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Workin’ With the Wind |
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Doug Stephens |
July 2005 |
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Crew aboard the Caleb W. Jones pulls in a dredge full of oysters. Photo by Doug Stephens.
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The following is excerpted from the book “Workin’ with the Wind” by permission of the author. He describes an oystering trip aboard the 44’ Caleb W. Jones, one of the few Skipjacks still working on the Chesapeake Bay.
During an excursion on the Choptank River with Captain Dicky [Webster], I had mentioned that I would like to photograph the “unloading of the catch” at the dock. However, photographing the unloading process presented a slight problem. Dicky and his crew usually worked through to dusk, and there wasn’t enough light left in the day to get the pictures I wanted by the time they returned to port. Dicky was the one who came up with the solution: “We’re only workin’ half a day on Thanksgiving. Why don’t you sail with us?” he asked. “We sail out of Cambridge.”
“Sounds good to me,” I replied.
Thanksgiving turned out to be bitter cold, particularly in the pre-dawn hours. I dressed as warmly as I knew how, with several layers of clothing, waterproof boots over my sneakers and two pairs of socks. Climbing out of my truck and heading toward the Caleb, I wondered, “What motivates these men to go out on a boat during the coldest part of the year, day after day, year after year?” It had to be more than a day’s work for a day’s wage.
Captain Dicky, Clyde, and Buster greeted me when I arrived. Accompanying them were two new crew members. Judging by what Dicky had told me of his past experiences, these newcomers probably wouldn’t be around for long. Keeping a good crew was one of the hardest parts of his job. Even from my limited experience on board, I could understand why crewmen move on. The work is backbreaking, and the weather conditions are often miserable.
As the watermen prepared to sail, I noticed they wore winter hats and insulated coveralls over their regular clothes. On top of the coveralls, they wore waterproof oilskins. Their boots looked insulated and waterproof, too. As I walked around the boat, I wouldn’t help noticing the exquisite heat radiating from the cabin. I poked my head in and felt the trusty little cook stove cranking it out.
As the sun began to rise, Captain Dicky gave the word to his crew and we headed out. It was quiet. The only sounds were the wind in the sail and the water caressing the hull. It wasn’t long before Dicky was on the marine radio with Captain Stan on the Howard to talk things over and decide which oyster bar they would try.
When we reached our destination, the crew dropped both dredges overboard on the captain’s order. Using only the wind for locomotion, the Caleb began to pull the dredges over the oyster bar. The cold, steady breeze and the smell of the salty sea air were invigorating. Every now and then, Dicky instructed his crew how to position the sails, and they made the necessary adjustments.
All of a sudden I heard a loud engine start up. It was the engine used to pull the dredges back in. When the first dredge came up, Buster and Clyde dumped its contents on the deck and began to cull the oysters. There is no one correct way to do this, and each man seemed to use a different method. To my surprise, what looked like a load of oysters on the first lick, or pass over the oyster bed, ended up only a dozen or so. The rest consisted of empty shells, undersized oysters, rocks, mud, and other debris, including an occasional crab.
After Buster and Clyde had culled for a few minutes, Dicky asked Buster to drop the dredge back overboard. Then he motioned to the crewman on the other side of the Caleb to start winding in the second dredge. When it came up, it too was dumped on the deck, the good oysters separated out. Everything else was shoveled back into the river.
That’s the way the morning went. Alternating back and forth, the crew kept very busy. Captain Dicky stayed busy, too. He found the oyster bars and kept the Caleb positioned over them while contending with the wind, the tide, the other boats working in the area, and the varying degrees of resistance from the dredges as the Caleb pulled them across the bottom. Sometimes the dredges worked like anchors when they got snagged on something. Dicky told me, “Many a dredge has been lost or damaged at the bottom of the bay.” Other times, the Caleb’s direction would change as the crew wound in one or the other dredge.
Dicky used one little trick when he had a particularly good lick over an area. He threw out a plastic buoy to mark the spot so he could easily find it again. When I asked Dicky how he found the oysters in the first place, he said that the depth finder was his most useful tool. He looked for what he called “hills” on the bottom.
