Heading south, Delaware 9 ends near Dover Air Force Base. I learn they offer tours, 
but only on a limited basis. "Priority scheduling" is given to "youth groups serving high-school-age students with a recruitment potential." I find it a lot easier to visit the Air Mobility Command Museum, right off Route 9 in a restored World War II hangar that was once a Rocket Test Center. Now it houses a collection of historic military airlift and tanker aircraft. It's connected to the base so I am more interested in watching through the fence as huge cargo jets are taking off and landing on the airfield.
North of Dover is the small town of Leipsic, which is a lot quieter now than it must have been in 1814, when a booming muskrat fur market prompted residents to change the name of their town, naming it after Leipzig, Germany, a big fur-shipping port. Driving down a dead end I find Alan Pleasanton taking advantage of a slow crabbing season to replace the white oak planks on his dock with pressure treated pine.
His boat (in the water behind him) is the "San," short for Sandra, named after his wife of 35 years. "I tell her every morning she's the luckiest woman in Leipsic." The painting at right is his dad's boat, the "Miss Ruth," named for HIS wife - Pleasanton's mother. It's full of oysters, he points out, back in the 1970's. Not able to count on a catch that size anymore, he opened a carryout seafood restaurant a few years ago so his daughters could make a living. But this summer, for the first time ever, this Delaware waterman has had to buy his crabs from Louisiana. Pleasanton's Seafood, is on Route 13 in Dover. He says it always gets the "Best Crabs" awards from magazines.
Earlier, near Odessa, another town named for a port in the old country - in this case grain shipping in Russia - I find someone actually catching crabs. Mike Gawronski of New Castle and his three kids and fiance are dropping nets baited with chicken drumsticks into the water off what he calls "the old wooden bridge" over Silver Run. It's not wood anymore, but it was when he fished and crabbed there as a kid. Gawronski thinks I'm a County Fish and Wildlife Agent when I walk up - just as he's showing a crab to his nine year old daughter Elizabeth. The minimum size for hard shell crabs is five inches. This one is six and a half, so he wasn't worried even if I were an agent.
