A Review by George Merrill, Delmarva Review

Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White. This is a well-researched story of how Chesapeake Bay skipjacks became a part of the social fabric of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and how their skippers and crews helped shape the ecological history of the Bay. White lived on Tilghman Island, a watermen’s enclave, befriending members of the oystering community and crewing aboard skipjacks in winter, dredging fro oysters. He offers intimate sketches of their crusty skippers and capricious crews, describes their local dietary habits, and quotes regional dialect. The book is both an elegy and social commentary about change in the modern world.

A review by Steven Toby, written for the Maritime History Listserv, included here with his kind permission.  Sounds like a fascinating book.

Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White is an excellent book on the last commercial fishing craft operating under sail in the US. The author has a journalistic rather than a scholarly approach, although he has an academic background in the biology/ecology area. He’s a great storyteller, and some of the anecdotes are almost novel-like.

Particular strengths of the book are its portrayal of the mystique surrounding the skipjack, an oyster dredging craft on Chesapeake Bay. While I’ve owned a house on the Eastern shore of Maryland since 2004, and sailed these waters on three cruising boats I’ve owned from 1983 to 2003, so that many of the landmarks were familiar, I discovered from this book how little I knew about the area’s culture. I’d heard the local accent; the author finds ways to represent it in print that ring true. I wasn’t aware that how you pronounce the name of your favorite bivalve allows those in the know to tell what port you sail out of. Nor was I aware that the town of Tilghman (as it is on maps) is called Tilghman’s by watermen who live there.

The author creates what at least seems like an insider’s view of the communities that grew up around ports skipjacks sailed out of. He crewed on several of the boats, but he also watched the oyster shuckers (and tried the art himself) and a blacksmith who makes the dredges and ironwork fittings for the boats. As a crewman, he managed to do pretty much everything on board, from sail handling to culling the catch and raising and lowering the dredges. He even steered a boat as she was “taking a lick” of an oyster bed under sail. He shows us the slang used by the watermen and describes many of the captains to the point we have some idea of their characters. They are known among themselves by nicknames they received in childhood and never outgrew. And the places they come from are traditional: even after the year 2000, only one woman sails with the fleet; the others stay home and cook the seafood the men bring home. Mr. White includes some of their recipes . While black  and white men have served together on the crews for a long time without obvious discrimination, the places they live are still largely segregated (Mr. White skims over this but you can read between the lines). As the book progresses he uses more of their vocabulary and syntax so the reader really feels like he’s learning the local dialect. It’s amazing that an outsider could have seen these tight-knit communities from the inside in a relatively short time.

The last skipjacks were launched in 1956. I was three. What exists when you’re growing up seems permanent. Later, as a teenager, I read the few sentences about the skipjacks in Chapelle’s “American Sailing Ships,” where the author, writing in 1935, holds them up as an example of good fisheries management: by making dredging under power illegal, Maryland not only preserved the Age of Sail into modern times, but also conserved the fishery itself so that future generations could eat oysters, too. During off season cruises I often saw skipjacks at work; at area restaurants, I frequently enjoyed the product of their operations. It never occurred to me that Chapelle’s view of the fishery was optimistic and that in my lifetime it might cease to exist.

Today, however, oysters are endangered, and it’s clear from Mr. White’s account that the skipjacks and the men who sail them are, too. Once they have crossed the Bar, there will be no getting them back, any more than a recovery for the oysters should they become extinct. This becomes clearer and clearer as we read about the skills and knowledge of the few old men, most long beyond retirement age, who were commanding skipjacks when Mr. White did his research. Accordingly, he may be pardoned for writing a conclusion that might be overly sentimental, yet is superbly done. He’s also to be commended for not taking the easy outs that are available to those who would assign blame. Mismanagement by state regulators, overfishing, pollution, and diseases whose source is still uncertain all played a role. The psychology of the “commons”, where no one actually owned the oyster beds, also had a role in developing a mind-set among the watermen that was not conducive to conservation, much like the open range in the Old West.

