watermen

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Waterman’s shanties in Dorchester County, Maryland, ca. 1941. Collections of the Library of Congress.

Springtime means flood tides here in the Chesapeake, both today and historically. These images from a waterman’s community in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1941, show that flooded fields, catwalks above drowned yards and an unclear distinction between water and land are nothing new.

What has changed is that these flood tides are now no longer relegated to spring. Dorchester County barely skims above sea level- it the second lowest county in Maryland and one of the lowest in the United States- and because of that, it experiences the ravages of high water and the prevailing winds across the Bay more intensely than anywhere else in Maryland. Today, flooding happens year-round, and along with impassable roads and submerged cars, whole stretches of the shoreline are steadily eroded by the ceaselessly encroaching waves of the Chesapeake.

The loss of land is particularly acute on the islands the lie offshore of Dorchester- Hooper’s, Holland, and Bloodsworth, where more than 20 acres a year disappear into the Bay. In many of these communities, residents have attempted to protect their homes by armoring their shorelines or jacking up their houses. Many have been forced to leave all together.

For Dorchester County’s maritime towns, the lives of watermen and their families have have long been dictated by the cycles of the Bay. But unlike 1941, when a springtime flood muddied boots and flooded yards, modern Chesapeake towns suffer tides that come seasonlessly, threatening their homes as well as their livelihoods.

River Schooling

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Students onboard the school skipjack Elsworth at sunset on the Chester River. Photo by author.

Throughout the Chesapeake when the weather is fair, wooden vessels are plying their trade—but it isn’t shellfish they’re capturing, or finfish, or even blue crabs. Rather than bushels of the Bay’s bounty, their decks are awash in kids. These are the Chesapeake’s school ships: once built for working the water, they are now floating classrooms, taking out school groups to experience that old Bay magic, up close and personal.

It’s a trend that’s extended to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, with the buyboat-turned-educational-vessel Winnie Estelle, to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and their skipjack Stanley Norman, and to Living Classrooms onboard the skipjack Sigsbee and the buyboat Mildred Belle. These beamy working beauties, so perfectly adapted to Chesapeake waterways, provide the perfect space for learning on the water— and as modern watermen turn almost universally today to fiberglass vessels, it’s a second chance at life for these traditional Bay boats that might otherwise have ended up as just another rotting hulk in a remote Bay marsh.

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A fine day for exploring the Chester with a full class of students onboard the Elsworth. Photo by author.

The skipjack Elsworth is one of these Chesapeake river school boats. Owned and operated today by Echo Hill Outdoor School, she was originally built in 1901 in Hudson, Maryland on a tributary of the Little Choptank River— ground zero of the Bay’s historic oystering industry. After a long career of oystering, the Elsworth was acquired by Echo Hill in 1988. For the next eight years, she continued to work for her keep, taking students out in the warm months and then dredging during the “r” months to earn the funds needed to pay down the loan for her aquisition. In 1996, after almost a decade of working the Bay’s oyster bars for Echo Hill Outdoor School, she was rebuilt and re-purposed as a purely educational vessel.

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Captain Andrew McCown in his element. Photo by author.

The mastermind behind this successful gambit and the man who captained the Elsworth during those hard dredging winters is a passionate educator, conservationist, and all-around Chesapeake environmental expert— Captain Andrew McCown. A native of Kingstown, Maryland, just across the Chester River from Chestertown, McCown has dedicated his life to inspiring learners of all ages with the Bay’s environment, culture, and traditions. McCown’s father was a dedicated outdoorsman, and as a boy, McCown grew up fishing, hunting and exploring the dense marshes and hardwood uplands of the Chester River. These simple experiences would be so elemental to McCown— yet as an adult, he found fewer and fewer of the children he encountered could share them. The solution would become Echo Hill Outdoor School, founded in 1972 by Peter Rice, where McCown and a team of environmental educators could introduce children to the marvelous magic of quiet Bay coves, the cathedrals of old growth forests, and the freedom of wet, muddy and entirely hands-on outdoor learning.

