Charted Fish

An old marine, like an old soldier, always finds something to gripe about. So Lieut. Colonel James Potter Rathbun promptly found something wrong with Washington, D.C. when he was ordered there for duty at the Marine Corps Institute. His gripe was novel, even for a marine. The fishing was terrible.

A dedicated angler ever since he was a boy in Noank, Conn., Jim Rathbun had taken his tackle to war with him when he joined the Marines in 1941. Between battles, he fished the Pacific from Guadalcanal to the Philippines.

After that, peacetime Washington and nearby Maryland promised to be a fisherman's dream. Captain Thomas D. Smith Jr., another enthusiast, was also stationed at the institute. "Everyone we met told us that fishing was fine in Maryland," says Rathbun. The trouble was that Rathbun and Smith could find no fish. "Go to Queen Anne's Bridge," said the experts. "or try 'The Gooses.'" For a long time the two men couldn't even find the recommended fishing holes.

Good Marines. Like good marines, Rathbun and Smith did more than gripe; they tried to do something about the situation. Other fishermen must be having the same trouble, they reasoned. Why not draw decent road maps that would tell people how to get to good fishing grounds? For the next few weekends they toured the highways and backwaters of Maryland. They talked to farmers, truck drivers, bartenders, charter-boat operators. Soon they had so much information that they changed their plans: Why not make a map that would tell fishermen everything--where to go for different fish, what kind of tackle to take, what time to fish, where to hire boats? Before long the mapmaking became so complicated that the situation was out of hand. Smith and Rathbun hired a professional cartographer, John F. Gantt Jr. "Instead of paying him," says Rathbun, "we asked him to become a partner and share our losses." The ambitious enterprise became Sportsmen's Guides, Inc.

Good Maps. Gantt simply took his partners' carefully collected information and placed it on standard charts of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. In August of 1950, the first map--Annapolis to Point Lookout--rolled off the press. Maryland fishermen bought 5,000 copies within a few weeks. The staff of Sportsmen's Guides continued to collect information, but they ranged farther. Next spring they were ready with The Chesapeake Bay Area, from Conowingo Dam to Annapolis. They they covered The New Jersey Coast, from Sandy Hook to Barnegat Light. Last year they printed their fourth map, The Atlantic Coast, from Cape May, N.J. to Chincoteague Is., Va., and they revised their first one.

The project keeps growing, but for the past year and a half Jim Rathbun has had to work alone. Tom Smith was wounded in Korea, Gantt was transferred to St. Louis. Rathbun will probably be sent to Camp Lejeune, N.C. in September. But even though it makes his wife a "map widow," he is going ahead with his charts. The corporation has already blocked out the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Morehead City, N.C. Wind, weather and enemy gunfire notwithstanding, the partners hope some day to cover every fishing area in the U.S. Rathbun still has a minor gripe: charting fish keeps him too busy to do much fishing.

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