As a naval architect, I can quibble with one aspect of the book. It fails to fulfill the promise of its title; not being strictly about the skipjack, it leaves important details about the boats unexplained. There was no Howard I. Chapelle to take the lines off a dozen hulls and provide drawings of the hull forms and internal arrangements of the boats; Chapelle himself provided only those few sentences in “American Sailing Ships” and a small drawing, plus a three page description, of a day-sailer sized version of a skipjack in “American Small Sailing Craft” (1951). The original builders used neither paper plans nor models. They took their secrets with them to the grave; Bronza Parks, who built the last of them, LADY KATIE, died two years later. Mr. White was told that Parks had been shot to death in an argument, but perhaps that is only folklore. TheChesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM) at St. Michaels has a skipjack in its collection (built by the same Mr. Parks by the way), and has helped maintain many others, yet their skipjack can only be viewed from the dock; there’s no access for the public below decks. Therefore, while I guessed there must be a head and cooking facilities on board because I knew they went out before dawn and returned late in the day, I had to learn from the text that there are full overnight accommodations on a skipjack, and that before World War II it wasn’t uncommon for the crew to live aboard for weeks at a time. Even recently, skipjacks have had a cook to prepare a hot breakfast as they are motoring out to the dredging grounds before dawn. There’s also a hold where the catch can be stored overnight, although it’s more common for the boats to bring their catch back to harbor each evening (and in earlier periods, “buyboats” came alongside and bought the catch at the end of each day). Each skipjack carries a pushboat on davits. Those are also on display at CBMM, and they are a mini-tugboat with a monster engine with remote controls leading on board the mother ship to a throttle and shift near the wheel. The pushboat has no rudder, and the means of holding it to the mother ship and slewing it like an outboard motor to aid in turning are not obvious from looking at it, nor documented elsewhere that I know of. Even the simplest drawings would have helped the technically oriented reader to understand the design of the skipjack and its dredging equipment.

American scholarly culture has mostly ignored the kind of highly skilled, blue collar workers who manned the skipjacks. Today’s children are exhorted to stay in school as long as possible because going to college and graduate school is necessary to qualify for the “best” careers according to elite opinion – medicine, law, academics, engineering, and Wall Street. It’s a pleasant change to read about people whose children skip school to crew on their fathers’ or grandfathers’ skipjacks, and even after learning that “drudging” is hard, dangerous work, pursued in winter on increasingly fragile, old wooden ships, still want very much to own a skipjack later on in their lives. Mr. White makes us share in the devastation these people must feel when they find out that it is not to be.

In a bizarre epilog, Sunday’s local paper from Easton, Maryland, has an article indicating that four watermen from Tilghman’s Island were arrested by the Natural Resources Police last week. They are accused of dredging under power from a skipjack, at night, without displaying navigation lights, in a location that is reserved for tonguing. The skipjack was LADY KATIE and I recognized one of the men’s names as the son of one of the skippers who mentored Mr. White as he was doing his research.

Skipjack is a unique peek into the mind-set and traditions of these extraordinary people who, like their quarry, are endangered. Listers (at least those from the Eastern US) should read it while it’s still true, but later on, it will have even more value as a record of what once was.

Selected Praise from the Media

“White spent a year chronicling the lives and community of the [Chesapeake] oystermen. … Anyone who is interested in the health and history of the Bay should [read] this amazing author.”–The Annapolis Capital

 “In Skipjack, Christopher White spends a pivotal year with three memorable captains to paint a vivid picture of life on a skipjack, a wooden commercial sailboat as they dredge for oysters…. This last vestige of American sailing culture is rapidly dying. The captains must set aside their rivalries to fight for their very livelihood.”  –Eastern Shore Attractions

  “A hands-on survey of the dangerous skipjack shellfishery, [which] White ably handles as a skilled naturalist. The old-time watermen fill White’s ear with stories of the past that give evidence to their enigmatic reputation as part outlaw, part conservationist. An illuminating, somewhat mournful story of a dying art form.” –Kirkus Reviews