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A bevy of wooden-workboats-turned-school-vessels rafted up on the south Chester River. Photo by author.

Throughout the spring, summer, and fall, the Elsworth is joined in her on-the-water learning experiences by several other wooden Chesapeake craft in the EHOS fleet—the buyboat Annie D, two 20th century workboats, Spirit and Twilight and two bateaux, the Ric and the Mr. Lewey (both named after seminal characters in Gilbert Byron’s classic book, much beloved by Capt. Andy, “The Lord’s Oysters.”). These six vessels are deployed throughout the fine months to ferry students to the heart of the river action—the best holes to seine for silversides or to cast a line to maybe hook dinner, the muddiest gunkholing spots, quiet places where the purple spikes of pickerelweed attract the tiny jewellike bodies of mating damselflies.

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Students from Washington College join EHOS Captain Annie Richards in an up-close-and-personal look at watermen pound netting on the Chester River. Photo by author.

These are not chance destinations— rather carefully chosen Chester River classrooms, where students can encounter the wild beauty of the outdoors and educators can shape meaningful environmental experiences. A morning trip after sunrise to a poundnet becomes a discussion about sustainability, watermen, and invasive species, and Capt. Andy holds up a diamondback terrapin he plucks from the net announcing, “I think this is the most beautiful turtle in the Chesapeake.”

He means it. As your bateau bounces on the chop and the students around you push to get a better view of the turtle or the watermen, there isn’t a shred of irony on this little wooden workboat. Capt. Andy is genuinely passionate about the turtle in his hand and the watermen we’re watching, and every student is too. Pure unadulterated enthusiasm, you understand, is a powerful teaching tool.

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Students enjoy a lunch crab feast of fat river crabs, and best of all, no need to worry about clean up. Photo by author.

Powerful, too, is the unfettered sense of freedom on these Chester River expeditions. Instead of cafeteria lunches, crabs, caught in the morning as the sun rose, are eaten for lunch directly from the bushel basket and cracked on the Elsworth’s broad decks. School uniforms are exchanged for old tee shirts and shorts or even better, bathing suits. And rather than paper, pencils, and books, students are encouraged to learn with their hands, their eyes, and and by making real-world connections— meeting watermen, raising sails, swabbing decks, and catching crabs. The study the ecosystem by literally immersing themselves in a marsh, as an environmental educator discusses the plants, animals, fish and insects they see. There is learning going on constantly, but it feels like play— the kind of play Andrew McCown so vividly recalls from his childhood on this same Chesapeake tributary.

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The Mr. Lewey takes McCown and a few students out to explore the evening river. Photo by author.

A bluebird day of active environmental education ends with a audacious sunset, a repast of fried fish caught by students that afternoon, and possibly a quick trip out in one of the bateaux to cast one last line before last light. As the students settle into sleeping bags on the deck of the Elsworth, McCown, Captain Richards, and crewmate Aaron Thal pull guitars and a ukelele from belowdecks. Together they put on an inpromptu concert, singing Chesapeake-inspired songs and reading river-inspired poetry as a million stars slowly coalesce into a white river overhead mirroring the dark one lapping at the hull. “My sweet heaven on the Chester,” McCown sings in his fine voice, and the students onboard drop slowly onto pillows, to rest for another challenging day at outdoor school.


My thanks to Andrew McCown, Annie Richards, Aaron Thal, Echo Hill Outdoor School and Washington College for the opportunity to join an overnight educational program onboard the Elsworth.

A common sight on rivers during the midsummer around the Chesapeake Bay— pound nets. Used to trap fish, pound nets are one of the oldest gear types used by watermen in the Chesapeake. Made up of a stout poles strung with netting to create a series o…

A common sight on rivers during the midsummer around the Chesapeake Bay— pound nets. Used to trap fish, pound nets are one of the oldest gear types used by watermen in the Chesapeake. Made up of a stout poles strung with netting to create a series of funnels, pound nets can catch and hold thousands of fish once they’re constructed. Native Americans along the Bay had their own version of pound nets known as “weirs,” which closely resembled the gear used by modern watermen. Herons, osprey, eagles and other fish-loving birds of prey are often thickly settled on the pound nets, poles and trees nearby— anything that will get them closer to the fish that seethe within.

