From Phillips, it's less than half an hour by canoe or kayak down Broad Creek to the main Nanticoke, and from there another two-to-three hours paddle to an easily accessible landing and picnic spot at Cherry Beach, the town park in Sharptown, Maryland. Like Bethel, little Sharptown is an old boat building and river fishing town. Guests staying at the Ball Cottage Bed and Breakfast there can take out at a private dock.
The towering old growth forests Smith sailed past in 1608 exist almost nowhere now; but the Nanticoke to an extraordinary extent still offers the look and feel of the Captain's passage when less than 100,000 Native Americans peopled the six-state Chesapeake watershed (current population, 17 million and climbing fast).
The river flows from the little-trafficked interior of Delmarva, a peninsula known to most for its outer edges--ocean beaches, waterfowl marshes, sailing harbors and Bayfront watermens' villages. The Nanticoke and its major tributary the Marshyhope Creek, extend northeast more than 50 miles from Tangier Sound, draining some 600,000 acres as far inland as Federalsburg in Maryland and Seaford and Georgetown in Delaware.
Even today fewer than 45,000 people live in the Nanticoke watershed. Most travelers know the river mainly from crossing it on U.S. 50 at Vienna, between Cambridge and Salisbury, on their way to the beach.
