When Smith explored the Patuxent in June of 1608, he sailed past a thin neck of land now called Point Patience. It is in this area that the channel is over 90 feet deep, one of the deepest locations in the entire Chesapeake. As Smith and later sailors found, the prevailing winds often make it difficult to sail around this point, hence the name Point Patience. Although fish were found throughout the Chesapeake, the explorers comment that schools of fish were more abundant here than elsewhere is notable. The quantities were so extraordinary that the fish and other Chesapeake resources did seem to 17th-century Englishmen to be present in infinite numbers. Although these exceptional schools of diverse fish no longer exist, travelers today on the Maryland Route 4 bridge at Solomon’s Island still see Point Patience much as it would have appeared to John Smith.