The Urbanna Oyster Festival Foundation (UOFF) has named Ray V. Rodgers III of Urbanna captain of the 2023 Urbanna Oyster Festival set for Friday and Saturday, Nov. 3 and 4.
UOFF first began naming captains of the festival in 1988 as a way of honoring people who are either a part of the area’s oyster heritage or who have played a role in enhancing and preserving that heritage and culture.
Rodgers is an artist, model maker and boatbuilder who about 20 years ago started pulling lines (measuring each aspect of the hull and decks) off Chesapeake buyboats to provide authentic scale drawings to make his model boats. With to-scale line drawings this allows other model makers to build more authentic boats too and it gives maritime historians and those interested in the boats a true image of what they are and how they were built.
Chesapeake Bay buyboats are large wooden deadrise (V-hull) vessels that were used to haul freight and to buy crabs, fish and oysters from area watermen out on the water. Thus the name buyboat originated.
“When I started building models of buyboats the first one I built was the boat the P.E. Pruitt,” said Rodgers. “Before I started I went out and looked for plans and I soon came to realize there were no professional drawings of buyboats. The boats were built from rack-of-eye with no plans and each builder built a little different.”
Rodgers has always been one about being precise. After building a model of the P.E. Pruitt without plans he was not happy with the lack of authentic detail in the model, so he decided he would go out and measure boats and document everything on them from door knobs to windowsills.
When he started it was to build a better model but as he got further involved he realized that the drawings were as significant as the models in that they were authentically preserving an aspect of the Chesapeake Bay’s maritime history that had not been done before.
Rodgers has gifted his drawings and rights to those drawings to sell to model makers and others to the Deltaville Maritime Museum. His drawings are framed and hanging on the walls at the museum and are an artwork unique to nowhere else.
Rodgers has taken the lines off a dozen boats. Some were in a state of decay while others were up on the hard for repair at a railway. “I can get some of the measurements on the boats when in the water but to get a finished drawing the boat needs to be out of the water,” he said.
He went to Coles Point to take the lines off the buyboat L.R. Smith built in 1925 by Lennie and Alton Smith of Mathews County. The boat was in a state of disrepair with one side caved in. “If I had waited too much longer, I would have missed that opportunity,” he said.
A short history of the boat is also part of Rodger’s drawing. “The L.R. Smith started life as an open deck fish pound boat,” he has written on the drawing. “Later she was decked over and fitted for crab dredging as shown above. The deck house was added in the 1950s.”
His travels have taken him from one end of the bay to the other. He took the measurements off the 1948 Mildred Belle in Baltimore Harbor when the boat was up on the rails and traveled to Georgetown on the Sassafras River to take lines off the 1926 Muriel Eileen and the 1925 Nellie Crockett.
Rodgers has also measured the 1949 Rebecca Ann built by Deltaville boatbuilders Moody, Alvin and Raymond Walden when she was on the grounds of the Deltaville Maritime Museum and the 1946 Mobjack built by Deltaville builder Linwood Price when the boat was at Smith Marine Railway in Dare.
Rodgers has lived in Urbanna since his family moved to town in 1965 when his father, who worked for IBM, was transferred into this area. After graduating from Middlesex High School, he attended Virginia Tech, and he decided he wanted to live, work and raise his family in Middlesex.
Over the years he has built several small boats and a 25-foot fantail launch he named after his daughter Rachel. He built and learned to fly an airplane and built the house he and his wife Kathy have lived in for 35 years.
“We picked Ray as our 2023 captain, not only because of what he has done to preserve the boats with his drawings but because of how much he has brought to our community,” said Pam Simon of the UOFF.
Rodgers will ride in the festival parades on Friday and Saturday and will be honored throughout the weekend at the festival.
