Proud, hardy skipjacks vanish from Chesapeake as oyster catch dwindles

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 14

Proud, hardy skipjacks vanish from Chesapeake as oyster catch dwindles

The last commercial sailing fleet in the United States is threatened with extinction as pollution and disease decimate Maryland’s oyster, industry. DONALD SMITH reports from Tilghman Island for the National Geographic News Service.

The E. C. Collier is dying. The Collier is a 17-metre skipjack, probably named at her birth in 1910 for the wife or daughter of her original owner. Proud, fast, and wide of beam, she carries the baggy sails, rakish mast, and needle-nose bowsprit that distinguish her hardy breed. Skipjacks have ridden the waves of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, in search of oysters since the mid 19th century. They compose the last commercial sailing fleet in the United States. Like the Collier, though, the fleet itself appears headed for oyster heaven. The Collier lies low in the water at the town dock — nestling, as if for support, against some of her healthier sisters.

A large bilge pump operates continuously below decks, throwing back the salt water that probes at her leaky timbers and around a large plugged hole in her hull, a wound inflicted one cold winter morning by a sharp chunk of ice. Her mast and boom, two ailing rounds of cypress and loblolly pine, also wear bandages. Her most recent coat of white paint is tattered and streaked with rust.

“Old Cap’n John Larrimore would turn over in his grave if he could see her now,” says Darryl Larrimore. A skipjack captain himself, he’s a nephew of the last master of the Collier, who died in 1983 at the age of

72. The elder Larrimore worked her for 35 years, through the last

golden age of Chesapeake Bay oystering in the mid-19705. He and the Collier were subjects of a glowing “New York Times” profile in 1978, when the bay was still healthy and oysters were plentiful. Things have changed dramatically since then, both for the bay and for the oyster industry that depends on it. Maryland accounted for 15 million bushels of oysters in 1884, roughly 50 per cent of the nation’s total harvest. Last year the state produced barely one million bushels. With the decline of the Maryland oyster, packing houses increasingly have turned to Florida and Louisiana as their sources.

The blame for this fall-off in oyster production lies mostly with bay pollution — primarily run-off from farmlands — and shellfish diseases, such as a nasty little microbe called MSX. It doesn’t hurt humans, but it ravages oysters. And then there are the hardships of life aboard the skipjacks

themselves. The normal dredging season, from November 1 to March 15, includes the coldest months of the year. The workday typically runs from 3 a.m. until 8 p.m. Finding the three to six hearties, besides the captain, needed to man a skipjack can be difficult, especially when an icy January wind is cutting across the water.

Maintenance is another problem. Wooden boats are notoriously difficult and expensive to keep up. Skipjacks are prime examples. \ Oysters can be dredged more efficiently by power boats. But in 1865, Maryland legislators, to help conserve the bay’s oyster stock, decreed that oysters could be dredged only under sail. Skipjacks now may dredge under power for two days each week; but in Maryland, as was the case more than a hundred years ago, most dredging must be done at the whim of wind and tide.

The death of a skipjack is not an unusual event on the bay. Rotting hulks of these tough little boats dot the seascape, hidden away in

skipjack graveyards — the lagoons, creeks, and mudflats to which they were towed until they ran aground — then left to submit to the natural forces they fought so stoutly during their lifetimes.

Their waterman owners maintain them as long as they can, but inevitably there comes a time when a skipjack can’t be saved. Not enough new skipjacks are being built to replace those that die. As recently as the 1920 s there were more than a thousand. Last season only 24 were licensed to dredge.

"It makes me feel bad every time I talk about it,” says Tobi Stuchinski, a clerk with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. She, like many others curiously affected by these simple yet elegant workboats, takes a personal interest in their fate. “My gut feeling is that the fleet is almost history,” she says. “It won’t happen next year or two years from now, but the trend certainly indicates that it’s on its way out.”

Maybe not entirely. Ed Farley, a 36-year-old former boat builder who was attracted to the rigorous and anachronistic discipline of , oystering under sail, has worked his own skipjack since 1975. He believes some boats will survive, though not necessarily as oysterdredgers. Occasionally a yachtsman buys one to convert into a pleasure craft. Farley uses his own vessel during the off-season for chartered parties, while he waits and hopes for better times on the oyster bars. “If the oysters are good and the boats are there, they’ll be used,” he says. As for the Collier, Captain Larrimore’s boat now. belongs to his daughter, Polly Cummings, whose son, John Ralph, aged 36, once worked the Collier. But he concluded that the business was too hard and the return too small. He now works on one of the stubby little crabbers that ply the same waters as he skipjacks, albeit with less elan.

Mrs Cummings would rather sell the Collier than see it towed off to die. She says she’s willing to negotiate considerably downward from her asking price of $65,000. In the meantime, she often walks over to the boat, (which lies within sight of her house on Tilghman Island, and recalls the days when her father used to manhandle the Collier across the frigid waters of the Chesapeake. “I just was out there yesterday,” she says. “I sat down and had a good cry.” I