His line was taut, his arms worked furiously and the rest of the fishers dropped their gear and gathered around Evan Woodard as he pulled a big one in.
“Another scooter!” Woodard said, hoisting a hunk of metal dripping with black, bottom-of-the-harbor ooze. It smelled awful. The crowd cheered. Cylinder Neodymium Magnets
“This one’s been in there at least three years,” said the historian, urban excavationist, photographer and lead magnet fisher of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
Yes, it’s a thing, and it’s having a moment, to the disdain of some in academia who question the methods of amateurs unschooled in preservation.
Every Thursday, Woodard, 36, leads a magnet fishing meetup somewhere along the sea walls of Baltimore harbor, where ships — freighters, cruise ships, tobacco ships, Baltimore clippers, even the Continental Navy — have been plying the waters and dropping junk overboard since 1670.
The growing hobby, with escapades documented on social media from the Netherlands to Hollywood, entices history nerds, environmentalists and (careful) adrenaline junkies.
Magnet fishers throw their lines into waters all over the world, joining the tribe of amateur treasure hunters that includes beachcombers with their metal detectors and mudlarkers plucking Roman coins from the muck of the River Thames. In Baltimore, they are artists, teachers, architects, scientists — and at least one funeral home removal technician — who come in Carhartt overalls, boots and work gloves to cast their magnets into the harbor.
When it comes to gear, the sweetest one is the Boss 360, a $277 neodymium magnet with a 3,500-pound combined pull force that’s so strong, you have to keep it in a special case or it’ll smack and stick to the side of your truck, as Woodard has painfully learned. They lug their gear, slimy rope and hand wipes in five-gallon buckets, always an oddity that stops tourists, strollers and joggers.
They are not especially beloved in the academic world of archaeology.
“There is a new threat to metal artifacts called magnet fishing,” the Maryland Advisory Committee on Archaeology tartly reported in its September 2020 meeting.
The academics worry that the amateurs do damage and aren’t properly cataloguing and preserving their finds.
Woodard, who dropped out of college when he got bored, rolls his eyes at the critics. The gonzo historian describes them as “gatekeepers of history” and says their oppressive and arcane methodology isn’t the only way to exhume the past.
“Rather than hinder development or hold property owners hostage with extensive archaeological processes, I collaborate with developers and property owners to swiftly salvage historical artifacts and structures,” Woodard said, replying on Reddit to a recent editorial critical of such treasure hunters. “Importantly, I offer my services pro bono, motivated by the passion to safeguard our shared heritage.”
He and his fellow fishers aren’t in it for academic accolades. They do it for fun and to democratize the staid world of archaeology.
Woodard’s got a day job that may sound exciting. He’s a cybersecurity expert — formerly for the Ravens football team, now with a white-shoe law firm. But when he was a kid growing up in Laurel, Md., he saw himself less Johnny Mnemonic and more Indiana Jones — outdoors, getting dirty and sweaty while discovering cool stuff.
A post shared by Evan Woodard / Salvage Arc (@salvagearc)
His voracious mind never settled in front of a computer. And he found a way to be urban-Indy by excavating Victorian-era privies in Baltimore, working with property owners and developers to get proper permission and access. He and his group of volunteers follow old city maps to find the spots and dig. Then all 6-foot-5 of Woodard spelunks into the abandoned outhouse holes of Baltimore’s past to retrieve majolica pottery, frozen Charlotte dolls, clay pipes, prohibition whiskey bottles and anything else folks wanted to discard — or hide.
Last year, Woodard’s restless sights turned toward the water. If people dumped bizarre things into their toilets, imagine what they tossed into the harbor.
He threw a magnet into the cold, dark waters just before Christmas a year ago and bam, he pulled up three scooters. He was hooked.
The traffic, the history, the fact that parts of the waterfront — Fells Point with its cobblestone streets and creaking, old taverns in particular — are relatively unaltered, make Baltimore primo magnet fishing territory.
“A Victorian bench, that one was special. And the shipping hook, that was from the 1800s,” Woodard ticked off his best relics. His white whale? “Oh a cannon. I’d love to find a cannon.”
Martin Strada, 26, carries his trophy with him to the Thursday night meetups.
“It might be from the Civil War,” he said, running his finger along the elaborately embossed, metal scabbard. “I pulled it out at Old Town Alexandria.”
Woodard calls his project Salvage Arc and has contributed some of his finds to the Baltimore Museum of Industry. He’s got a robust social media presence, where thousands of followers check his weekly finds and the photos come with history lessons he’s researched in archives. He makes and sells jewelry out of the ones that are cool but not rare enough for a museum display. And he’s had pop-up museums around town. His dream is an urban archaeology museum, which he said is in the works.
Centuries of tides and silt make historical harbor finds rare. More frequently, magnet fishers pull up the evidence of contemporary misdeeds, the drunken nights that crescendo with shopping carts, park benches, trash cans and electric scooters hurled in the water (Woodard’s scooter count is up to 197 as of last Thursday’s meetup).
He’s pulled up guns, a cherry red Vespa, empty cash registers, chairs, manhole covers, a patio umbrella, a traffic cone, wallets, a Steve Madden kitten heel and a purse with $37 inside.
At the end of each fish, the group poses with its trophies, like they’re on a fishing charter in Cabo. Then they peel off the mucky clothes and head to a local bar for Natty Bohs.
The truth is, most of what they do is harbor cleanup. And there’s pride in getting all those old tires, trash cans and e-scooter batteries out of the water (the scooter companies hate the magnet fishers — they get fined by the city for every scooter the fishers recover).
That’s the part that drives Zoe Fried, 31, to come. She pulled up a shopping cart last week. Plus, it’s fun.
Ndfeb Bonded Magnet “For me,” said the artist and musician, “it’s a chance to do a social sports thing without having to hit a ball.”