailed there anyway, but at their own pace.
The journey was what Moore called “type-two fun” — too scary when you’re doing it, but great in memory because you get to brag about it. Once Moore’s boat reached the Key Bridge, the winds died a bit and the seas calmed.
“We thought, ‘Oh, thank God, we’re going to make it, we’re going to be OK,’” Moore said. “When you make the final left turn, and now you’re there, pulling into the driveway, so to speak, you know you’re about to put the boat away. You’re about to have a beer or dinner and you’re home. There’s a sense of relief that comes with arriving at the bridge.”
Moore keeps his boat on land at Young’s Boat Yard in Baltimore County’s Edgemere community over the winter, but ties it up in the summer season at the docks of the Downtown Sailing Center. Sailing to the Key memorial buoy and back is a regular exercise of summer.
When the bridge collapsed, his boat was still at Young’s, and he was among many recreational boaters unable to leave or enter the Inner Harbor.
On April 16, the day the Coast Guard finally allowed recreational boaters a one-time passage across where the bridge had stood, he woke up early, eager. At the time, the Coast Guard made no promises there would be more openings, so boaters lined up.
Moore was the second to pass through, at the head of the single-file line he called the “boat parade.”
“It was the closest any of us had been to the wreckage. Seeing all those barges with cranes and recovery equipment,” he said. “The scale of the thing, it was crazy, and it really put into perspective for me how complicated the recovery effort was.”
The former exclusion zone is once again a regular passageway for freight traffic and day sailing. As a visual marker, the bridge still does its job. It is an odd but unmistakable sight.
“I look at it every time I go out there,” Moore said. “We still refer to it the same way. We talk about it as if it’s the same bridge. It’s our gateway. It’s the Colossus.”
After sailing nearly 2,000 miles along the Atlantic Coast and through the Florida Keys, I returned to the Chesapeake in June almost two years after I’d departed, arriving at the mouth of the Patapsco late in the afternoon.
The lattice of steel no longer arced across the sky to mark the finish line.
No rumble of vehicles overhead.
No long shadow cast by the roadway.
What remained of our Colossus, two footings with nothing above them, stuck out of the water like a shipwreck to be steered clear of.
The wind fell to a whisper. The city the broken bridge promised to deliver soon appeared.
