Log Canoes: Grace, elegance and a puff away from disaster

The dugout canoe on display at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum looks more like a feed trough than the ancestor of a thoroughbred racer. The ends are bluff, the sides are slab and the interior fashioned with fire and stone.

But hidden in the crude shell is the idea that would someday become the gracious speedster known on the Eastern Shore as the Chesapeake Bay Log Canoe.

For more than 150 years, the sleek vessels with their twin, raked masts and sharp-angled sails have been battling for bragging rights on the Chester, Miles and Tred Avon Rivers to the delight of sailors, spectators and artists.

The fascination is not lost on Judge John C. North II. His family owns three of the classic sailboats, two of which were built in the late 1800s by his great grandfather, W. S. “Captain Sid” Covington of Tilghman Island.

“They are distinguished for their beauty and grace,” North says. “They are simply very appealing objects to look upon.”

Pete Lesher, Chief Curator at CBMM and a log canoe racer, says that log canoes have long inspired artists who have sought to capture their beauty and intrigue. He points to Marc Castelli, the famed watercolorist from Chestertown, who is one of the more prolific and successful of the modern artists to focus on the canoes.

Castelli, who is known for his paintings that document the knuckle-busting working world of the Chesapeake waterman, has also created a large body of work depicting the fast-paced action of log canoe racing. He has raced on log canoes and writes in an e-mail that he finds them “visually stunning.”

“I have photographed and painted five America’s Cups, a Whitbread ‘Round the World Race,’ and a Global Challenge ‘Round the World Race,’” he writes. “I am always drawn back to the log canoes.”

Judge North says the log canoes have been on the Bay since “time immemorial.”  They were first developed by the Native Americans as a way to ply the endless waterways of their homeland. They were painstakingly carved out of large logs using slow-burning fires to ease the process. The early European explorers of the Bay drew pictures of the canoes being made and used. They were the first workboats of the Chesapeake.

M. V. Brewington, in his classic book “Chesapeake Bay Log Canoes and Bugeyes” published in 1963, writes that the Europeans almost immediately began to modify the dugout to suit their needs.

Sometimes multiple canoes were lashed together to make wider boats and eventually more logs were carved and pegged together to shape a single hull. In a land without sawmills, anyone with an axe and shaping tools could build a boat from the abundant stands of pine. Once that technology was understood, boat builders began making vessels in a variety of sizes. The bugeyes evolved into commercial vessels for dredging oysters or carrying produce to market. By the 1800s, there were thousands of log-built boats on the Bay.

“In 1880, the United States Census investigators found 6,300 canoes in use on the Chesapeake, with builders turning out 175 crafts annually,” Brewington writes.

CBMM’s bugeye Edna Lockwood, now undergoing reconstruction at the museum, was built in 1889 out of nine logs and is the last of her breed.

But the smaller, three- and five- log canoes were more popular with the watermen who used them as their primary fishing, crabbing and oystering boats. With the centerboard up, they could be poled into the shallows and with their sails up, they could be raced back home with the day’s catch. The watermen often raced to the packing houses in the hopes of getting a better price if they were the first boat in.

There is an old sailing adage:

“If two boats are sailing the same course, there is a race going on whether the other captain knows it or not.”

Lesher says that the earliest recorded log canoe race was reported in an 1859 newspaper account. Within two decades, canoes were being built solely for racing.

Covington built several race canoes in his “Island B” series, North says. “There was the Island Bird, Island Bride, Island Belle, Island Beauty and Island Blossom.”

North owns and skippers the Island Bird built by Covington in 1882.

“In 1949, my father acquired Island Bird,” he says. “These boats that my great-grandfather built were not intended to be kept in the family. He built them for sale. They were all racing boats. They were not tonging boats, not workboats. The difference is that the racing boats were a little narrower, more fine-lined and round bottomed.”

As sporting boats, they didn’t need to carry tongs or crab pots. And they didn’t have to be stable work platforms. So the rigs got taller as the racers looked for every edge. The sails got bigger than a fisherman or two could handle, so more crew were added. As the masts kept climbing, the skippers needed to find ways to counter the wind pressure. Along came the springboards and the daring souls whose job it is to climb out on the end and act as moveable ballast.

JayDee and Mystery duke it out

JayDee, the largest of the log canoes was built on Tilghman Island in 1931 by North’s great uncle, John B. Harrison. It is owned and sailed by North’s son, Dan. The boat puts up so much sail that it carries four springboards that are each manned by three crew members.

For Tad duPont, skipper of the Island Lark, it is the crew, which he calls “the Lark Family,” that makes canoe racing special. DuPont says he has been racing sailboats all of his life, starting in dinghies and moving on to one-design and cruising fleets.

“In log canoes, it is a total team effort,” he says. “Some of us on Lark’s crew have been together for more than 30 years. Lark’s crew is an example of how people from all walks of life have gotten together and this is their common bond.”

DuPont says that on recent races Lark’s crew has been comprised of every age group from teens to sailors pushing 70. “We have had six decades on board.”

He also says that the competition between the crews is stronger than other racing circuits in which he has competed. “When you get a boat that is your ‘enemy,’ it becomes very apparent it is not just you. It is your 10 guys versus their 10 guys.”

As an example of how long grudges can last, he points out that Island Lark was built on Kent Island in 1901 with the expressed purpose of beating Island Blossom, a canoe built in 1892 by Covington. It is now owned by the North Estate and captained by Corbin Penwell.

“I find it ironic that a hundred years later, those two boats are still locked up,” duPont says. The Blossom and the Lark are frequent one-two finishers.

In addition to the history, speed and competitiveness of the fleet, the log canoes add the always-present danger of capsizing. The boats are so tender and top heavy, they have been known to tip over standing still at the dock. A stiff breeze can turn a log canoe race into a scary, wet ride.

“We know every time we leave the dock that there is a reasonably good chance that we are going to go swimming,” says North.

Castelli writes, “For all of their elegance, they are physically demanding, unforgiving and sometimes brutal boats to sail. I like that dichotomy. It is a real challenge to capture visually. The mere slips of hulls whispering by in moderate breezes with crew members reflecting the intensity of the moment in their posture has always fascinated me.”

Judge North sums up his take on the log canoes this way:

“When you combine their history and their visual excitement with the fact that to keep them sailing requires the agility of the crew sliding in and out on the springboards, you have something that is much more appealing than the average fleet of modern, fiberglass sailboats.”

This story was originally published in The Shore Life magazine.

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