 “Naturally, what’s at stake is not just an important sea creature but a way of human life; White mines…testimony on every aspect of community life, from family recipes to skipjack races to oyster wars, in a moving account. Examining the circumstances and difficult decisions of [the] men…. White provides on-the-ground insight into the possibilities and problems of simultaneously sustaining a community and an ecosystem.” –Online Publishers Weekly

“[An] evocative portrait of the nation’s most beautiful and poignant vocational anachronism. It’s an action-packed tale, complete with waterborne grudge matches, on-deck shootouts, fierce winter storms and suspenseful escapes…[all] served up for us on the half-shell.”–The Washington Post

“Exciting, frustrating and poignant as a few aging men and boats struggle to keep a remarkable way of life alive just a little longer.” –Chesapeake Bay Magazine

“As powerful as The Perfect Storm . . . [a] vividly written book with superb, vernacular dialogue.” –The Working Waterfront

“Move over William Warner, author of the ultimate Chesapeake Bay book, Beautiful Swimmers, the ode to blue crabs.  Make room for a shared reign with Christopher White and his new book Skipjack, an elegiac hymn to the beautiful sailboats, the last sailing watermen who skipper them and the vanishing oyster harvest…. Don’t miss this book, readers.  It’s a wonderful account of a miracle right under our noses.  Run, do not walk, to buy a copy.” –The Star Democrat

“Skipjack…encompasses just about everything a reader would want to know about life on and in the Bay. Author Christopher White burrows so deeply into Bay history, culture and scientific miscellanea that there isn’t much remaining for other Bay lovers to write about…. The reader gets it all: the violent oyster wars; the decline of oysters over the years because of disease and overfishing; and the many conflicting (and greedy) interests…. Skipjack is a book to be enjoyed for its details, authenticity and writing style. It’s local lore at its best, a worthy addition to any library. –Bay Weekly

 “The author spent a year with the captains of three skipjacks, as they balanced politics and tradition, environmental and economic issues in their struggle to harvest oysters from their wooden sailboats.” –WoodenBoat Magazine

 “A stunning portrait…. [White’s] keen eye and lively prose together draw a clear image of a place where work, nature and a deep connection to regional history are interwoven. Join the author as he rides along with the last vestiges of a great American tradition.” –National Fisherman

 “Terrific…. Most centers around Tilghman Island, where the majority of the world’s few remaining skipjacks are [found]…. It reads well and easy and offers a sophisticated analysis of the skills involved in sailing these great boats….” –Surfbirds

 “Those who sail or make their living on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries know that the water is no stranger to sudden and freakish weather conditions. Such was the case in February 1939, when a squall swept across the Bay and up the Choptank River, catching the oyster-dredge fleet unaware. And in a matter of minutes, the quickly moving storm left nine watermen dead while sending several skipjacks and bugeyes to the bottom. The forgotten disaster was resurrected in Christopher White’s recently published book, Skipjack. By the time the wind slammed into Howell Point, White wrote, it had reached hurricane force. And when it did come, White described the wind as looking ‘like black smoke over the water…. Then it rolled right over the fleet.’” –The Baltimore Sun

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE      

contact: MICHAEL BUCKLEY

(v) 410.810.7156  (f) 410.810.7175  mbuckley3@washcoll.edu      www.starrcenter.washcoll.edu

LEGENDARY CHESAPEAKE SKIPJACK CAPTAINS TO APPEAR WITH AUTHOR CHRISTOPHER WHITE AT WASHINGTON COLLEGE 

“SKIPJACK: THE STORY OF AMERICA’S LAST SAILING OYSTERMEN”

CHESTERTOWN, MARYLAND – On Sunday, April 25th, Christopher White, author of the newly published and critically-acclaimed book, Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen (St. Martin’s Press, www.skipjackthebook.com ), will appear at the Decker Theatre on the campus of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.  Joining White will be four legendary skipjack captains from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, including 89-year old Captain Arthur Daniels, Jr. and his son Captain Stan Daniels, both of Deal Island, plus Captain Wade Murphy, Jr. and Captain Stanley Larrimore of Tilghman Island.

Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen is the saga of a quickly vanishing way of life and a culture unique to the Chesapeake Bay.  The skipjack, an iconic wooden sailing vessel, has been used for dredging oysters since the nineteenth century. Once numbering in the hundreds, the number of working skipjacks has fallen to little more than a handful as the annual oyster harvest has been drastically reduced due to disease, pollution, and mounting social and economic pressures. A way of life that has sustained the watermen and their communities for generations is now on the verge of extinction.
           

Christopher White moved to Tilghman Island for two years in order to immerse himself in the watermen’s culture.  During that time he crewed on skipjacks owned by the island’s most formidable captains, such as Captain Wade Murphy, Jr. of the Rebecca T. Ruark and Captain Stanley Larrimore of the Lady Katie.  White also ventured down to Deal Island to work with the Chesapeake’s oldest working skipjack captain, 89-year old Arthur “Art” Daniels, Jr. and his sons and grandsons aboard the skipjack City of Crisfield.  

The book that came of out this experience chronicles a life of hardship and frequent danger as these men work through the winter navigating unpredictable waters and an equally volatile economic seafood marketplace. The story beautifully reveals the abiding passion these watermen hold for working the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. At Washington College, the author and captains will speak to the traditions and future of the watermen’s singular livelihood.

Skipjack: America’s Last Sailing Oystermen is co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Center for Environment and Society at Washington College. The event will also include an exhibition of skipjack-inspired art, including photography by Marion Warren, A. Aubrey Bodine, M.C. Wooten, Constance Stuart Larrabee and others, plus ship models, poetry and a post-program reception. All events will take place in the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts at Washington College in Chestertown, Md.. The conversation with Christopher White and the Chesapeake watermen will begin at 5:00 p.m.

For more information or to make reservations, contact Michael Buckley, Program Manager, C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Washington College (410) 810-7156, or email mbuckley3@washcoll.edu.  This event is free and open to the public but reservations are strongly suggested.

About the Starr Center

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores our nation’s history – and particularly the legacy of its Founding era – in innovative ways. Through educational programs, scholarship, and public outreach, and especially by supporting and fostering the art of written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between past and present, and between the academic world and the public at large. From its base in the circa-1746 Custom House along Chestertown’s colonial waterfront, the Center also serves as a portal onto a world of opportunities for Washington College students. Its guiding principle is that now more than ever, a wider understanding of our shared past is fundamental to the continuing success of America’s democratic experiment. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

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Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen

Christopher White

St. Martin’s Press 2009

Hardcover, 372 pages, $25.99

A saga of the last working boats under sail

It would be fair to say that Skipjack is as powerful as The Perfect Storm without the tragedy. Yet, the tragedy here is the decline of historic sailing dredge boats called skipjacks, which are barely still in use, and the decline of Chesapeake Bay oysters due to overharvesting, disease, and pollution.

Author Christopher White describes firsthand what it’s like onboard a skipjack, handling equipment that can snag crew body parts if one doesn’t pay attention, dredging in fog and hoping that a container ship doesn’t slice the 50-foot wooden vessel in half, and “spatting” (planting seed oysters) on beds in off-season in spite of the deadly MSX and Dermo diseases killing off large quantities of the shellfish.

Living on Tilghman’s Island for a year as one of the community of oystermen and their families, White has a down-to-earth, respectful, and appropriately dramatic tone throughout Skipjack. He doesn’t ever romanticize the watermen and their boats.  White writes, “From onshore these boats had seemed romantic, a pleasant anachronism. Far from quaint, they were kept afloat by grit and tenacity, by sweat and muscle.” He adds that each skipjack oysterman was  “a piece of the water…part of the ecology of the bay.”

White writes of arriving to crew on a skipjack for the first time well before dawn and seeing  “treelike masts…their white sails aloft” in the moonlight. “My heart raced a little. I had stepped back into the Age of Sail. Like a time traveler, I had entered another world.” Skipjack masts can be 69 feet tall, with a 52-foot boom, on a 50-foot boat.

