Remains of the Bay

The last American fishing fleet with sails is scudding westward across the Chesapeake Bay, one more time. It's dark yet, autumn winds are blowing, the water is roughening. The crewmen huddled below in cramped cabins and and the captains topside at their helms realize this could be the final season they will go dredging for oysters -- "drudgin' arsters," in the waterman's vernacular.

Running under motor, not sail, this scattered fleet of four skipjacks no longer uses the wind to oyster. Sailing is too slow and doesn't pay when so few shellfish remain on the bottom of the bay -- for something is killing the oysters.

A century ago skipjacks numbered perhaps 1,000 but by 1985, when they were listed on the National Register of Historic Places, only 35 working boats had survived. Just a dozen are commercially licensed today. Most captains don't bother to leave their docks.

In the fall of 2003 Lawrence Murphy hadn't given up. His "Thomas Clyde" was one of the biggest and oldest skipjacks still afloat. Launched in 1911, 73 feet from bowsprit to far stern davits, 20 feet across her beam, weathered rough by any measure, she smelled of diesel fumes and of men who work hard.

This day that year it's 6:40 a.m. when the boat reaches the underwater ledge known as Seven Foot Knoll, and the sun swells like a fat pumpkin growing from Maryland's Eastern Shore. Murphy pushes a throttle, engines rumble, and crewmen swing big dredge baskets over each side. After a few minutes of shuddering across the bottom, they are hauled up and hundreds of pounds of muck and shell are dumped on deck. "Arsters aren't very thick on the bottom," Murphy observes.

At day's end he's looking over four high heaps, reckoning his final haul at 130 bushels. Not bad, but short of the 150-bushel limit, and the season's early days are the best. Murphy shakes his head and says, "If there was a good job somewhere, I'd take it."

Skipjacks are awash in irony. The purpose for which they were designed has all but disappeared, and the laws governing their use have been contorted to the point of contradiction. This is a vessel that evolved after one of the earliest conservation laws banned dredging except by sail -- to conserve oysters at a time when there were billions of them -- yet today, when oysters are scarce, laws allow motor dredging, which rakes more of the bay bottom, and faster. And yet again, the prospect of no waterman dredging for oysters and no skipjack left to "lick" the bars saddens anyone who's ever seen the craft on the Chesapeake.

Up close, the old one may be big around the belly and broad across the butt, white paint flecked, decks jumbled and dirty. At any distance, though, especially when the sails are up, she's a pretty sight. With her long why bowsprit, decks flush to low hull, tall raked-back mast, big jib and vast leg-o"-mutton mainsail, she seems to skim the waters like a fish on the flats.

This is why efforts are being made to save the vessels that are historic symbols of a time and place. The age of the boats and the punky bottoms and brittle masts that come from deferred maintenance during years of waning harvests make preservation urgent. Few owners can afford to keep their craft in good repair. In November 2000 the 50-year-old "City of Crisfield" went down at her dock in Cambridge, Md., rotten from the keel up. A year before that the 113-year-old "Rebecca T. Ruark, oldest skipjack of all, foundered in a storm near the mouth of the Choptank River.

With funds from the state and preservation groups, one by one the skipjacks have been hauled ashore, practically dissembled, then plut back afloat with sound timbers. Sums spent, a cap of $50,000 per boat, would astound those who built the boats generations ago. Skipjacks once were many because their design was simple and cheap. Their box construction requires fewer supports or ribs and is called for in round-hulled vessels. Supposedly a competent house carpenter could put one together for a few hundred dollars. But that was the 1890s, when hand labor hardly cost and huge trees could still be found here. Plentiful oysters repaid the expense in a few seasons.

Today the ship's share of a year's harvest might barely buy the mast. One day at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, where the skipjacks are being restored, Russell Dize, whose 101-year-old skipjack "Kathryn" was in line for a new 12-foot-long stern plank, shook his head at the cost. Dize's grandfather built the boat in 1903 for $500. Today, he figures, it would cost $200,000. "Kathryn" will stay moored that season. "It's the first year I'm not dredging," Dize says. "We have no oysters in our area. You have to go to the head of the bay to find any, and they can't last very long."

What happens on the deck of a skipjack that does venture out is nothing a yachtsman would enjoy. On "Thomas Clyde" there is no hauling of sheets or reefing of sails because the canvas stays furled, but much to do with shovels and throttles. Powered or not it's hard-muscle work. Up comes a big steel-toothed basket on each side of the boat. The baskets are about four feet long and weigh about a hundred pounds, and most scoops bring up a couple hundred pounds more of bottom glop. Two crewmen grab either end of the basket, dump it on the steel-plated deck, heave it back overboard, drop to their knees to pick through the load for oysters, then get to their feet and shovel what's left over the side -- and up again comes the basket.

This happens every few minutes for nine hours, with just one 20-minute break below for yellow cheese sandwiches. It's as monotonous as any assembly line but far more strenuous than factory work today. But all day long the men are trading jokes and laughing.

On the starboard basket is Russell Swift, 31, with a wife and children at home down in Crisfield. He spends nights aboard the skipjack while the boat works the northern bay. He'll get maybe $500 for two days' work. "It's not a lot for what we do to earn it," admits Swift. "I probably won't clear more than $6,000 for the season. It's hard, it's cold. I miss my family -- and I love it. It's what I want to do. You're your own man."

