Background

Skipjack Ethel Lewis was built in 1906 in Chesconessex, Virginia. According to Pete Lesher, curator of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, she was built by William H. "Tom" Young, a renowned skipjack builder of the early 1900s. Of the surviving skipjacks, he also built Claud W. Somers and Joy Parks.

She was named by her first owner, Capt. Solomon Shores, for his daughter Ethel and son Lewis. But she also had two other names during her long life—March Gale II and Nine Belles—before reverting to Ethel Lewis. When those name changes occurred is unclear, as is much of her early life, with just a few glimpses popping up in the records.

There is an intriguing sighting in a roster for 1929 workboat races, in which a 40-foot skipjack named March Gale is listed with Capt. George Bozman out of Champ, Maryland. While this is unlikely to be her, given that ten years later she was noted still as Ethel Lewis, she did end up with her name eventually changed to March Gale II, so it may point to a possible ownership relation.

She definitely was Ethel Lewis on 3 February 1939. She was dredging under Capt. Purnell Todd in the Choptank River that day when the great squall came up that capsized two skipjacks, killing nine crew members. Ethel Lewis left the rest of the fleet before the squall reached them and had just about reached Long Wharf in Cambridge when it hit. The boat arrived safely unlike some of the others that day.

Ethel Lewis is listed in the roster of boats for the Solomons races in 1962 with owner G. D. Faulkner and homeport Tilghman, and in the Deal Island 1963 race roster with Capt. Dave Faulkner, again out of Tilghman.

However, sometime after that, probably in the late 1960s, she gave up her dredging life and was converted to a yacht, with a large cabin added amidships. It was likely at this time that she left the Chesapeake, was taken to Great South Bay in Long Island, New York, and had her name changed. How she got there and who took her there are unknown, but in 1977, she was found falling apart in a boatyard in Oakdale, Long Island, by Richard Schaefer, who said she was then named March Gale II.

Schaefer fell in love with her. He needed a big boat for his big family, and she filled the bill. Schaefer had ten children, nine of whom were female, so March Gale II became Nine Belles. He restored the skipjack and was quoted in a 1999 New York Times article, saying, "We sailed the boat up and down the Great South Bay and enjoyed it for 21 years."

By 1996, however, she was showing her years again, and Schaefer was looking to sell her. Marine surveyor Fred Hechlinger checked her over that year at her berth in East Islip, Long Island, and produced a dismal report for a prospective buyer from Columbia, Maryland, who was considering bringing her back to the Chesapeake Bay. She was extremely hogged, with rainwater running off her deck by the wheel box. She had little longitudinal strength due to the large center cabin cutting through her deck beams and short sections of side planking replacing rotten planks over the years. The sides were rotten, the stem was rotten near the waterline, the rudder was rotten, the deck was rotten. Previous repairs of the mast and boom were "unacceptable." He said the hull could no longer serve as a foundation for rebuilding the boat, and the only parts still usable were the standing rigging, steering gear, engine, anchor, some blocks and the pumps. He concluded, "Under no circumstances should it be considered that this vessel could be sailed, powered or towed from Great South Bay to Chesapeake Bay on her own bottom." He later said, "Once you cut the deck beams and put a full-length house on her, it kills them."

Schaefer was going to scrap her when he heard about a group called Maritime Workshop working out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The organization took low-income high school youths and trained them in woodworking and marine repair. When Schaefer offered them the boat in 1998, they said, "If she'll float, we'll take her." She did—barely. With the help of her bilge pumps, she made it from Islip to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The Maritime Workshop's ambitious plan was to remove the large added cabin, replace sections of the rotting hull, give her some new rigging and coats of paint and varnish to ultimately use her for educational sailing tours and as a workshop exhibit. They initiated a campaign to raise $100,000 in donations for the project and have the boat—now back to her original name of Ethel Lewis—ready for a Fourth of July 2000 unveiling.

It wasn't to be the last time that plans for her restoration fell apart. The project stalled, funding fell through, especially after 9/11, and Ethel Lewis was once again left to rot. And once again, someone tried to save her.

She was sitting on wooden beams behind an old boathouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when the Yard's COO Elliot Matz found her in 2003, about to be scrapped. He did some research and reached out to Frank Young in Eastville, Virginia, with the Eastern Virginia Historical Society, who then helped to create the Ad Hoc Committee to Save the Ethel Lewis.

They sent an engineer to Long Island to inspect her. He generously found her to be perhaps 60-70 percent sound at that point, so the group made arrangements to bring her back to the Chesapeake. A cradle was built to hold her, and on 24 November 2004, she was loaded onto a barge towed by a tug deadheading south. She made her way to Eastville, Virginia, and was finally offloaded and trucked on her cradle to a park in Onancock, not far from where she was built almost a hundred years before.

There, she generated another round of ambitious plans. The group expected it to take two to three years and $200,000 to $300,000 to restore the skipjack, ultimately to be put on display, fully rigged, as the centerpiece of a park.

But there was more work to be done on her than anticipated. Her keel was cracked and stern nearly broken off, her stem rotten and bottom coming off. Paul Ewell, who surveyed the boat, said, "It's almost sawdust." They took the lines off her, but yet again, support fell through and many in the group lost interest and decided the project was beyond their means and skills. In a final indignity, just before we found her in 2009 and took photos, vandals tried to set fire to her.

Finally, Ethel Lewis was deemed unsalvageable. The town had plans for the lot she was on, so the group released the boat to the town for disposal. Ethel Lewis was destroyed by controlled burn on 18 January 2010.