Chesapeake Bay Trawler

Chris:

Do you mean the Chesapeake Bay shipjack?

Dick Wood

they are on ebay all the time

I'm having trouble with the terminology here. Chesapeake Bay is the domain of several distinctive boat types - the skipjack, the bugeye, the log canoe, the pungee, and the deadrise come to mind. Most of them were/are used for harvesting oysters and/or crabs. I've seen plenty of trawlers coming into and out of Norfolk, Hampton, and Newport News (where I used to live), but so far as I can recall there's nothing about them that's noticeably different from trawlers operating out of other ports. I think most of them do their fishing well offshore, in the Atlantic. The boat types that are generally associated with the Bay operate in shallow water. (Most of the Virginia oystering nowadays is done by 1- or 2-man deadrise power boats. The waterman stands on the rail with a pair of "oyster tongs" and literally scoops the oysters off the bottom.)

The Model Shipways skipjack Willie L. Bennett is a nice kit - great for anybody who wants to get into serious scale ship modeling for the first time. I've also seen a line of wood kits by another firm, whose name escapes my halfzeimer's-afflicted brain at the moment. This firm (whatever it was) made a skipjack, a bugeye, and a deadrise - and maybe some others. They looked to me like pretty good kits, but I haven't seen them for a while. I fear they may be out of business.

The only plastic kit for a Bay boat, to my knowledge, is an old, old skipjack by Pyro. It may still be around (maybe in a Lindberg box). As I remember it wasn't too bad, if you got past the injection-molded furled sails.

I'm afraid I haven't helped much. If you could be more specific some more relevant light bulb might light up in my head. Good luck.

Thank you for the responses. I'm hoping to build a fishing trawler used in the shallow waters of the Bay. They have the front mounted wheel house with the booms (two I think) from the back.

jtilley- I grew up in Norfolk, VA. and have been to the Mariners Museum many times. Great place!!!

Now I see what you're after. I've never seen a kit of such a vessel, but I suppose it's possible that there was one in that range of Bay craft by the manufacturer whose name I've forgotten. The kits were in relatively nondescript white boxes with black-and-white photos on the fronts. I saw a big stack of them in one place: The Hobby Center, on Patterson Avenue in Richmond. That was a first-rate hobby shop. Unfortunately it went out of business last year, and I haven't seen the kits anywhere else. I'll keep my eye open and troll through my poor old brain some more.

The Mariners' Museum is a remarkable place. I worked there for three years (1980-1983), in which I learned a great deal about all sorts of things. In more recent times it's operated in a manner that I personally find pretty appalling, and these days I avoid the place. My wife says - and she's right - that my blood pressure rises noticeably whenever I get near it. Maybe a change of management in the future will bring back the good old days.