Once, you had to be your own sheriff, too. Two hundred miles long by 30 miles at its widest, the bay was as lawless a region as the nation has known. Battles on the bay began as early as 1812 when New England schooners, having scraped their beds clean, began showing up in the Chesapeake. Local watermen armed their boats and tried to drive ou the damn Yankees; they were outgunned. In response, Maryland banned all dredging but could not enforce the law.

Long after the West was considered tamed, the escalating violence became the so-called Oyster Wars. Fighting over the bounty became three-way among the locals: "hand-tongers" in small bateaux, skipjacks dredging under sail, and Maryland's new force of marine police -- nicknamed the Oyster Navy, which tried to limit the harvests. Watermen from Virginia traded shots with Marylanders, each claiming rights to the oyster beds. In 1888 the dredger crews of the notorious oyster pirate Gus Price fired volleys into what looked like a police steamer in the fog on the Chester River but turned out to be a steamboat filled with women and children. When Price returned to the Chester later that year, the Oyster Navy retaliated with howitzers. Two boats sank, drowning shanghaied crewmen Price had locked in the forepeaks.

The deliberate drowning of deck hands to avoid paying them was practiced into the 1900s. Captains were known for "paying off with the boom," letting it sweep crewmen over the side. A study then in the Geographical Review stated, "Dredging in Maryland is simply a general scramble, carried on in 700 boats, manned by 5,600 daring and unscrupulous men, who regard neither the laws of God or man. . .These men taken as a class form perhaps one of the most depraved bodies of workmen to be found in the country. They are gathered from jails, penitentiaries, workhouse and the lowest vilest dens of the city. Many are foreigners. . .unable to speak more than a few words of English."

Shootouts between low-county Marylanders and their counterparts from Virginia continued all the way into the 1950s. In the final incident, three Virginians slipped out from Colonial Beach to dredge beds inside the mouth of the Potomac. Lying in wait, Maryland oyster police killed one waterman and wounded another.

Killing a man over oysters was too much for the public to tolerate in 1959. A shakeup of Maryland's marine force was followed by negotiations between the two states over harvest rights. Three years later President John F. Kennedy signed a law establishing a bistate fisheries commission to conserve marine resources of the region.

The Oyster Wars were over and nobody won. The big loser was the oyster.

The Chesapeake was once the perfect habitat for one of the most fertile animals on the planet, a sex-changing bivalve that, as a male, spews millions of sperm, and when a female expels millions of eggs. The 2,500 square miles of the bay provided the ideal mix of fresh and salt water for oyster reproduction. Scientists calculate that the filter feeders once numbered so many that they cycled and cleaned the bay's more than 18,000 billion gallons of water every few days. Now so few survive that it takes them a year to do the job.

The record catch was 15 million bushels, in 1884. The annual average held at several million bushels for the next 90 years. The final good oyster year was 1986, with 1.6 million bushels. In recent years the catch has been below 40,000 bushels.

The bay is choking on sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus that are the by-products of human and animal wastes, fertilizers and auto emissions. Some 290 sewage treatment plants in the Chesapeake watershed make no effort to remove nitrogen from their waste streams -- contributing to a yearly load of 300 million gallons oozing into the bay.
The problems aren't confined to water quality. Half the forests that once stood here have vanished, along with vast underwater meadows of grass that served as habitat for marine life.

Conservation has made some little progress. Volunteers are planting bay grasses, increasing the acreage from 38,000 in 1984 to 69,000 in 2000. More than 1,400 miles of riparian forest buffers have been established.

Still, the oyster is in decline. Two of the big killers are little things, microbes -- Dermo and MSX -- for which no remedy is known. The parasites are harmless to humans but lethal to oysters. Many watermen push for transplanting disease-resistant Asian oysters to the bay. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wary of reintroducing an alien species, resists.

As the oyster harvest dwindles, some skipjacks have switched to "dredging" for tourists. It can be noble work if done right and the people taken aboard are made to see their own accountability for what has happened to the bay. Each of the 15 million people living in the broad watershed is in some part responsible for the plight of its waters, say environmentalists. The bay is a favored place of recreation for many of them. To net this market, several captains have converted their skipjacks for charters.

Andy McCown captains the skipjack "Elsworth," owned by the Echo Hill Outdoor School, north of Chestertown, Md. It accommodates half a dozen students who live and sleep aboard for five days and nights as she cruises the Chesapeake. McCown and his two crew members teach them how to analyze bay sediments and build aquariums on board that recreate the marine food chain.

McCown thinks this is how skipjacks fishing for a reason to keep afloat might find a purpose. How satisfying that may be for watermen is another matter. Most captains would rather have piles of silent oysters on their decks than a heap of noisy people. McCown reluctantly quit dredging in 1996. "That was the first time in 94 years the "Elsworth" didn't go oystering," he says sadly. "But I felt like I was chasing the last oyster."

Even so, McCown and other captains believe the bay suffers more from what people have done on land than from what's been done on the water. That's proved, they argue, by the fact oyster stocks stayed plentiful for most of a century even as the watermen took huge harvests. "The oysters could come back," McCown insists. "If we'd clean up the watershed, oysters could revive. Only I don't think it will be done," he adds, "in my life span."