Reedville Fishermen's Museum

Claud W. Somers

Skipjack

The rebirth of three Chesapeake Bay dredge boats

BY LAWRENCE LATANE III
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
May 10, 2001

REEDVILLE - In a tour de force of vision, know-how and local pride, three of the Chesapeake Bay's most famous vessels are being coaxed back to life in boatyards on the Northern Neck.

"I call it the Western Shore renaissance," said Angus Murdoch, director of the Reedville Fishermen's Museum, whose 90-year-old Claud W. Somers is one of the skipjacks under reconstruction.

Once a workhorse of the bay's oyster beds, skipjacks, or two-sail bateaux, are now even rarer than the bay's endangered bald eagle and just as beloved.

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About 30 of the sloop-rigged sailboats remain. Only 13 still dredge oysters in the Maryland portion of the bay. They are the last working sailboats in the nation. In their heyday around the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of the boats dredged oysters and hauled cargo throughout the bay - especially Maryland's lower Eastern Shore. Many called Virginia ports on the Potomac, Rappahannock and James rivers home. Some were built and repaired on the Northern Neck.

"I've seen so many I didn't used to pay any attention to them," admitted Wendell Haynie, a retired Northumberland County pharmacist who's among two dozen or so museum volunteers rebuilding the Somers.

Haynie used a chain saw to fell seven pines and three oaks that are providing lumber for the reconstruction. Among the trees was the towering loblolly that yielded the Somers' massive 35-foot keelson, the literal backbone of its sturdy hull.

"We've spent $48,000 to date," Haynie said recently while examining the 42-foot Somers suspended from a boatlift. With its pointed bow spit and long tapered sides, the hull looked like a giant billfish eager to return to sea. Like the other two skipjacks on the Northern Neck, the Somers was rescued from a boatyard on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where decades of laborious winter oyster dredging had taken its toll.

"We had to take out all the bottom on one side and part of the other," Haynie said of the effort to rebuild the Somers, which was built in 1911 in Accomack County. Haynie and other volunteers, led by boat builder Andy Cockrell, also had to rebuild the boat's gracefully arched decking that had succumbed to rot.

"Once we started, we started seeing how much needed to be replaced," Haynie said.

It's a familiar refrain.

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In Sandy Point, a spit of land on the Westmoreland County side of the Potomac River, owner Herb Carden was forced to discard most of the Wilma Lee, a 20-ton skipjack built in 1940 in Wingate, Md.

When Carden, a Westmoreland County lumberman, bought it five years ago, "it looked good," he said, "but structurally it was no good."

All that's left of the original 50-foot boat as Carden and boatwright John Morgenthaler struggle to complete the restoration by Memorial Day is its stem, a huge oak block called the mast step and the boat's 16-inch by 16-inch by 48-foot-long cypress keelson.

Morgenthaler painstakingly rebuilt the Wilma's bottom and sides plank by plank using the original hull as a guide to retain the boat's lines. The process was necessary because bay boatbuilders never used plans.

Restoration work on the Virginia W, which is moored at Port Kinsale Marina, is in its third year. A big pine log will be a replacement for the Virginia W's rotten keelson.

The 42-foot Claud W. Somers is suspended from a boatlift at Cockrells Marine Railway, where some of the work was done.

PHOTOS BY LAWRENCE LATANE' III/TIMES-DISPATCH

"You just don't know what we've been through," said Carden.

"We hauled it [out of the water] and the transom about fell off," Morgenthaler added.

When Carden embarked on the restoration four years ago, it capped a lifetime love affair with the bay's many styles of wooden boats.

The skipjack is perhaps the bay's most distinctive. Built to carry a massive sail to catch what little breeze often blows on the Chesapeake, the boats feature high bows, raked masts and sides that sweep low to the water at mid-deck to facilitate dragging in the iron oyster dredge and their heavy loads.

"She's a really pretty boat," said Ian Williams, a British transplant who is leading the reconstruction of the skipjack Virginia W at Port Kinsale Marina in Westmoreland County.

Afloat at her moorings in a basin filled with mass-produced fiberglass yachts with their rigging clanging against aluminum masts, the wooden Virginia W sits low and quiet, sleek as the mergansers that dive for bait fish in the Yeocomico River - and just as swift.

"In my opinion, she's the fastest sailboat in the marina and she's over 100 years old," Williams said.

Marina owner Marty Miller created a 501.C.3 charity to own and maintain the skipjack. He envisions sailing the boat to bayside festivals and using it as an ambassador for the Chesapeake Bay pollution cleanup campaign and the effort to rekindle the bay's declining oyster population.

"We're hopeful that it will be an attraction to help people relate to the message of clean water and oyster restoration," Miller said.

Miller said he paid $18,000 for the boat, which had been moored on Tilghman Island, Md., one of the last redoubts for the vanishing skipjacks. "The better part" of $100,000 has gone into the restoration, now in its third year, he said.

Williams hopes to finish the job soon, having hewn a big pine log donated by Carden as a replacement for the Virginia W's rotten keelson.

On second thought, though, he knows the restoration will be a work in progress.

"It's an ongoing thing," Williams said. "That's wooden boat building."

Contact Lawrence Latane III at (804) 333-3461 or llatane@timesdispatch.com