The rest of the morning passed quickly. It was almost noon when Captain Dicky called it quits and we headed back to port. We had what looked like a fair amount of oysters on board. During the return trip, Dicky asked the crew to cull their catch again to reduce the possibility of getting fined by the Marine Police for harvesting undersized oysters. This second cull was necessary because the crew gets paid according to the number of bushels caught, and they are therefore inclined to be a little less precise on the size restrictions than the captain would like. “The captain is the one who gets fined if the percentage of undersized oysters taken exceeds the limit,” Captain Dicky told me, “And if it happens repeatedly, they’ll take his license! Besides,” he continued with a concerned look on his face, “if everybody kept the little ones, there wouldn’t be any left for next year.”
The day had warmed a little by the time we returned to the harbor. Ahead of us, docked at the place where the oysters are unloaded, was the Skipjack Wilma Lee. When it was our turn, Captain Dicky guided the Caleb up to the bulkhead. Before us stood two men wearing insulated coveralls and heavy boots. These men were oyster buyers. I was standing next to Dicky when he compared these buyers to the buyers of the old days. “The major difference in this part of the oyster business is that middlemen now use trucks instead of buyboats to transport the oysters to market. They can get’m there quicker, too!” He went on to say, “These oysters could be in a restaurant in Philadelphia or New York by tonight.”
There were only about twenty feet separating the Caleb from the truck used to transport the oysters to market. Between the two was a conveyor belt, and overhead was a boom with some pulleys and a rope leading to a metal bucket the size of a bushel basket. The basket was lowered onto the Caleb’s deck and the crew quickly filled it with oysters. The men used very large shovels and it took only three or four shovelfuls to make a bushel. After the bucket was full, the man who was standing at the end of the conveyor belt pulled a lever and, with hydraulics instead of physical exertion, lifted the heavy oysters up high enough to be dumped by another crewman onto the conveyor. From there the conveyor did the work getting the oysters into the truck. This process was repeated thirty-three times before the loading was complete.
The middleman paid Captain Dicky and he in turn gave the crew their shares, keeping one share for himself and one share for the boat. “That’s the way it’s done,” he told me. “Everything goes on shares now, with one extra share for the boat for maintenance and expenses.”
Before I left, Dicky handed me the oysters that he had put aside for me to take home. “They’ll be great appetizers for our Thanksgiving dinner,” I told him. “Thanks for having me aboard.”
On my way back to Salisbury, I began to understand why Captain Dicky works so hard to hold on to his way of life. Aboard the Caleb, there are no telephones, no traffic lights, no deadlines, no hurry! He has the wonders of the sky and the clouds, the wind, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, with all their moods and radiance. He has the oyster, the delicious bivalve that grows on the bottom, and he is part of this history.
Related Links:
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Skipjack Restoration Project
http://www.cbmm.org/wh_prog_skip.html
National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Endangered Sites
http://www.nationaltrust.org/11Most/2002/skipjacks.html
Save Our Skipjacks Task Force
http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/mdmanual/26excom/html/32skip.html
Annual Labor Day Weekend Skipjack Race off Deal Island, MD
http://skipjack.net/races/
Saving the Skipjacks by Deborah Davis (9/02 Skipjack.net feature article)
http://www.skipjack.net/article.asp?StoryID=12
Author and photographer Doug Stephens was born and raised in Salisbury. He first met Dicky Webster of Wenona, owner of the “Caleb W. Jones” in 1983. Over the ensuing years he has taken almost 5,000 photographs of the boat and its crew, 165 of which appear in his book. “Workin’ with the Wind” was published in 2004 by Factor PR of Salisbury. Stephens’ principal occupation is real estate sales; he lives with his wife and daughter in Sharptown. He can be reached at workwithwind@hotmail.com.
© University of Maryland Eastern Shore, 2005. All rights reserved.
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Additional Photos
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Captain Dicky Webster of Wenona, comes from a long line of Chesapeake Bay watermen. Photo by Doug Stephens. |
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Crewmember Clyde holds a magnificent oyster, just about as big as they get. Photo by Doug Stephens. |
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The captain asked the crew to cull the catch a second time. Marine Police fine the captain if 5% or more are undersized. Photo by Doug Stephens. |
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A conveyor belt moves the day’s catch into a truck that can get oysters to Philadelphia or New York restaurants by evening. Photo by Doug Stephens. |
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Skipjacks race off Deal Island on Labor Day and off Sandy Point State Park at the start of the oystering season in the fall. Photo by Doug Stephens. |
Questions or comments regarding
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addressed to the editor:
Katherine Harting
Room 2133 Richard A. Henson Center
University of Maryland Eastern Shore
Princess Anne, MD 21853
Telephone: 410-651-6084
E-mail: kharting@umes.edu
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