Annie Richards

100 ton USCG licensed captain
Chester Riverkeeper

It is hard to overstate how varied and incredible Annie’s experiences on the water have been. After growing up on the Chester River, her path took her to places like the Royal Thai Navy Yard, the Panama Canal, and spanning the Americas from New England to the Caribbean to Brazil. She has worked on skipjacks, schooners, tall ships, buy-boats, and catamarans. She’s even worked on an oyster farm. Even after traveling the world and living so many dreams, her heart remains in the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay. She is now the Riverkeeper for the river on which she grew up. She acknowledges the value of knowing a place, a water, your entire life and knowing it so well. Her upbringing and her travels have driven home to her the importance of the connection between a community and its waterways. An important goal for her is to bring that water access to younger and more diverse future boaters in an effort to make the Bay a more equitable place, and to share the wonder that she finds in the water. She reflects upon one of her formative experiences as a young woman - being an intern at an on-the-water education camp where they had the chance to go slow and really notice all of nature. “How much there is to inspire you, if only you’re there to see it.”