While 1,000 skipjacks dredged a healthier Chesapeake a century ago, only 18 skipjacks were active in the late 1990s, located on two islands-Tilghman and Deal-while White dredged and lived with them. The count is currently six and dropping due both to aging captains and aging boats beyond affordable repair. Yawl boats under power are allowed to push skipjacks only two days a week, and some younger captains and crew don’t want to bother to sail dredge anymore, an arduous feat, with diminishing catches.  

Oyster sustainability was ensured for decades due to the initial 1865 law limiting dredging to sail power. It changed for the worse in the late 1950s when patent tongers-oystermen using hydraulic-powered tongs-were allowed to pry oysters loose from the beds (”strong enough to dig up asphalt,” says one skipjack crew member). Prior to that only hand tongers, who waded in shallow water, were allowed along to harvest along with the skipjacks. Diving for and farming oysters added up to five legal ways to harvest oysters at the start of the 21st century.

In the epilogue, White sadly reports that Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources now allows full-blown power dredging with scoops in parts of the Chesapeake, another nail in the coffin of the skipjacks and, possibly, of oysters. (In November the Obama administration ordered the EPA to draft a Chesapeake cleanup strategy that would require mandatory measures by states rather than voluntary, so there is some hope for oysters.)

Of the rapidly diminishing oyster population and formerly sound conservation practices gone awry, White writes, “More than the fishery was at stake for the waterman. At stake was his way of life, a lineage for [many] going back three generations.”

Skipjack isn’t a book only for sailors or those interested in the fishing industry. And the author doesn’t overwhelm the reader with history or marine ecology-he touches on many aspects just enough and focuses on the people and their way of life.

After devouring this vividly written book filled with superb, vernacular dialogue, this reviewer will never eat any non-farmed oysters (or “orsters” as the Tilghman folks call them) again without thinking of how skipjacks dredged for this delicacy, scraping reefs and mounds on a 16-hour grueling workday in rough conditions for nearly two centuries. It is a way of life now fading away.

Linda Hedman Beyus, when not in Maine, lives in Connecticut and is a regular contributor to Working Waterfront.

A Conversation with Christopher White, author of SKIPJACK

As a boy you grew up along the shores of the Bay, when Chesapeake watermen were commonplace. What inspired you to write now about their vanishing way of life?

When I was young there were more than 5,000 watermen, and their villages peppered the shores and islands of the Bay. But today there are fewer than 800 active watermen—both oystermen and crabbers. When Beautiful Swimmers, the book on summer crabbing, won the Pulitzer Prize, I realized there was strong interest in the comings and goings of Bay watermen. And yet, no one had documented winter oystering under sail. I thought I’d tackle it before all the sailboats and captains were gone. They were a time capsule of American history. To me, they represented the American frontier, the last cowboys of the waves.

Handling the sails and dredges of an oyster boat is notoriously dangerous and poorly paid work. How did you come about crewing on a skipjack?

 Researching the book on the captains, I had expected to go along with the fleet as an observer, standing safely with each skipper at the helm. But on my very first voyage, the crew was a man short and I was shanghaied to work as a deckhand. It was a trial by fire: I had to pass muster with the captain. Subsequently, I worked as a crewman a dozen times, when a boat was short on crew, and other times I kept the captains company. As a result of my participation on the middle deck, I was invited into the captains’ homes and their lives. The story followed from there.

 In the book, you tell of several oyster boats that sink in sudden storms. Did you have any close calls?

Sailing with the skipjack fleet was always exciting, but sometimes dangerous. One crewman fell overboard in December while trying to guide a dredge aboard. Another lost half his finger in the windlass. My closest call came at the start of one season: The Rebecca was a man short and I was to be the substitute crew, but I was late getting to the boat. She left without me. As it happened, she was caught in a living gale, trying to sail home at the end of the day, and the boat sank. The captain and three crewmen spilled into the water. Waves were topping twelve feet. Miraculously, they were rescued by another boat. I was dry as a bone when the rescue boat brought them into port. The captain has never forgiven my good luck.

Skipjacks—propelled only by wind power—are anachronistic, inefficient, some would say obsolete. How did they survive the twentieth century?

