WoodenBoat at 50

Maybe it was fate…or maybe just a happy accident. But Jon Wilson and The WoodenBoat, Volume 1, changed a lot of lives, mine included. It began for me on a bright warm, autumn day at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1974.

But first a bit of backstory. I was 26, a young writer, sailor, and wooden boat custodian fresh from graduate school in New Hampshire. In 1974 I had been drawn from New England by the possibility of a teaching job near the shores of Chesapeake Bay and a search for my roots.

According to family lore, I was descended from the bay’s watermen, so I had begun to explore the watermen’s ports of the Chesapeake. In late winter 1974, I was in Cambridge, Maryland, when I got my first glimpse of working skipjacks. Four boats were unloading their daily catch of oysters at the wharf. I was blown away by their graceful sheers, long and proud bowsprits, raked masts, and immense amount of oyster grit. The crews had a rugged independence, a distinct drawl, a comical litany of hard-times tales, and a peculiar way of calling their shipmates “honey.” The scene struck me as a tableau from a hundred years ago, and something about these crews and their skipjacks seemed simultaneously foreign and hauntingly familiar.

I wanted some of that. So when I saw “Tilghman Island” written as the hailing port on the transoms of the skipjacks, I knew Tilghman would be the next stop on my search for my roots. But the teaching job, and a summer of reconditioning and sailing a tired Wianno Senior knockabout on Cape Cod, intervened.

I didn’t get back to the Chesapeake until that sunny fall day in ’74 at Dock Square in Annapolis. It was the annual boat show—part fall ritual, part fair, part carnival. But while the show teemed with happy people and gleaming boats, I found myself feeling a bit estranged from the euphoria surrounding the rafts of fiberglass production boats that I could neither afford nor relate to.

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