Bay Facts

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

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.

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

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.

The mouth of the Chesapeake Bay is about 12 miles wide between its northern point near Cape Charles, Virginia, and its southern point close to Cape Henry, Virginia.

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

A few deep troughs run along much of the Bay’s length and are believed to be remnants of the ancient Susquehanna River.

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

The Susquehanna River watershed includes nearly 50 thousand miles of rivers, streams and creeks.

Two of the United States’ five major North Atlantic ports—Baltimore and Hampton Roads—are on the 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.

Half of pet owners always pick up after their pet, but one-third of pet owners seldom or never do so. Pet waste contains bacteria that can harm human health and contaminate the water we use for drinking, swimming and fishing.

The Chesapeake Bay was formed about 10,000 years ago when glaciers melted and flooded the Susquehanna River valley.

During the winter, the Bay supports 87 species of waterbirds. Of these wintering waterbirds, 14 species rely on the Bay to serve as habitat for more than 10% of their continental populations.

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 Bay and its tidal tributaries have 11,684 miles of shoreline—more than the entire U.S. west coast.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed stretches approximately 524 miles from Cooperstown, New York, to Norfolk, Virginia. It includes parts of six states—Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia—and the entire District of Columbia.

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.