ST. MICHAELS, MD—Two seniors from Holderness School in Plymouth, N.H., are spending 10 days outside the classroom helping restore Chesapeake Bay skipjacks, the last commercial sailing fishing fleet in the country.
The students, Liza McElroy, 17, and Jay Connolly, 18, arrived at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at dawn one early March day and by noon had found themselves ankle deep in wood shavings.
“It’s pretty hard work,” noted McElroy, the daughter of Mark and Amy McElroy of Hartland, VT., as she took a break from sanding a boom for the skipjack “Lady Katie.” “It feels important because it’s restoring Maryland’s history. I like that part of it.”
This time each year Holderness seniors leave the campus to begin a 10-day senior project, which can include performing a community service. McElroy, whose grandparents live on the Eastern Shore, knew about the Skipjack Restoration Project through visits to the museum and by reading about the oyster boats on the Internet. She decided to try her hand working on the wooden vessels and talked her friend Connolly into making the venture his senior project as well.
“I think it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for,” said Connolly, the son of Steve and Ducky Connolly of Marblehead, MA. “It’s more than I was looking for. I’ve never really worked on boats like this before. This is pretty cool.”
The goal of the museum’s Skipjack Restoration Project is to repair the bay’s remaining skipjacks enough that their watermen owners can continue to dredge oysters. The skipjack is a sailing vessel indigenous to the Chesapeake Bay region. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the boats were designed and built for the local oyster fisheries.
Skipjacks grew in popularity and numbered in the hundreds during the industry's prime. Today only about a dozen are licensed to dredge oysters commercially.
Project director Capt. Mike Vlahovich said he welcomed the two students’ request to work side by side with museum shipwrights and apprentices. “It’s important that the museum encourage people their age to look at how they can help preserve our maritime heritage,” he said.
Posted: 3-7-2003