 Chesapeake oyster dredging was legalized right after the Civil War, in 1865, under the restriction that all Maryland boats were limited to sail power. This conservation measure, one of the earliest in the country, prevented steamboats from tearing up the extensive oyster reefs of the Bay. When the internal combustion engine was invented, the dredge boats just sailed right on past them. In those days, there were several types of sailboats in the oyster fleet: schooners, sloops, bugeyes, skipjacks. The 1865 conservation law allowed the dredge boats to survive the course of the twentieth century. And their sails conserved the oyster beds for many years, until overharvesting from other oystermen—tongers not dredgers—came into play. By then schooners, sloops, and bugeyes had vanished. Only the cheaper skipjacks could be maintained. Fewer than a dozen saw the dawn of the twenty-first century.

At the beginning of your book, there are twenty working skipjacks (down from 1,000 a hundred years before). At the end of the book—today—there are only half a dozen still working. How long can the last few survive?

 The fleet’s profile is even more precarious than that. Out of those six boats, only one actually raised its sails last season. The rest used motor power during the two days of the week that engines are now allowed. Art Daniels, the captain of that boat, the City of Crisfield, is now 88 years old. He goes out oyster dredging every day he can, but he can’t go on forever. When he retires, the Age of Sail will lose its last holdout.

 You credit the mismanagement of the oyster fishery by state officials as one of the main threats to the dwindling fleet. Is anyone else at fault?

 An array of forces jeopardizes the skipjack fleet—pollution, oyster disease, poor prices, aging captains, mismanagement. The state of Maryland has favored sportfishing over commercial harvests and modernization over tradition. But the greatest tragedy, the terrible irony, is that the watermen themselves have crippled their own chances for survival. Overfishing has stripped the Bay bottom of oyster beds, reducing profits and rendering skipjacks impossible to keep up.

 You changed the names of several characters. Why was that necessary?

 Watermen are a rough crowd and they are very private. Some asked for anonymity. In other cases, I decided to honor privacy—to protect the innocent or the guilty.

 This book took many years to write. Are you a slow writer? What’s your creative process?

 When I’m writing, I clear the decks and focus on one thing, every day, every week—for years if required. I spent two years living on a Chesapeake island, working on boats and crewing for watermen, then another two years doing follow-up interviews and research, then five years writing. This gave me some distance, some perspective as did finishing the book in New Mexico. Sitting on my deck, overlooking the Rio Grande Valley, it was easy to imagine the broad desert sky as the sea.

 Why did you choose Wadey Murphy as the main character in your story?

 I had a blast both getting to know and writing about the memorable characters in the book. Many, including the three main captains, are larger than life. But it’s true Wadey does take up more space, more oxygen than the others. At first, he seems simple, a hot-blooded captain. But as the story unfolds, he’s more complex: he’s a renegade and he doesn’t suffer fools, but he has a code. He represents the dual nature of the commercial fisherman—a competitive streak that leads to overfishing by some (but not by him) and an altruism that holds the community together.

 What is your favorite part of sail dredging on a skipjack?

 Watching the golden sunrise from the bowsprit of an oyster boat, as it plowed through the waves, is one of my fondest memories. But the most touching scene was when a grandfather captain instructed his grandson on how to captain a skipjack—a noble art, a legacy at that moment spanning five generations.

 Is it true what they say about oysters being aphrodisiacs?

 I love oysters and downed many in the name of research for this book. The crews eat them fresh from the Bay every day. One crewman claimed he owed his five boys to Chesapeake oysters. For myself, all I will admit is that oysters make you romantic. But just in case, I limit myself to no more than eight.

 What was the hardest part of writing Skipjack?

 Every voyage to an oyster bar, every race home to port was likely to be one of the last. The boats were in terrible shape; a few sank during my two years with the fleet. The captains were getting old. Their legacy was tenuous. It was difficult to witness firsthand a great tradition that was vanishing before my eyes.

