cotty! Look!"

Don Scott, asleep at full length on the houseboat's sun deck, which was
also its cabin top, awoke in time to see the dark shape reenter the calm
water. "Stingaree!" he exclaimed.

Rick had never seen an area more teeming with life than Chesapeake Bay,
unless it was the jungles of the South Pacific. Books, guides to eastern
land and water birds, regional fish and reptiles, rested on the cabin
top before him, along with a pair of binoculars. He had used them all
repeatedly, identifying eagles, wild swans, ospreys, wild duck and
geese, terrapin, snapping turtles and water snakes, as well as a horde
of lesser creatures. Trailing lines over the houseboat stern had
captured striped sea bass, called "rockfish" locally, a species of
drumfish called "spot" because of a black spot on the gills, pink
croakers that the Marylanders called "hardheads," and the blue crabs for
which the bay is famous. He had seen clam dredges bringing up bushels of
soft-shelled, long-necked clams that the dredgers called "manos," and he
had seen the famous Maryland "bugeyes" and "skip-jacks"--sailing craft
used for dredging oysters. The boats were not operated during the oyster
breeding season from the end of March until September.

Rick's interest in the life of the great bay was to be expected. As son
of the director of the world-famous Spindrift Scientific Foundation,
located on Spindrift Island off the coast of New Jersey, he had been
brought up among scientists. The habit of observation had developed
along with his natural--and insatiable--curiosity.

The tall, slim, brown-haired, brown-eyed boy was completely happy. He
enjoyed casual living, especially on the water, and life on the
_Spindrift_ couldn't have been more casual. He was dressed in a tattered
pair of shorts and a wristwatch. Once, in the cool of the evening, he
had slipped on a sweat shirt. Otherwise, the shorts had been his sole
attire while on board since leaving his home island a few days before.

Scotty, a husky, dark-haired boy clad only in red swimming trunks, came
down the ladder from the cabin top and stood beside Rick in the cockpit.
"Now that you woke me up to look at a fish, suppose you tell me where we
are? Last thing I remember, we were passing under the Bay Bridge off
Annapolis."

"That's Bloody Point Lighthouse behind us," Rick said. "Poplar Island is
on the starboard and the Eastern Shore to port. That black thing
sticking up ahead of us is a light