Image by author.

Gilbert Byron’s original tiny house

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The Gilbert Byron house, the home of “the Chesapeake Thoreau,” image by author.

Writer Gilbert Byron lived alone in this cabin for nearly 45 years on San Domingo Creek’s Old House Cove. Within its three rooms, which he built himself, Byron crafted short stories and poetry, all inspired by the people, places and landscapes of the Chesapeake Bay. A prolific writer of the late twentieth century, Gilbert Byron published 14 books and 70 short stories, articles and poems during his writing career, and most were composed here.

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Gilbert Byron. Photo by Tyler Campbell, shared with permission of the Kent County Historical Society.

Byron was a native of Chestertown, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and much of his work is set along the Chester River where he grew up and the lower Eastern Shore where he spent his adult life. Lyrical, keenly observant, and deeply steeped in place, Byron’s work reflects the end of the Bay’s era as the great highway and the great divider. His stories are inspired by a Chesapeake when rivers were roads traversed by steamboats and log-built descendants of dugout canoes, plied by hardy people Byron referred to as ‘elementals’— watermen and farmers who lived close to the land and closer to the water.

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Image by author.


After his death in 1991, Byron’s modest cabin, truly the original ‘tiny house,’ was preserved thanks to the efforts of several Talbot County organizations. Relocated from its little cove outside of St. Michaels and restored in commemoration of Byron’s life and work, Byron’s cabin now resides at Pickering Creek Audubon Center. It can be visited by the public for free, and once you lift a hook on the door, you’re free to explore the diminutive rooms that Byron built himself and imagine him gathering inspiration from the view over his beloved placid little cove.


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Images by author.

A low sun turns/ Chesapeake’s yellow cliffs/ Into golden hills/ Stillness finds the evening/ calms the water/ And my spirit/ Joyous fish leap/ From the cooling river,/ The peepers whistle/ To the greying marshes/ In the darkening skies/ A passing heron cries/ A falling leaf/ A cowbell far away/ That flitting bat/ From night itself/ Ushers out the day.

“Chesapeake Evening” from The Wind’s Will by Gilbert Byron, 1940.

For more information on Byron’s work and life, the Gilbert Byron Society is an excellent resource: www.gilbertbyron.org

Maryland’s Iconic Smith Island

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In the wide open waters of the Tangier Sound, a 30-minute ferry ride carries you from the closest town, Crisfield, to the classic charm of Maryland’s Smith Island. The low land is framed by endless water and sky, and the island is surrounded by thick, verdant wetlands roamed by egrets the color of bleached bone. Today, Smith Island is also home to a few hundred souls in several small towns that still largely rely on waterwork as the main economy.

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240 residents live year-round in three communities of Ewell, Tylerton, and Rhodes Point— a significant drop from the island’s heyday when over 800 people lived on Smith and supported themselves well through the booming harvests of  crab, fish and oysters. Today’s Smith Islanders, though less in number, still make a living from the Chesapeake—scraping for soft shells in summer and dredging for oysters in winter— but as the Bay’s environment declines, the number of watermen dwindles every year.

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Mark Kitching is one of these watermen-  in fact, he’s the head of the Smith Island Watermen Association. He grew up on the island and raised his family there, and acknowledges that though its a challenging place to live sometimes, we wouldn’t trade it for the world. Kitching loves the traditions on Smith Island, but he’s also willing to experiment— he and a partner have been growing a few thousand oysters on a new lease just a little north of where he docks his scraping boat. Unless Smith Island embraces some change, with new harvests or new kinds of people, he asserts, then the island won’t be around in 100 years.

