Peter Ianniello gathered the first harvest of grapes from his Harford County vineyard and trucked them to a dock in Havre de Grace. To get the two-ton load of fruit to a winemaker in St. Michaels, workers spent an hour putting them on a skipjack for the nine-hour trip to the Eastern Shore.
"It took a lot more time to pick than it did to load," Ianniello said, as the captain and crew of the Martha Lewis handled more than 130 crates.
Though intended as a historic re-creation of sorts, yesterday's operation presented a contrast to the classic imagery of the skipjack as an oyster dredging vessel. But cargo hauling was a vital function of the sloops, maritime historians say, as operators hauled all manner of cargo to bay ports after the September-to-April oyster season.
"Skipjack captains had to make a living after the dredging season," said Richard Scofield, boatyard manager at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. "They were work boats and would deliver any cargo, from lumber to watermelons."
Pete Lesher, the museum's curator, found a print by Baltimore artist Louis Feuchter that depicted the skipjack E.C. Collier with watermelons loaded on its decks at a city wharf about 1910. That same skipjack is preserved at the St. Michaels museum.
And recently Lesher found a newspaper clipping from September 1907 describing how skipjacks had spent the summer carrying fruits and vegetables to Baltimore.
"This grape hauling is absolutely right on point to what skipjacks did," Lesher said.
For nearly a century, skipjacks were the lifeblood of commerce on the Chesapeake Bay. Designed for oyster dredging, the ships first appeared on the bay in the late 1800s. In the heyday of dredging, about 2,000 were in operation.
Nearly as numerous as the skipjacks were "buyboats," craft that would meet the bigger sloops halfway, buy produce and carry it to markets on the Western Shore.
But the skipjack's role as cargo-hauling workhorse came to an abrupt end with the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
"As soon as that first refrigerated truck went over the bridge, the buyboats and skipjacks went out of business," Scofield said.
About two dozen skipjacks remain today and a few still dredge for oysters. The 52-year-old Martha Lewis is the only one that dredges under sail, according to the Chesapeake Heritage Conservancy, which owns the ship and operates it as a living classroom out of the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum. Over the winter, the vessel underwent a $60,000 restoration.
