24 NATIONAL FISHERMAN • JUNE 2015 For updated news, visit www.nationalfisherman.com

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Story and photos by Jay Fleming

Under sail on the Maggie S. Myers, Delaware Bay’s oldest working schooner

Thumper’s legend

The 122-year-old 59-footer has come a long way since her first season with

Thumper, during which he ran 13 pumps and towed a Zodiac just in case.

new workboats.” Thumper’s “pas-

sion for saving money” has turned into a passion for oper-

Once I grabbed Maggie’s tail, she took me for a ride and cleared my bank account,” says waterman

Frank Eicherly IV, 56, of his relation-ship with the Maggie S. Myers, the old-est working schooner on Delaware Bay.

In 1999 Eicherly, known on the bay as Thumper, purchased the 59-foot Maggie S. Myers from Willis Hand of Port Mahon, Del., for only $5,000. The boat’s 122-year-old wooden hull was rotting away and was just barely seaworthy enough to work on the notoriously rough Delaware Bay. The first year Thumper worked the boat, he and his crew put in more than 100 days on the water. “We had 13 pumps on board running full

“

Frank “Thumper” Eicherly IV runs his wooden schooner year-round on a suite of Delaware Bay fisheries.

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Since the 1950s, three gen-erations of Flannigans have

learned the shipwrights’ trade at a boatyard on the banks of the Cohansey River in Fairton, N.J. Flannigan’s is one of the few remaining yards on Delaware Bay that specializes in wooden boats. Donald Flannigan and his two sons, Bryan and Sam, are masters of their craft. Workboats make up nearly 80 percent of their busi-ness, and many praise them for pricing their work fairly.

Delaware Bay was once known as the Oyster Capital of the World. Hundreds of schooners employed nearly 4,500 people. The boom supported dozens of shipyards, sail makers, blacksmiths and shucking houses. In the late 1950s the bay’s oysters grew susceptible to the disease MSX, wiping out nearly 95 percent of the bay’s product. Fortunately for the remaining watermen, Flanni-gan’s has been able to survive.

“Shipwrights are getting older. They are a dying breed,” explains Thumper, formally known as Frank Eicherly IV, skipper-owner of the Maggie S. Myers out of Bowers Beach, Del. Thumper says he’s grateful to have skilled help so close to home.

The Maggie has been hauled up on the railway for as long as three months. For his first visit in 1999, Thumper had saved to do some major work. “Donald and his boys took off all of the siding on the port side, making a hole large enough to drive a VW Beetle through,” he recalls.

Thumper describes these long visits to Flannigan’s as open heart surgery for the schooner. Dur-ing his last visit to the railway in 2014, just before the crab dredging season, Thumper added two 18-foot I-beams to stiffen the centerboard trunk, replaced ribs near the engine, and added a mizzen mast over the cabin. The bill for this visit totaled nearly $33,000 for the 38-day haulout.

“We give it our all and put a lot into this project.” — J.F.

Flannigan’s fleet

boatyard where the Mag-gie S. Myers spends a lot of her down time. Not-withstanding the eco-nomic hardships that come with keeping a century-old work-boat on the water year round, Thump-er keeps an optimis-tic attitude about his unique

Beach, Bowers Beach, Little Creek and Port Mahon. This hodgepodge fleet comprises deadrise box sterns, New England-style lobster boats, repurposed Chesapeake buy boats and Delaware Bay schooners. Maggie S. Myers is the only boat rigged to sail. It’s no won-der other watermen jokingly refer to Thumper as the last pirate. The dredg-ing fleet slowly breaks up, and we move to a deep slough close to the 14-foot bank lighthouse. The area had not been dredged this season, and crabs were fresh and abundant. After a couple

dozen licks off the bottom, we finish up the 12-hour day with 33 bushels of mature sook females, three bushels

of males and about 200 pounds of whelk bycatch, an above average

haul for the 2014-15 season. On our 15-mile motorsail back to

the dock, a Northwest wind blowing right down the bay

picks up and now it really feels like we are sailing.

Thumper’s enthusi-asm for an already

good day reaches a n o t h e r

level as

Donald Flannigan is the senior shipwright with his two sons at the Flannigan Brothers yard on

Delaware Bay in Fairton, N.J.

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❯ COVER STORY

right at the dock in downtown Bowers Beach to unload the haul.