Christopher White’s Skipjack

Author White burrows so deeply into Bay history, culture and scientific miscellanea that there isn’t much remaining for other Bay lovers to write about.

reviewed by Dick Wilson BayWeekly.com

This is a skipjack tale like no other. Of the several books I’ve read about Chesapeake boats and oyster harvesting (or orstering, as its practitioners would say), Skipjack is the one that encompasses just about everything a reader would want to know about life on and in the Bay. Author Christopher White burrows so deeply into Bay history, culture and general scientific miscellanea that there isn’t much remaining for other Bay lovers to write about.

First, the boats: Skipjacks, built specifically for harvesting oysters in shallow waters, are the symbols of the Chesapeake oyster fishery, and those who sailed the skipjacks are the iconic representatives of that breed we call watermen. Watermen have pursued everything the Bay has to offer, and in the process they’ve defined the rich history of the Bay and its culture.

This detailed narrative captures the essence of that unique culture. At the time of writing, White had lived among watermen who still plied the trade (although their economic survival was tenuous). With Skipjack, White puts us in there with the watermen and their families.

The personalities - with their many quirks - are well defined. Not all the watermen are depicted as heroic types. For example, two brothers - both skipjack captains - carry a grudge spanning many years. To this day they don’t speak, although they live and sail in proximity. Then there was that squabble between two captains over dredging rights on a small oyster reef that resulted in one ramming and sinking the other’s boat and leaving the sinkee for dead (he lived, however). The one who did the ramming did jail time, paying his debt to society. Many years have since passed, but the two families are not on speaking terms.

On the whole, however, watermen are shown as people (flawed, like the rest of us) who love the Bay, its history and their work, and they’re determined to hang on, whatever the cost.

Skipjack is full of yarns, related in such a way that you are drawn deeply into the action. White comes by his information honestly; he lived and worked among the Tilghman Island watermen, eventually becoming accepted into their tight community. He isn’t afraid to insert himself into the narrative, clarifying obscure points when necessary, but he takes care to ensure that he is never a major player.

One exciting chapter is devoted entirely to skipjack racing, an annual event fought (and the word fought is appropriate) between two skipjack colonies: Tilghman Island and Deal Island. These two communities compete fiercely for a nominal cash prize, but mostly for prestige. Each captain is trying to win the race, but that’s almost secondary to beating his fellow captains.

The skipjack race frames the book, at a consistent rhythm with occasional tacks in an offset direction, much as the shifting wind drives the course of the boats. One chapter leads cohesively to the next, resulting in a fine book that’s somewhat about boats but more about the Bay and its people.

The history detailed in Skipjack is another major strength; the historical data fit nicely into and informs the present-day settings. The reader gets it all: the violent oyster wars; the decline of oysters over the years because of disease and overfishing; and the many conflicting (and greedy) interests competing in the ongoing legislative wars.

Skipjack (St. Martin’s Press) is a book to be enjoyed for its detail, authenticity and writing style. It’s local lore at its best, a worthy addition to any library.

By Ken Ringle
Sunday, December 13, 2009

SKIPJACK The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen
By Christopher White
St. Martin’s. 372 pp. $25.99

For those of us who love the Chesapeake — and others merely curious — the ultimate Bay sourcebook remains the late William W. Warner’s wonderfully readable “Beautiful Swimmers,” which chronicles the biology of the blue crab and the culture of the watermen who pursue them. Surprisingly, little has been written about the Bay’s other edible treasure — the Chesapeake oyster — or about the sail-powered wooden workboats that harvested them for more than a century.

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Along the low waters of the Chesapeake Bay the tall masts of a few oyster dredge boats signal another winter harvest–still to be made with the benefit of the wind. These wooden sailboats, called “skipjacks,” are the last working sail used by commercial fishermen in North America. For nearly 130 years, the skipjack fleet has worked the waters of the Bay in a mode some have called “enforced obsolescence.” In 1865, Maryland passed a “sail-only” law, limiting dredging of oysters to wind power—one of the first conservation statutes in the country. Incredibly, skipjacks have survived, but this season may be their last. When they disappear, so will the last vestige of the 500-year Age of Sail.

