THE OYSTER BOAT—MOBJACK

One of the Chesapeake Bay's maritime treasures is the 80-foot buyboat, Mobjack.

The Mobjack was built in 1946 by boatbuilders, Linwood and Milford Price on Broad Creek in Deltaville, Virginia for the J.H. Miles Company in Norfolk, Virginia.

Miles was one of the largest oyster packing companies on Virginia’s lower bay. The firm leased nearly 8,000 acres of private oyster rock from the State of Virginia and its Norfolk shucking house had over 200 shuckers working during the oyster season. The firm grew, harvested, bought and processed thousands of bushels of oysters annually.

The Mobjack was built at the end of World War II when the country was gearing for an economic revival. Miles and other seafood dealers were optimistic the oyster business would take off again and companies like Miles would reap the economic benefits of the times. The Miles family had been in the seafood business since before the turn of the century. They had seen the ups and downs in the bay’s oyster fishery. Business was always slow during wartimes. With the end of the war, the company gambled that things would be good again and part of the gamble was the construction of the Mobjack.

Company officials knew exactly what they needed in a boat and they also knew that boat builder Lin Price was the most experienced of any builder in the bay region for building large, low sided, deadrise, cross-planked deck boats – the style Miles needed to dredge and buy market oysters and to plant seed oysters.

Lin and Milford Price had built the largest deck boat ever constructed on the bay in 1927 when the firm completed the over 100-foot Marydel for W. E. Villiant Company of Delaware. The yard was well equipped to build an 80-foot deck boat.

The firms’ gamble actually paid off as many veterans arrived home fro the war with a new optimism on life and a new attitude about our times and our country. More importantly, they bought and ate oysters and the business boomed.

By then Miles and others understood completely what they needed and wanted in a boat and builders like Price knew how to build those needs into a boat. The Mobjack and those deck boats built right after World War II were the Cadillac ’s of all other deck boats.

The strong post World War II oyster market and the success of the Mobjack lead the Miles family to just two year later have Price build the Ocean View another 80-foot long deck boat. There were literally hundreds of these boats on the bay but only about a dozen or less were built from start to be over 80-fee in length. For a while, there was the appearance that the fisher and the boats were here to stay. However, it was short lived.

Hurricane Hazel, in 1954, devastated the business as the storm literally sucked the water out of the York and James rivers and winds picked up thousands of bushels of exposed oysters and heaped them in piles to suffocate. It took several years for the fishery to get back on its feet from Hazel and then, in 1959, a mysterious oyster disease surfaced in the Delaware Bay region and quickly spread to Maryland and Virginia waters.

For years, oyster growers had fought the oyster disease dermo; the devastation of hurricanes on oyster beds; and their own over harvesting of grounds’ but none of these alone or together could kill the prolific oyster of the bay. MSX, as the new disease was called, was a vicious and deadly as any cancer. It allows the oyster to mature to about a year and a half, just months before harvest and when the grower had his entire investment in the oyster, then it killed it. MSX and dermo, together took the life out of the Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery and the future of the buyboat.

Suddenly, boats like the Mobjack were a liability instead of a tool to support an industry. These wonderful boats that evolved from the era of sail and wind, no longer had a home in the bay ’s oyster fishery.

Although it was not the final nail in the coffin for the boats, it was one of several nails that would eventually end the commercial use of the Mobjack and boats like her.

Today, the boats have taken on a new image, and they still turn heads. Go to any event around the bay and watch those multi-million dollar yachts sail pass, but none will turn a head any quicker than when an old wooden buyboat cruises by. There were once over 1,000 of these boats moored in coves, guts and rivers throughout the bay region. Now the 20 or so left throughout the bay region are maritime pearls left over from a bygone era.

The Mobjack is one of those pearls.