Herman Melville maybe told it best: “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” he wrote in his legendary sea-saga Moby Dick. “Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”

Change the venue from Manhattan to Baltimore and move time forward by 160 years or so, and there you have it: three men pulled to the Canton waterfront this Sabbath afternoon like metal filings to a magnet.

The day was fraught with possibilities in the gleaming sun, and with warm breezes tugging at clouds and pushing sea gulls about the harbor.

“These are all landsmen; of weekdays pent up in lath and plaster – tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?” wondered Melville.

We went off to grab pen and pad to pose the same question to these gentlemen. But when we returned, they were gone. Asking joggers with headphones didn’t seem right, so we let them go by and pondered the lure of the water on our own.