Several years ago, while attending the Sultana Downrigging Festival in Chestertown, Md., Jim Drake and his wife Brooke were introduced to Chesapeake Bay buyboats. Brooke fell in love with the boats and Jim set out to build her one.
Since 2015 National Fisherman has followed Jim Drake’s efforts in building his 46-foot Chesapeake Bay buyboat in the couple’s Mount Airy, Md., backyard. Drake’s latest report shows the project is coming along.
But when asked when the boat, named the John Swain, will be launched, he replies, “That’s the $64,000 question! I’m following the lead of Leo Sampson, the guy who restored (the cutter sailing yacht) Tally Ho out in Washington State. His standard answer to that question was always ‘two years’ so that come launch day, he’d be two years ahead of schedule.”
“I’m a one-man shop. When I started this project, I said this is an act of faith or denial or both,” says Drake. “My hope is that four more years will see it ready. That’d make me 80. Wanna take bets?”
During the 1920s and ’30s, more bay buyboat-style commercial fishing and freighting boats were built on Chesapeake Bay than at any other time in the bay’s maritime history. At one time, thousands of these boats were used to buy oysters, crabs and fish from commercial watermen out on the fishing grounds.
Before today’s good roads for trucking, the boats were also used extensively in the freighting business. Today, there are about 40 buyboats in existence, some as museum pieces, a few working in Maryland’s and Virginia’s oyster fisheries, and the rest converted to cruising yachts.
The boat is named for John Swain because of the Drakes’ admiration of the Chestertown, Md. boatbuilder.
read more at nationalfisherman.com.