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Smith Island’s fisheries aren’t the only reason people are leaving the island. The Chesapeake’s insatiable tides have eroded away huge portions of the shoreline, and the Bay has rushed inland, inundating once-dry yards, homesites, and roads. The US Army Corps of Engineers estimates that in the last 100 years, Smith Island has lost 3,300 acres of shoreline, and scientists warn that the entire island could wash away as early as 2030. On the island, this truth is everywhere. Houses stand empty and abandoned, and stagnant pools collect beneath their mired foundations. Especially on the western side of the island, which bears the brunt of the erosion, once-handsome homes are quietly decaying into the marsh. Their paint peels and clapboard sags even as ornamental pomegranate trees in their jungly yards drop overripe fruit to the sodden ground.

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But in each community, a nucleus of activity and life still thrives. Neighbors greet each other in the evenings on the streets where trucks without license plates haul fishing gear and golf carts trundle along. The Methodist Church is a community hub, busy with the goings-on of small town life from spaghetti dinners to funerals. Unleashed dogs roam in friendly packs as their owners enjoy constitutionals and greet each other. The one restaurant in town serves up mean soft-crab sandwiches and coffee, which some old-timers linger over around lunchtime.

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Over at the Smith Island Center, tourists watch an informational video about the history of the island, browse exhibits exploring the island’s traditions and former residents, and admire a custom set of ‘Crab-opoly’ created by a waterman one long winter, years ago. Tourism— from photographers, environmental types, students and weekenders— is a force on the island, although it is unsurprisingly seasonal. All summer long, visitors arrive on the ferry from Crisfield, ready to demolish a buttery crab cake at the Bayside Inn restaurant or a slice of the renowned Smith Island layer cake. Once temperatures drop, however, it’s back to a long winter of familiar faces and the occasional isolation of a deep freeze.

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Small, friendly, and approachable, Smith Island is a place that represents the essence of what makes the Chesapeake unique. Life lived at sea level means one deeply connected to the Bay’s seasonality, its currents and its vacillating moods. It also has created a close knit community whose residents can rely on each other for a cup of sugar or to fix a workboat, yet still welcome outsiders with warmth and acceptance. These old-fashioned, small town values in a quintessentially Chesapeake setting are Smith Island’s most charming, resonant qualities— and fortunately, even hurricanes haven’t yet been able to wash those away.

All images by author.

Hey beautifulswimmers fans, the author of this blog, Kate Livie, has written a book! It’s the epic story of the long, tangled story of Chesapeake oysters- and their role as a survival staple, mainstay of the economy, and cultural catalyst. If you’ve…

Hey beautifulswimmers fans, the author of this blog, Kate Livie, has written a book! It’s the epic story of the long, tangled story of Chesapeake oysters- and their role as a survival staple, mainstay of the economy, and cultural catalyst. If you’ve enjoyed her posts on the Bay’s history, culture and the environment, it’s worth a look. You can purchase it on Amazon, or Maryland residents can grab a copy at local retailers or book events throughout the state. The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum will be hosting a free book event for “Chesapeake Oysters” on November 20th at 5:00 PM- more information on that program is available at cbmm.org.


Happy reading, and as Kate would say, “Believe in bivalves!”

On October 1st, Maryland’s oystering season opened again for another year. Currently, Maryland has 1,100 licensed oyster harvesters that will head out this winter from harbors around the state in search of bars full of mature, 3 inch ‘keeper’ Easter…

On October 1st, Maryland’s oystering season opened again for another year. Currently, Maryland has 1,100 licensed oyster harvesters that will head out this winter from harbors around the state in search of bars full of mature, 3 inch ‘keeper’ Eastern oysters. Throughout the rest of the month, only a few forms of oystering are allowed: hand tonging, patent tonging, and diving. Power dredging begins on November 1st.

Traditionally, the “R” months (from September to April) have been the boundaries of oyster season in the Chesapeake Bay. Oysters spawn in the summer, making them milky and unpalatable, but in the colder months their efforts to turn growth and energy conservation, and they become the fat, toothsome morsels we love to enjoy half-shell or in stews, fritters, dressings, and all sorts of delicious ways.

