A skipjack is a type of sailboat used for dredging oysters. Named after a fish that seems to skip across the water, this nearly flat-bottomed work boat was designed for the shallow Chesapeake Bay. Once there were hundreds, but today only about a dozen skipjacks are still used for dredging, so reduced is the oyster population due to over-harvesting, pollution, and shellfish diseases.

In the 1850s, people could buy Chesapeake oysters as far away as California. The high demand for the popular shellfish caused an "oyster boom." An early method of harvesting oysters, hand-tonging, was labor intensive and often dangerous in the wintery conditions of the oyster season. A more efficient method--scraping oyster beds with a large metal dredge--was introduced to the Chesapeake region by New England oystermen who began working the Bay when their own oyster beds played out.
At first resisted and restricted, dredging had become the main form of oyster harvesting by the 1880s. The skipjack was developed from an earlier Chesapeake boat type called a bateau to carry two metal dredges. Skipjacks dredging under sail were a common sight on the Bay and its tributaries from the 1890s to the 1960s.

But oystering declined, and other forms of fishing required different kinds of work boats. Some skipjacks were preserved by their owners, or sold or donated to museums. Many were scrapped. By the 1990s, only about 30 skipjacks remained, and less than half of them were still working. In 2001, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael's, Maryland, began a Skipjack Restoration Project and so far has restored six skipjacks to working order. Today, there are also a number of skipjacks owned by individuals, museums, or environmental organizations that offer pleasure cruises and educational programs. Others, like the Joy Parks, have been preserved on land as a tribute to their builders and the watermen who worked them.

The Joy Parks was built in 1936 on Virginia's Eastern Shore by Tom Young and sons. Her captain for many years was Orville Parks. She finished her oystering days on Tilghman Island, Maryland, captained by Dan Murphy, and was sold to the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship in Piney Point, Maryland, in 1968. The Joy Parks was taken out of the water in 1975. She joins other classic Chesapeake Bay work boats in the collection of the Piney Point Museum, St. Mary's County, Maryland, a member of the Chesapeake Gateways Network of the National Park Service.

Visit www.baygateways.net to find other places you can see and sail on a skipjack and other Chesapeake work boats.

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