When the cold grips the Chesapeake Bay, as it has for weeks now, much of the estuary’s water freezes into ice.

It locks in along the shores first, in the inlets and rivers. People walk over the water, skate, even sail across the ice on specialized boats mounted with skates and a mast.

But watermen, emergency vessels and the pilots who steer cargo ships into the Port of Baltimore still need to access the water. And not on skates.

In Maryland, where the upper bay is more likely to freeze, the state usually operates three steel-hulled boats that patrol the estuary’s icy reaches. Like giant snow plows, they clear critical channels for those who need to leave the harbor in frigid temperatures.

“Our work is so unsung,” Capt. Mike Simonsen said before setting out aboard the 80-foot A.V. Sandusky from an Annapolis dock Tuesday morning.

The Sandusky’s domain this winter stretches from Havre de Grace to the Choptank River on the Eastern Shore.

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A day earlier, the icebreaker’s three-man crew traversed from Kent Narrows on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the Maryland capital. The Sandusky spent three hours cutting through ice before it reached open water, Simonsen said.

Since temperatures plunged into the single digits following January’s snowstorm, ice has crept across much of the Chesapeake. It covered almost 40% of mid-Atlantic waters on Wednesday, according to the U.S. National Ice Center, much of it clogged in Maryland’s upper bay, where lower-salinity waters freeze more easily.

But ice in the Sandusky’s path doesn’t stand a chance.

The 120-ton vessel rides up and over ice sheets with its reinforced hull before using a 2,000-gallon water tank in its bow to add weight.

In front, ice splinters, reverberating through the boat.

“Sandusky’s singing to us,” Simonsen observed.

When the freeze gets really deep — the captain and his crew recently pushed through ice over seven inches thick — toilet paper bounces off its stand in the boat’s stall and dishes tremble in the kitchen.

Simonsen, who grew up in a maritime family in the Pacific Northwest, settled in Maryland after marrying a Towson volleyball player. He likes to think of himself and his crew as “modern-day pirates” but admitted that his wife has “pretty much washed the pirate right out.”

The Sandusky has broad turf this winter in part because one of the Department of Natural Resources icebreakers, the J.C. Widener, is out for maintenance.

The third, a new vessel called the Eddie Somers, handles the lower bay.

At 94 feet and costing $9 million, the Eddie Somers is the Cadillac of icebreakers. It can bulldoze through 18 inches of ice, more than enough to support a car, and replaced the storied J. Millard Tawes, which was built during World War II and broke ice on the bay for almost 50 years, including during the legendary freeze of 1977.

Based in Crisfield on the Eastern Shore, the Eddie Somers has spent much of the last week clearing paths for watermen, while maintaining a supply line for the remote and sinking Smith and Tangier islands.

“It’s been madness,” Capt. Shawn Ridgley said Thursday as he steered the Eddie Somers across Tangier Sound back to Crisfield.

He was returning from Virginia’s Tangier Island, which, because the U.S. Coast Guard no longer operates a Chesapeake icebreaker, has gotten Maryland’s help during this freeze.

The Eddie Somers dropped off packages and pallets of groceries for Tangier on Thursday, supplies that will have to last the islanders at least through the weekend, Ridgley said.

The 37-year-old Sandusky, meanwhile, is about as Maryland as they come, its captain said.

Built in a Locust Point shipyard next to the Domino Sugar plant, it’s named for the legendary Baltimore Colts lineman Alexander Vincent Sandusky, who guarded Johnny Unitas and, after over a decade in professional football, charted a second career at the DNR. There, he spent nearly 25 years helping build marinas and boat ramps around the state.

His namesake’s crew expects to keep busy after the thaw.

In warmer months, the Sandusky tends the state’s network of hundreds of buoys. It’s also on tap for other jobs around the bay. After the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March of 2024, the Sandusky hoisted the first fallen truck from the Patapsco River, lifting the vehicle with the same crane it uses to anchor buoys.

While stubborn, this year’s freeze isn’t the deepest the Chesapeake Bay has experienced.

In late January a year ago, nearly half of mid-Atlantic waters froze over, according to National Ice Center tracking. And that’s nothing compared to the winter of ’77.

In one of the greatest freezes the Chesapeake has seen, ice covered nearly the whole bay, stretching well into Virginia’s salty southern waters and spanning the Bay Bridge end-to-end.

That freeze pushed navigational buoys out of place and disrupted shipping channels, retired bay pilot Bill Band wrote in a recent retrospective for Chesapeake Bay Magazine. Its ice was so powerful it tilted a Choptank River lighthouse sideways and blocked pilot boats from approaching cargo ships.

Instead, bay pilots were lifted aboard by helicopter, Band wrote.

Ben Gillis, an engineer and the longest-tenured member of the Sandusky crew, has worked the icebreaker for almost a quarter-century. Now 69, he’s held just one job on land in his life: pumping gas in Annapolis when he was 16.

The long-timer wasn’t too impressed by this year’s freeze and expects he’s still got another winter in him.

“I like it. You have to,” Gillis said, “to be on the same boat for 22 years.”

The bay got a brief reprieve this week as temperatures warmed somewhat, but forecasts of single digits over the weekend will keep the estuary in what Simonsen calls “ice-making mode.”

He expects his crew will be breaking ice well into next week.

They spent Tuesday morning against a backdrop of the State House and the Naval Academy clearing channels in a frozen Annapolis harbor.

Twin engines allow the Sandusky to perform agile turns. Its crew steered back and forth Tuesday to “checkerboard” the harbor into chunks, which they hoped an outgoing tide would pull to open water.

It’s a technical job for which Jim Tate, backup captain of the Sandusky, had commonsense advice: “Never approach a dock faster than you’re willing to hit it.”

Whenever the icebreaker arrives in a new area, the Sandusky crew fields calls from private boaters and marinas eager to have their corner of the bay busted.

One such call this week came from the captain of the Harvest Moon, a sailboat locked in ice at the back of an Annapolis marina. With a few minutes and what might have been the world’s smoothest parallel parking job, Simonsen cleared a path from the marina into open water.

“Beautiful!” the man, Kevin Moore, called from the shore. “You have no idea how happy I am.”

“Where you headed to?” Tate called back.

“Florida!”