Rosie Parks is a skipjack built in 1955 by celebrated Dorchester County boatbuilder Bronza Parks in Wingate, MD. The ship is part of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum's floating fleet of historic vessels. Photo courtesy of The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
The men and women who make a living by fishing, crabbing and oystering in and around the Chesapeake Bay are an enterprising and resourceful lot. Likewise, the workboats plying the waves are as interesting and varied as the watermen they serve and the thousands of miles of shoreline from which they cast off.
The term “waterman” dates as far back as the eleventh century in England. These early English watermen were actually smugglers who used small boats to transport stolen goods across waterways. When the English settled around the Chesapeake Bay, they continued to use that name, applying it to anyone who worked in the fishing industry.
According to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Virginia’s watermen harvested more than 382 million pounds of seafood from the Chesapeake Bay in 2013. This ranks Virginia third in the nation behind Alaska and Louisiana for seafood production. The most popular Chesapeake Bay seafoods are the blue crab and the Chesapeake Bay oyster, but there are at least 50 commercially valuable species in addition to crabs and oysters, including menhaden, soft clams and hard clams, and a wide variety of fish. The dockside value of the harvest in 2013 was upwards of $163 million.
Because each area around the bay is unique, watermen over the years have tended to develop their own customized boats and equipment with which to get the job done. Many became skilled boatbuilders and have been sought after for their craftsmanship. Deltaville has long been known as a hub of boatbuilding. A great many watermen built boats for themselves, and when one of them built a particularly handsome and able craft, word spread and other watermen often asked that he duplicate the model for them. That’s how oystermen and crabbers became boatbuilders — they simply built boats by eye, maybe carving a model first.
Dan Knott, a crabber from Mathews with the Virginia Waterman’s Association noted: “Watermen use whatever they have, or whatever they can modify to make it work. It is really all over the place, which is what I love about it. I love skiffs, and eventually when a good deadrise comes along, I will get it just to help preserve it. I seem to have a fascination for them!”
And why not? With quirky workboat names like pungy, bugeye, skipjack and deadrise, who wouldn’t be charmed enough to become fascinated?
SCHOONER
Lady Maryland, a replica of a Chesapeake Bay pungy schooner, was built in 1985 by the Living Classrooms Foundation and is owned and operated by the foundation. Photo courtesy of The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
Schooners are sailing ships with two or more masts. These Colonial-era workhorses were used for everything from hauling cargo to tormenting the British. They have a long history in the mid-Atlantic as workboats for the watermen who made their living harvesting oysters, blue crabs and fish from the bay. The fastest-sailing vessels delivered goods and people to their destinations and often garnered the best price for their cargo by beating slower schooners into port. Over the years, commercial schooner designs evolved for the bay’s routes, taking into consideration shallow waters, local crops and regional needs, with speed being a primary concern to beat competitively loaded vessels into port.
In October, schooners can be seen racing 146 miles down the bay from Annapolis, Maryland, to Hampton Roads, Virginia, as a part of the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race. This race was started to draw attention to the bay’s heritage and to support environmental education and restoration work.
LOG CANOE
Originally built by the native Powhatan tribes along the Chesapeake Bay, these boats were adopted by early English settlers, who discovered that the sturdy craft could handle the rough waters of the bay and carry a heavy load. The canoes were made of logs from loblolly pine or tulip poplar trees. The log was slowly burned, then the ashes were scraped from inside. The settlers added a sail to the canoe, increasing its speed. Depending on the size of the tree, a canoe could be 30 feet long and up to five feet wide. With an ample supply of logs, the canoe became the standard workboat for the bay until the 1900s. Log canoes were not constructed at a shipyard, but on the owner’s or builder’s property. Requiring only simple tools and no plans, the log canoe was inexpensive to build and easily replaced.
PUNGY
The pungy is a smaller form of schooner developed on the Chesapeake Bay to dredge oysters and carry bulk cargo. It was developed in the 1840s and 1850s in the Accomack region of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The name is believed to come from Pungoteague, an area in Accomack County where the ships were built. This workboat has a large, heavy spar projecting forward from the bow (bowsprit), with narrow lines down its sides. The pungy was a common site in Baltimore’s harbor during World War I and up until the 1930s. The most unusual cargo carried by the pungy was pineapple picked green in Bermuda and delivered to Baltimore — the fruit ripened as it traveled. The problem came in heavy seas, when the pungy’s lowboards allowed wash over the decks and ruined the fruit below. The use of the pungy eventually gave way to newly developed boats like the bugeye and the skipjack.
Only one pungy is still afloat, the Lady Maryland, which takes children out on the bay for the Living Classrooms Foundation in Baltimore. There were no pungies on the bay (or in the world) from the 1950s until the Lady Maryland was built in 1986. Today, she is the only pungy schooner in existence.
Edna E. Lockwood is a National Historic Landmark and the oldest sailing log-bottom bugeye. She was built in 1889 by John B. Harrison of Tilghman Island, MD. Photo courtesy of The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
BUGEYE
New England fishermen brought the oyster dredge to the Chesapeake Bay. The watermen of the bay used tongs to pick up oysters from the beds. This was difficult and slow work, and when northern fishermen were spotted on the bay using a dredge, the oyster industry began to change. The small log canoes did not carry enough sail to pull the heavy iron dredge, so a new boat was needed. The bugeye was a hybrid of three boats developed in the bay and peaked in popularity in the 1880s as an oyster dredger.