Image by author.

Not all Chesapeake watermen are actually men. This image taken by Lila Line in 1981, is a perfect example of the tenacity, tirelessness, and work ethic of plenty of the Bay’s water-working-women. While many women work off the water in watermen famil…

Not all Chesapeake watermen are actually men. This image taken by Lila Line in 1981, is a perfect example of the tenacity, tirelessness, and work ethic of plenty of the Bay’s water-working-women. While many women work off the water in watermen families, picking crabs or placing orders, some women choose to follow the example of their fathers or brothers, buy their own boat, and make a living from what the Bay provides. In this photo, Kathleen, a Tilghman Island waterman, is heading out for a long day of crabbing, despite being heavily pregnant. She continued to work until three weeks before her son, Noah, was born.

Image by Lila Line, collections of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

Sunset on the Chesapeake’s Miles River, as seen over the bowsprit of the skipjack HM Krentz. “The Krentz,” as she is commonly referred to, is a working skipjack based out of St Michaels, Maryland. Constructed in 1955 in Harryhogan, Virginia, the HM …

Sunset on the Chesapeake’s Miles River, as seen over the bowsprit of the skipjack HM Krentz. “The Krentz,” as she is commonly referred to, is a working skipjack based out of St Michaels, Maryland. Constructed in 1955 in Harryhogan, Virginia, the HM Krentz was built during one of the Chesapeake’s ‘mini oyster boom’ years, which happened twice in the 20th century after World War I and World War II. Watermen, returning home, found the oyster populations had rebounded after several fallow years while the oystermen were overseas. 

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photos by author

City of Crisfield at the dock in Wenona harbor, Maryland. She was built in 1948 in Reedville, Virginia, and is one of the few working skipjacks still left on the Chesapeake- most of the other vessels now earn their keep as education or pleasure craft.

Every winter, she heads out to the Tangier sound to oyster with her owner, Captain “Daddy Art” Daniels, notably the oldest skipjack captain still living. Skipjacks were practical vessels, built quickly and cheaply, but still sturdy and beamy enough to carry hundreds of bushels of oysters on a good day’s harvest.

An endangered species, skipjacks are an iconic Chesapeake symbol of the 19th and early 20th century, when the working communities of the Chesapeake built homes and futures on oyster money.

Spring Spawn

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Alewife Herring Spawn on the Potomac River, photo by Jay Fleming.


Every year, as they have for thousands of years, fish flood into the Chesapeake. Flowing upstream, against currents that may still contain sheets of drift ice, they return to the streams of their birth. Today, we may look for the iconic osprey’s migration back to the Chesapeake as the first sign of spring. For our Bay ancestors, however, renewal and rebirth was all signified by molten silver rivers of spawning fish- shad, perch, herring, rockfish.

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Hickory Shad spawn in Deer Creek off the Susquehanna, photo by Jay Fleming


Most of species are known as anadromous fish- species that normally live in the ocean, but return to to freshwater tributaries to spawn. Often, these tributaries were where they were born, small rivulets of water in brown winter marshes. A few, like perch, are semi-anadromous, living most of their lives in the Chesapeake’s brackish main stem and returning to their natal freshwater birthplace to furiously reproduce.


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Yellow Perch Eggs, photo by Jay Fleming


Millions of fish rush upstream to answer the roaring impulse to reproduce. Once they get there, the act itself is surprisingly demure. In the case of shad, for example, female roe shad wait until dusk to release their eggs. These, tender, translucent, and impossibly fragile, drift along the bottom, where the male buck shad swim overhead, lacing them with milt. No mating rituals, no togetherness, no nuturing for shad- in dark water, they achieve the single purpose of their life and depart, bound for the sea. Their progeny, fertilized, plump up and become semi-buoyant. In this vulnerable state, for 5-9 days, they are the basis of the food chain until they move up one rung by breaking from the eggs on the last day as tiny fish, journeying for the ocean.


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Yellow Perch spawn on the Magothy, eggs in background, photo by Jay Fleming.  


