Nobody in Maryland is arguably more famous for her feats in the Chesapeake Bay than Katie Pumphrey, who last year swam 24 miles from the Bay Bridge to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

For the ultra-marathon swimmer’s training over the last decade, Anne Arundel County’s 533 miles of shoreline might seem like an obvious place to jump in. But it’s not easy to swim here — for someone of Pumphrey’s renown or anyone looking for a hot summer day reprieve.

“The only way I could get in the water in, say, Annapolis was to know someone with a dock,” Pumphrey said. “That’s a huge barrier.”

Only 2% of the shoreline that surrounds the Chesapeake Bay is publicly owned. It’s little different in Anne Arundel. And, in a county synonymous with the nation’s largest estuary, only about a mile of the shoreline — a tenth of 1% — is set aside for public swimming.

That’s the outcome of centuries when owning the waterfront was either a key to wealth through the tobacco trade or a sign of it with waterfront homes and private beaches. The result is that the few public swimming beaches are crammed every summer and tightly regulated with fees and reservations.

With no outdoor public pools in Anne Arundel County, residents’ best bet for summer swimming is to know someone who has private access to the bay or the Magothy, Severn or South rivers.

“It’s not even drops of water access,” said Lisa Arrasmith, a Hanover resident, avid kayaker and longtime water access advocate. “It’s a sprinkling, maybe.”

Arrasmith has for years and through multiple political administrations led a coalition calling on county officials to add places for public swimming, boating and paddling. She acknowledges the challenges of acquiring expensive waterfront property but points to underutilized county-owned parks with shoreline where swimming is prohibited as opportunities to increase water access.

Anne Arundel leaders have taken different approaches to water access.

Elected in 2018, County Executive Steuart Pittman has focused on upgrading facilities around existing beaches. He has tried to increase public engagement with the water through summertime festivals featuring boat rides, music and swimming.

His hallmark achievement may be bowing to public pressure by opening a once- segregated beach in Edgewater to the public in 2023 over the outrage of neighbors, who effectively had been renting a third of the beach for exclusive use for a dollar a year.

Boosting water access remains important to Pittman, the incoming chair of the state Democratic Party.

“When we connect people to the water, they then care about it and want to protect it,” Pittman said. “When we get outside and recreate, we are healthier.”

Approximately 80% of Anne Arundel’s 600,000 residents don’t live on the water or in communities with access to it.

There are 78 recognized private beaches in the county but only four public ones. They are:

Sandy Point State Park

• 1,800-foot swimming beach at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge
• Entrance fees of $5 per person on weekends and $4 on weekdays during summer
• Reservation required for summer weekends and holidays
• Capacity of 1,768 parking spaces

Fort Smallwood Park

• 1,300-foot swimming beach (opened in 2016) in Pasadena
• $6 entrance fee per vehicle
• First come, first served
• Capacity of 1,400 parking spaces

Mayo Beach Park

• 1,000-foot swimming beach (opened in 2014) in South County
• No entrance fee
• Reservation required for weekends in the summer
• Capacity of 90 parking spaces

Beverly Triton Nature Park

• 2,300-foot swimming beach (opened in 2023) in South County
• $6 entrance fee per vehicle
• Reservation required for weekends in the summer
• Capacity of 96 parking spaces

Anne Arundel has indoor aquatic centers in Annapolis and Glen Burnie, with a third slated for Hanover.

Though the county has no outdoor public pool, there is one in Annapolis’ Truxtun Park.

The city, however, doesn’t have any designated public swimming spots on the Severn River or the creeks that branch off it.

“You can swim in most places except Ego Alley, and nobody’s going to stop you,” Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley said. “I mean, swim at your own risk.”

Buckley, a Democrat, said he’s worked to make the water more accessible in the city, most notably by joining forces with the county, state and the Chesapeake Conservancy in 2022 to buy an undeveloped portion of waterfront adjacent to what was once Carr’s Beach, a bustling African American resort during segregation.

Purchased by a formerly enslaved man who worked at the Naval Academy, Carr’s Beach blossomed into a “mecca on the East Coast” that hosted stars such as Ray Charles and James Brown, according to local historian Janice Hayes-Williams.

Carr’s Beach was sold and developed like much of the once-predominantly Black-owned waterfront, which was originally considered undesirable by white people concerned about mosquitos and the diseases they carried, Hayes-Williams said.

“Once Carr’s Beach was gone,” she said, “there was no swimming. ... The lasting impact is community loss, Black kids not knowing how to swim.”

Plans for the new Carr’s Beach site in Annapolis call for a swimming beach and center celebrating local Black history. City officials said they expect to break ground early next year and hope to open it to swimming next summer.

“We’re trying to undo the damage that was done in the past,” Pittman said.

Creating an official swimming beach involves more than clearing the waterfront and dumping tons of clean sand, with state and federal law requiring potable drinking water and water quality testing.

Anne Arundel also considers the cost of maintenance, staffing and health regulations, according to a county spokesperson. The county health department also requires official swimming beaches to have adequate sewer or septic systems, with portable toilets considered inadequate. With limited public transit, parking is also a significant factor.

Though water quality testing can be viewed as a hurdle to opening public swimming beaches, the county health department and Maryland Department of the Environment monitor the quality of the water in most of the major waterways the county touches. While swimming is prohibited in some county parks, those waters already are being monitored for nearby private beaches.

On a recent morning, Arrasmith, the water access advocate, fought off flies as she trudged through overgrown grass to get to the waterfront of Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Park in Pasadena, which the county said it’s looking at as part of a review of “underutilized waterfront locations to explore the possibility of” swimming access.

The entrance opens to a gravel lot with enough room for about a dozen cars, though she said it’s often closed off with a chain. Only about a mile from the gate of Fort Smallwood Park, it is managed by the same rangers.

She’s skeptical about whether and how quickly the county will act, noting that it took a decade from the opening of Beverly Triton Nature Park to cutting the ribbon on its swimming beach. Still, she sees potential here for a kayak launch and maybe even a swimming beach facing the remnants of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

“At low tide, this is a sandy beach,” Arrasmith said. “The whole shore here is Pasadena sand — it’s natural sand. They wouldn’t have to build a beach.”

Water access here, she said, might alleviate pressure on Fort Smallwood Park, where the swimming beach hosted 205,000 visitors from Memorial Day through Labor Day last year, four times as many as the county’s other swimming beaches.

That would be welcome news to Adam Lindquist, vice president of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, a nonprofit focused on improving water quality in the city’s harbor. Lindquist considers swimming in open water a “basic human right” that Maryland largely fails to provide, and he believes Anne Arundel plays an important role.

He lives in landlocked Howard County, he said, so “if I want to show my son the Chesapeake Bay, I’m heading to Anne Arundel County.”