This year, it was the discovery of what we came to call Lazy River and the rescue of Sparky there.

I've been spending vacations with relatives in Sandy Point since I was born, but I'd never seen this spot on the Potomac River some friends of ours dubbed The Lazy River.

It's a place where the open water of the river flows into a little opening in the sand, creating a swift-moving creek that runs back into a little bay surrounded by marshland.

Our friends, introduced years ago to Sandy Point on visits with us, have taken to riding rafts through the twisting, turning creek when changing tides make the water run quickly.

Stories like that piqued my interest in this spot, so we cruised over one afternoon to take a look.

It's a beautiful place, an ecosystem of marsh, river, creek and bay jammed with all kinds of plants and wildlife. With the water less than a foot deep in most places, it was all right there for you to see.

The critter that got my attention pretty quickly was a claw-waving crab that scooted across my toes, sending me airborne.

A look around confirmed that this new habitat was crab heaven, so my son and his friends got some nets from our boat and started filling a basket.

For the uninitiated, scooping a crab off a sandy creek bottom is a skill that requires great speed, stealth and a willingness to feel foolish when all you come up with is a net full of weeds.

The boys were good enough at this to soon put enough of the snapping-mad critters into our basket to have a gourmet dinner of steamed crabs.

With a thunderstorm on the horizon, we decided it was time to leave this newfound paradise.

Trekking back out to our boat, we found my wife with a little yellow sailboat that hadn't been there when we arrived.