For generations, we have harnessed the bounty of this seething torrent. Chesapeake Native Americans created fish traps, or weirs, from rocks on freshwater rivers to funnel the fish into pools. Colonial fishermen set huge seine nets, encircling the fish in mesh corrals on the flood tide. They hauled the nets, frothing with fish, to the shore, where their springtime catch would be cleaned, salted, packed, and stored away for breakfasts throughout the year. 


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American Shad Eggs from the Potomac River, photo by Jay Fleming.


The arrival of the spring spawn couldn’t have been better timed. At the desperate tail end of winter, when overwintered stores were depleted to worrisome lows, the fish came. Geese had hardly left the quiet freshwater coves when the pulse of hickory shad and glut herring would rush in. So vital were these fish as salvation from late winter’s terrible teeth that Chesapeake dams were broken and millers killed to allow the fish upstream, food delivered by tide and fin. Shad roe was the original Easter egg. 

Many species of anadromous fish have populations impacted by pollution and dams- an unintended side-effect of water power. Though restoration initiatives are seeing some positive changes, the spring spawn is diminished, dimmed. Once the herald of the season’s transition from bitter winter to balmy spring, the return of the fish to the Chesapeake has largely lost its meaning. Yet anadromous fish eggs, vibrating with tiny life, still bounce along the Bay’s bottoms every year. 

Even as we hunt for their pastel-dyed counterparts this weekend, think for a moment of the shad, the herring- bearers of a tradition older than our existence, the first sign of spring.

Photos in this post have been generously shared by Chesapeake photographer Jay Fleming. Check out more of his work here: jayflemingphotography.com

Workboats all lined up and ready for dredging at a marina in Chance, Maryland, way down at the marshy islands on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was a windy, rough day and the watermen didn’t go out, providing a dockside view of their winte…

Workboats all lined up and ready for dredging at a marina in Chance, Maryland, way down at the marshy islands on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was a windy, rough day and the watermen didn’t go out, providing a dockside view of their winter gear and oyster mud.

Dredges are still a common tool for oystering in the Maryland part of the Chesapeake, even though they’re a gear type introduced in the 1840’s. Blacksmiths and gear netters make the frames and the rope “baskets,” just as their fathers and grandfathers did.

Oystering, the oldest Chesapeake fishery, still represents a seasonal portion of the waterman’s livelihood, with some of the strongest intact traditions, methods, and technology. Although simple and sturdy, these dredges represent an integral and dwindling part of the Bay’s iconic heritage.

Bumper Politics

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Bumpers are prime locations to display your opinion du jour, and the Chesapeake has its own twist on this proud American tradition. Somewhere between rolling billboards and a protest placard, local bumper stickers can provide a flicker of insight into the regional politics, grievances, and causes. Whether pro oysters or clams, open to environmental restoration or closed to outside influence, a lively debate is aired in public every time the rubber hits the road. They might not always be politically correct, and some are downright unfriendly, but a few little inches of adhesive can communicate volumes about the issues and causes that touch lives and inflame tempers in the Chesapeake’s working communities.


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Images by author.

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Southern Miss is one of the last working boats docked in St Michaels, Maryland, come winter. Her very slip used to be a cold-weather berth for log canoes that left the harbor in the 19th century to tong for oysters. Now St Michaels is a refuge for recreational boaters, and in winter, very little activity takes place on the harbor at all. So, Southern Miss is a rare exception indeed—  a raw-knuckle St Michaels workboat still braving the frozen Bay during Maryland’s oystering season.

Her gear is also pretty remarkable— oyster tongs— the simplest, oldest form of catching oysters. Tongs were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they’re not a common sight around the Bay into day’s era of power dredging and patent tongs. Often called “widow sticks,” tongs have been known to unbalance watermen in rough winter weather. Once overboard, the watermen’s bibs and boots would fill with water, dragging the oyster tonger down in the frigid Chesapeake.

