Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks de Pat Vojtech

Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks

Pat Vojtech

Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks documents the skipjack and its role in the oyster dredging industry, describing the natural and manmade disasters that affected the industry, including the August storm of 1933 that swept vessels ashore into pastures, the ice that locked them in harbor for months at a time and led to the novel idea of dredging through the ice with sleighs and later cars and trucks, and the Great Depression that crushed the oyster market overnight and forced many to abandon their vessels and their way of life. By talking to survivors, Vojtech recreates the last moments of some of the worst incidents in dredging history, including the day in 1939 when nine men died on the Choptank.

The author interviewed some thirty captains, former captains, and relatives of the men who worked the boats, to recreate events that took place between 1917 and 1993. The early years were reconstructed by research of Maryland dredging records and newspaper accounts.

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In the 1900s, skipjacks were a familiar fixture in every port on the Chesapeake. Their captains and crews were tough, hardy souls who earned a living in the harsh conditions of the wintertime Bay, dredging for oysters under sail. It was a dangerous but rewarding occupation; boys as young as twelve years old left school to follow their fathers and grandfathers onto the water in an age-old tradition of independence from the farms and factories that were the lot of men in the towns and cities of the region. The author has gone among skipjack captains, gathering stories of exciting events in their lives and reminiscences of how it was in the good times when oysters were healthy and plentiful. They told, too, about the bad times, when storms endangered their lives, or ice threatened their boats, the times when harvests were meager or the price they could get for oysters was too low to cover expenses. Throughout this absorbing book Vojtech has threaded the history of the skipjack, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century when dredging by sail was the only legal method, to the present when the twin scourges of disease and water quality threaten to put an end to the country's last commercial sailing fleet.