After the crab dredging season clos-es, work does not stop for Thumper. He is hoping to get lucky in the horse-

shoe crab dredge lottery, as horseshoe crabbing can be lucrative for the hand-ful of watermen who are lucky enough to get access to it. Oyster toadfish will become a big part of Thumper’s focus in the spring and the fall. He targets these ugly bottom dwellers with unbaited pots that are almost identical to a crab pot. These fish are kept alive and supply a small niche market with a handful of Asian buyers. In addition to the oyster dredging season quickly approaching, Thumper is working hard to acquire as many licenses as possible.

With a 122-year-old schooner and the constant transition into the bay’s different fisheries, there is never a dull moment in Thumper’s world. From

crabs to whelk to oyster toadfish, Thumper and the Maggie S. My-ers have seen it all. Through bad

weather, countless boat repairs and ever-changing fisheries regulations, Thumper and Maggie have been able to navigate rough waters and remain afloat in Delaware Bay.

Jay Fleming is a freelance writer and photog-rapher based in Annapolis, Md.

Eastern oyster — Delaware’s wild oyster season is open April-May and September-December. The most common method of harvest is power dredging. Each oyster license can harvest an allocated number of bushels per year. In 2014 170 oyster licenses harvested 12,245 bushels, about 70 bushels per license. The licenses are transferrable and stackable. The 2015 quota is the same as 2014’s. Delaware Bay oysters go to shucking houses, where the meats are put into pint, quart and gallon containers; and to restaurants and retailers, where they are sold by the box/bag (1 dozen, 250 count). The 2014 boat price averaged $40 per bushel.

Blue crab — Unlike Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay is open to crabbing nearly year-round. Dredging runs December-March. Boats pull a long, toothed dredge across sandy and muddy bottoms where crabs hibernate. These crabs almost exclusively go to the basket market in New Jersey and New York. During the 2014-15 season, a typical catch ranged from 25 to 50 bushels at $60 to $66 a bushel for females and $75 a bushel for No. 1 male crabs (6 inches or larger). There is no bushel limit. Sponge crabs

(egg-bearing females) and immature females must be released. The changeover to crab potting carries many watermen through Decem-ber. Pot-caught crabs also supply the basket market, and a lot of their product is sold to picking houses in the Chesapeake region.

Whelk — Channeled and knobbed whelk, locally known as conch or snails, are targeted by pots and dredges. Watermen work with

pots near the mouth of the bay in fall and spring. Conch migrate off-shore and into deeper, cooler water. Horseshoe crabs are the primary bait. Whelk are subject to a minimum size but no daily limit. The meat is shipped to Asian markets.

Horseshoe crab — Delaware Bay has one of the world’s largest populations of horseshoe crabs. Until the 1950s, millions of horseshoe crabs were harvested from the bay for livestock feed and the fertilizer industry. The expansion of the American eel and whelk fisheries in the 1990s, increased the demand for bait crabs. Simultane-ously, demand for horseshoe crab blood for biomedical purposes rose, and the harvest of crabs climbed into the millions. The increases forced regulators to place restric-tions on the harvest. The current quota for Delaware’s harvest is 154,527 male crabs and no females. Only a handful of watermen win the lottery to participate. They target crabs in dredges and by plucking them from the beach. The price in 2014 was $2.50 apiece.

Rockfish/striped bass — Delaware has adopted indi-vidual transferrable quotas for stripers. Individual quotas add up to the state’s total quota — a number determined by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The primary methods of harvest in Delaware are gillnet and hook and line. New Jersey does not allow commercial harvest of stripers.

Other finfish — Delaware Bay watermen target Ameri-can eel, Atlantic menhaden, black sea bass, bluefish, At-lantic croaker, oyster toadfish, black drum, red drum, sum-mer flounder, Spanish mackerel, shad, spiny dogfish, spot, tautog, weakfish and winter flounder with gillnets, hook and line, and pots. Each is subject to a minimum size, a season and a daily maximum.

Other shellfish — Lobster is a small fishery in Delaware Bay, with most being caught as bycatch in conch or crab pots. Lobsters are targeted by watermen fishing pots in the Atlantic Ocean out of Cape May, N.J., and out of Lewes, Del. The hard clam fishery in the Delaware Bay is open to harvest with tongs and dredges.

Delaware Bay fisheries — THE FACTS

Thumper hauls out the Maggie S. Myers at Flannigan Brothers every year.