They’re backbreaking to use, and require strength and skill to employ correctly— especially the longer ones, which are so long they can actually start to flexibly bow.  The fact that the Southern Miss still carries them is a perfect example of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” pragmatism still favored by a few old timers.

Barren Island's Beautiful "Ugly" Oysters

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Barren Island Oyster sign, photo by author.

To get to Barren Island Oysters, you wind your way along the sliver of highway snaking through Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Water and land blur together seamlessly, eagles plunge from aeries in pinwheeling fish surveillance. These intertidal edges, so prevalent at Blackwater, abound with life. Where the salinity rises closer to the Bay’s main stem, they also abound with oysters. Historically, the oyster populations here were wild. Now, to augment a struggling baseline of wild oysters, Maryland oyster harvesters are trying a new technique- growing the oysters they want to sell. Some of the people entering this new oyster farming industry fit the profile of the “traditional” watermen. Others, like Tim Devine, owner of Barren Island Oysters, are decidedly non-traditional.  

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Oyster farming is wet, dirty work. Bibs are an essential tool, especially in the winter, when wet clothes can be more than just uncomfortable- they can be dangerous. Photo by author.

Tim, a former New York photographer, grew up in nearby Easton, Maryland. He returned to his hometown when things in New York went south, looking to reconnect with his roots and find purpose in a new occupation that might help the Bay he’d fossil-hunted on as a kid. Oyster farming had just been green-lighted by the State of Maryland and Devine was ready to dive in. It hardly mattered, he thought, that he didn’t really like to eat oysters. Enough other people did, at places in New York and Washington, DC. Devine knew the market was there.

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Buoys and Barren Island Oyster’s holding floats, with Barren Island in the distance. Photo by author.

Devine’s business is located on Hooper’s Island, but his oyster cages aren’t. Located in the protected bottom around Barren Island, just across Tar Bay, Devine’s choice of location was environmentally advantageous. It was also politically savvy. As his proposed oyster farm was in water already off limits to most other fishing, he wouldn’t be encroaching on bottom and therefore the  traditional livelihood of watermen living on Hooper’s Island. 

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Devine is admittedly a bit of character. Outspoken and opinionated, he’s self-deprecating about pretty much everything other than his oysters. These, he’s proud to show, are beautifully formed, with deep cups and evenly tumbled edges. Their sweet, buttery taste has a creaminess that slides elegantly into a briny finish. Eating one, you tip the shell to get the last silky liquor inside. It’s no surprise when Devine starts ticking off the list of restaurants that are carrying the “BIO” brand. His oysters even won the 2014 Mermaid Kiss Oyster Festival’s “Best Oyster” award. 

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Oysters are sorted from cages to ready for packing and shipping. Image by author.


Inside the concrete-block building that functions as Barren Island Oyster headquarters, a few guys sort through the finished oysters, preparing to package them for shipping off to numerous Superbowl parties around the state. They’re Eastern Shore guys, friends of Tim’s or locals, who spend their days doing what their grandfathers used to do- oystering- just using some newfangled techniques. Once opened and savored, the basics are the same. Oysters, a delicate balance of tide, sunlight, current, and salt, are the essence of their environment. Grown on the leeward side of a Chesapeake island, Barren Island Oysters reflect the Bay’s ability to persevere, an ecological engine that keeps humming along, generation after generation.


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Oysters headed down the conveyor belt for boxing. These are Devine’s “BIO” brand. He also sells a non-tumbled oyster under the “Ugly Oyster” label, whose tagline boasts Devine’s own brand of humor: “They’ve Got Great Personalities.” Image by author.

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Oysters, boxed and ready for shipping. Image by author.

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One of Barren Island Oyster’s shucked shellfish. Image by author.

Dorchester County is one of Maryland’s largest producers of aquaculture oysters. Three oyster farms, Hooper’s Island Oyster Aquaculture Company, Choptank Oyster Company, and Barren Island Oysters, are all within a  45 minute drive of each other down one of the Chesapeake’s quintessential marsh landscapes. To find out more, or try Barren Island oysters for yourself, check out Dorchester County’s tourism page: http://bit.ly/1xtHwVW

Happy shucking!