            Exclusively operating in the late autumn and winter in the Maryland half of the Bay, skipjacks start their oyster season on November the first. Two enormous sails are used to pull the heavy dredges that rake oysters from the bottom of the Bay. Sail power is required for three days of the week; motor power via a push boat is allowed on two days. (The captains are allowed to choose which days for each.) Last year only one boat—the City of Crisfield—chose to unfurl its sails; the rest of the small fleet restricted themselves to power.

Only five boats remain, down from nearly one thousand at the turn of the twentieth century. The five include a few that are registered with the National Trust as “national historic places,” and together were named in 2002 as one of the eleven most endangered American land- marks. Most skipjacks hail from Tilghman Island or Deal Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore:

• Thomas Clyde (built in 1911)—Captain Lawrence Murphy, Tilghman Island

• Hilda M. Willing (built in 1905)—Captain Barry Sweitzer, Baltimore

• City of Crisfield (built in 1949)—Captain Art Daniels, Deal Island

• Fannie L. Daugherty (built in 1904)—Captain Delmas Benton, Deal Island

• Somerset (built in 1949)—Captain Walton Benton, Mt. Vernon, Maryland

To some an anachronism, to others a symbol of wind power and sustainability, the remaining skipjacks will only survive as long as timbers and captains endure—and the oysters live. Art Daniels, the dean of the fleet, is eighty-eight years old. Other captains are in their late fifties and sixties, and can’t sail on forever. No young captains are coming up though the ranks.

Aging boats and men are just half the problem. Overfishing of oyster beds by mechanized patent tongers, who compete with skipjacks for the reefs, is another threat. Annual oyster harvests in Maryland now average less than 200,000 bushels, just a fraction of the 15 million bushels caught in 1884 and only ten percent of the 2-million-bushel catches that were typical from the 1920s through the 1960s. Besides modern gear, the oyster stocks are imperiled by two oyster diseases, MSX and Dermo, which have been ravaging shell- fish beds since the late 1950s. Pollution in the form of silt from farm fields chokes the beds, and nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus lead to decreased oxygen levels on oyster habitat. The combined effect is a reduced oyster population only one percent of nineteenth-century levels.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the skipjack fleet is the mismanagement of the resource by the State of Maryland. The captains have always depended on a state-funded seed program to plant the beds with next year’s crop. Two years ago, the program was abandoned. Also, the state recently allowed power dredging aboard modern workboats, thus reversing the 1865 sail-only law that had brought skipjacks into existence. The modern gear is more efficient. It is their inefficiency that enabled skipjacks to preserve oyster stocks and to sail so long.

Governor O’Malley of Maryland has taken two bold steps this month to re-invigorate the beleaguered Maryland oyster industry. The first move–the expansion of oyster sanctuaries–benefits everyone and especially the health of the Bay. However, the funding of an expansion in oyster farming may only benefit the few. Watermen have long warned of this: the potential threat of large seafood companies leasing the bottom of the Chesapeake, as they have done in Delaware Bay. Even if aquaculture leases are issued initially to mom-and-pop outfits or to some individual watermen, these leases could potentially be consolidated, leaving watermen out all together. That is their fear.

 On a broader level, why leave watermen and a public fishery out of the mix? The governor’s proposal promotes aquaculture nearly to the exclusion of a wild fishery. Actually, there is no reason why these two modes of harvest–private and public–can’t be compatible. Some bay bottom–for example, sand bars–are suited to oyster farming but not suited to traditional oyster bars. Likewise, some deepwater oyster beds are not the best place for aquaculture. The 36,000 acres of existing oyster habitat and approx. 7,000 acres of current leased bottom could be divided up equitably. Other areas of “barren” bottom could be rehabilitated with stone, shell, or concrete to propagate oysters for leaseholders. A fair plan, portioning the resource, could be established.

 Watermen have a poor reputation for stewardship of Bay resources. But the problem of overharvesting is not solely on their shoulders. Maryland has mismanaged the oyster fishery, beginning with lax enforcement of harvest regulations. With proper enforcement, a public fishery could thrive right next to private leases, where owners could police themselves.