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Devotees revive a skipjack
From cutting a new keel with chain saws to sealing deck boards with strips of cotton, work nears an end on a piece of the Chesapeake Bay's history, the Virginia W.TO SOME, the painstakingly difficult repair job going on in the big shed at Port Kinsale Marina is a bit of a mystery.
Date published: 8/27/2002
After all, why would a crew spend months this year at the Westmoreland County shop hewing a sailboat keel out of a huge pine tree with little more than a chain saw and hand tools?
Not to mention rehabbing a hull with odd-sized pine planking with enough twists, turns and angles to make the most experienced shipwright scratch his head.
Then, after using hand tools to carve out a centerboard case just 4 inches wide but 5 feet long, there were the deck planks to be lined with cotton batting. Each piece had to be tamped in with hammer and chisel, ready to be pinched by planks that will pinch the batting when wet.
"Most of the deck was in bad shape when we got the Virginia W.," said Marty Miller, the man who headed the effort to save this 37-foot shallow-draft sailboat known as a skipjack. "Back in the days when it was working, the salt water kept it from rotting. But she hasn't been worked for many a season."
That storied past is the reason Miller and a handful of others who care about Chesapeake Bay history and maritime heritage have created the Port Kinsale Foundation Inc.
Over the past four years, the group of businessmen, lawyers, artists and others have begun raising the $100,000 they say it will take to restore the Virginia W., built in 1904 in Guilford on Virginia's Eastern Shore.
Purchased from Tilghman Island Capt. Bobby Marshall in 1998, the Virginia W. is in the third year of a reconstruction program that has captured the attention of many who love bay lore and the old ways of boat construction.
"The keel was a pine tree that was down on the road at Sandy Point," said Jeffrey Moss, a member of the Port Kinsale crew working on the boat under the direction of shipwright Ian Williams. "There aren't many keels cut these days with a chain saw."
Those not familiar with the term skipjack won't understand what the single-masted sailboats symbolize for many, or why otherwise frugal businessmen will spend and raise big money to keep one of these boats sailing.
"It's part of this area's history, symbolizing the way of life that existed here for so long," said Robert Crown, one of the foundation's board members. "It's that way of life that brought so many of us here, the charm that is a part of this place."
The Virginia W. is one of only a handful of survivors from a skipjack fleet that once numbered nearly a thousand.
Taking advantages of a shallow draft that allowed them to get into oyster beds in low water, the vessels were the workhorses of the oyster-harvesting industry, scraping millions of bushels of sharp-shelled oysters from grounds up and down the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.
Date published: 8/27/2002
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