Storm clouds hang over workboats rigged for oystering at a marina in Chance, Maryland. One of the traditional fishing communities of Somerset County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, watermen here have been working through economic depressions, env…

Storm clouds hang over workboats rigged for oystering at a marina in Chance, Maryland. One of the traditional fishing communities of Somerset County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, watermen here have been working through economic depressions, environmental challenges, and radical changes in regulation. Though considerably smaller than in year’s past, the fleet still leaves in the morning to harvest whatever is seasonally available, up to the chance of tide, wind, and timing.

Image by author.

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Shipwrights from Coastal Heritage Alliance hard at work restoring the skipjack Kathryn. Never built to last, wooden skipjacks require regular upkeep to stay above the waterline. Only a few places throughout the Chesapeake still maintain the traditional woodworking and boat building techniques needed to care for these hard working vessels. This boat yard, in Chance, Maryland, is one of a handful where the art of wooden boat building lives on in the calloused hands of a few dedicated shipwrights.

Iconic Skipjack Dredging Licenses

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City of Crisfield dredge license #33. Photograph by author.

There is much that is iconic about Chesapeake skipjacks- their long, wide-bellied form, their single masts and double sails, the weathered men who sail them to unseen oyster bars deep below the Bay’s surface. They have come to represent so much about the halcyon days of the Chesapeake’s past, when the water was the source of life and livelihood, and harbor towns hummed on the seasonal harvests: fish, crabs, and oysters.

But skipjacks have a whole visual language of tools and traditions associated with them, as well. As much as their towering cargo of shellfish, skipjacks are defined by the rusted dredges, white galoshes, and trailboards that encrust them like barnacles. Dredge licenses, those large, metal plates seen below the starboard and port lights on the skipjack’s rigging, are a part of that immediately-recognizable motley assortment of working objects.

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Image of Martha Lewis, CBMM archives

These 24" x 24" metal licenses are now assigned to skipjacks for their entire life. But that is a recent development. Prior to 1971, captains had to reapply every year for a new set of dredging license plates. And the issuing of metal licenses was started in 1958. Earlier licenses were paper, and skipjack captains had to  sew their license number onto their sails. It’s helpful tool for dating photographs here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum- any skipjack photos that include sewn-on license numbers have to be earlier than 1958.

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Oyster sloop J.T. Leonard displaying a pre-1958 dredge license. CBMM archives.

Modern metal dredge licenses are rare- just as rare as the few skipjacks that still sail on the Chesapeake Bay. Their maintenance is part of the annual spiffing-up that captains undertake to prepare their vessels for the working months. Decks and hulls are freshly painted with a new coat of white that hides the rust stains and oyster grit of last season, and their licenses are often given a brush-up too. Layers of paint on the licenses, thick as cake frosting, are a symbol of pride in continuing this diminishing way of life.

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Dredging license, Rebecca T Ruark. CBMM archives.

Dredge licenses are not obviously beautiful adornments to the skipjacks they permit, but on closer thought, perhaps they are just right. Skipjacks are working girls, hardy, rough, and made for hauling, dredging, and sailing into headwinds. Flashy varnish or brilliant burgees wouldn’t suit these ladies. Their big frames are better set off by simpler things. Proudly painted and bright against a blue sky, dredge licenses are a skipjack’s crowning jewel, representing a working Chesapeake past that still defines our modern Bay.

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Fannie Daugherty relaunch after restoration work at CBMM. CBMM archives.

The “Why Worry” out of Wenona, Maryland is having a good oystering season this year. Other watermen out of Deal Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore have been meeting their limit, bringing in 100 bushels of oysters a day. It’s …

The “Why Worry” out of Wenona, Maryland is having a good oystering season this year. Other watermen out of Deal Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore have been meeting their limit, bringing in 100 bushels of oysters a day. It’s good news for watermen and the working fleet of deadrises on Deal, where oysters still represent a substantial part of the Bay’s winter economy.