The builders took from the log canoe the principal design elements of a dugout log hull and sail plan. From the pungy came the sweeping, low freeboard and log rail. The log rail allowed the oyster dredge to be easily and quickly hoisted onto the deck. The Chesapeake Bay Schooner lent the idea of a shoal or shallow draft and an unobstructed deck.
There are numerous ideas about how the bugeye got its name; two theories are the most widely recognized. One is that it came from the Scottish word “buckie,” meaning oyster shell. Many Scottish immigrants settled in the bay area, and it is believed that local slang corrupted the word to “buck-eye” and then to “bug-eye.” The second theory is that the name came from the hawse-holes at the bow of the boat, which from a distance resemble a bug’s eyes, while the bowsprit looked like a nose.
SKIPJACK
The skipjack is an elegant V-bottomed boat developed in the 1880s and based on a smaller sailing skiff like a bateau. The two-masted skipjack was used for oyster harvesting, as it was powerful enough under sail to haul two full-sized oyster dredges. Traditionally, skipjacks were called “bateau” by watermen, but in 1900, a newspaper article from the Baltimore Sun described these boats being fitted-out for oyster season in the Baltimore Harbor. The writer portrayed them as a “skipjack,” referring to their speed on the water. The name stuck, but the words “skipjack” and “bateau” became almost interchangeable.
Skipjacks, long known as the “queens” of the bay, ruled the oyster-dredging trade from the late 1800s through the first half of the twentieth century. Of the estimated 2,000 built, fewer than 30 remain.
Deadrise at sunset.
DEADRISE
Developed in the late 1800s, the sturdy Chesapeake Bay deadrise workboat remains one of the most popular and traditional boats for crabbing and oystering around the bay and its tributaries. Watermen have used these boats year-round for everything from crabbing and oystering to catching fish or eels. More recently, they’ve become popular recreational vessels as well.
Traditionally wooden hulled, the deadrise is characterized by a sharp bow that quickly becomes a flat V shape moving aft along the bottom of the boat. A small cabin structure lies forward and a large open cockpit and work area aft. It has a shallow draft of two to three feet, making it ideal for the shallows of the bay. The average deadrise workboat is 35 to 45 feet long with a beam of nine to 12 feet. The deadrise can use almost any engine, but diesel engines are preferred over regular gasoline because of their reliability.
A Chesapeake Bay deadrise. Photo courtesy of Bob Cerullo.
Over the years, watermen have modified these boats to accommodate the unique characteristics of the areas where they work, which is one reason many watermen eventually became successful boatbuilders. For instance, the round stern style of deadrise, so named for its rounded rear end, is said to have made it a little easier for watermen tonging for oysters to work both with and against the tidal water flow from both ends of the boat. The deadrise workboat is the official boat of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The engine-driven deadrise and its modern recreational kin evolved directly from the sailing skipjacks of the late nineteenth century.
BUYBOAT
Buyboats were the middlemen of the oyster trade. Buyboat captains purchased a waterman’s catch while the working craft was still on the water. Buyboats are typically wooden boats 40 to 90 feet long and characterized by a rear wheelhouse and a long deck for cargo.
Buyboats circulated among the harvesters collecting their catches, then delivered their loads to a wholesaler or oyster processing house. This spared the fishermen of the task and its downtime, allowing them to catch more oysters. Buyboats saw their heyday in the first half of the twentieth century when most oysters from the Chesapeake Bay were harvested by tongers in small flat-bottomed boats, or dredged by sail-powered vessels.
The Nellie Crockett, a buyboat on Jackson Creek in Deltaville, VA. Photo courtesy of Bob Cerullo.
By 2013, only one buyboat operating out of remote Tangier Island was still buying oysters on the Chesapeake Bay; although many of these sturdy, but largely obsolete wooden vessels remain afloat. Some were used to dredge crabs into the 1980s, but have since been replaced by smaller deadrise workboats in this role. A few of them were adapted for use in the Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishery during the 1970s and 1980s but have since been retired, and some were used to haul seed oysters to replenish oyster reefs in Virginia and Maryland into the early 2000s. Most of the vessels of this type that are still afloat have found completely new lives as museum pieces, yachts, floating classrooms, and dive charter boats.
A skiff sails on the Miles River in St. Michaels, MD, at the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival in 2019. Photo courtesy of The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
SKIFF
Skiffs are shallow, flat-bottomed boats recognizable by their sharp bow and square stern. These watercraft are small and sturdy, made to move through the tributaries and along the coastal areas of the bay. While they can be used as workboats, skiffs are most often used for recreational fishing and other leisurely outings.
Since watermen are known for their ingenuity at adapting any vessel that can work, it’s not unusual to see a clutch of industrious workers in their skiffs, combing the waters for hard crabs, clams, oysters and fish, and scouring the shallow grass flats for soft crabs — changing out minimal gear as needed and taking the weather as it comes.
For more information on workboats of the Chesapeake, or the men and women who make their livelihoods on the water, visit The Mariner’s Museum website at marinersmuseum.org.