Bugeye

The bugeye is a type of sailboat developed in the Chesapeake Bay for oyster dredging. The predecessor of the skipjack, it was superseded by the latter as oyster harvests dropped.

Between 1820 and 1865, the state of Maryland banned the practice of dredging for oysters. In the latter year, the law was relaxed; the use of steam power remained banned, however, and remained entirely prohibited until 1965, in which year powered dredging was allowed two days of the week. As long as dredging for oysters in the Chesapeake was prohibited, oystermen working from log canoes tonged for oysters. In 1854 the Maryland legislature permitted the use of dredges in the waters of Somerset County, Maryland, expanding the use of dredges to the rest of the Bay following the Civil War. Opening the Chesapeake to oyster dredging after the Civil War created a need for larger, more powerful boats to haul dredges across the oyster beds.

The first vessels used were the existing sloops, pungys and schooners on the Bay, but none of these types was well suited to the purpose; pungys and schooners were too deep in their draft to work the shallower waters of the Bay, the schooners and sloops had bulwarks too high to facilitate handling the dredges, the relatively complex rigs of all three types required uneconomically large crews of skilled sailors, and the vessels themselves were relatively expensive to build and maintain.

The log canoes had none of these disadvantages, but were too small to successfully haul dredges. The result was the development during the 1870s and 1880s of the brogan, an enlarged log canoe. In brogans, the open hull of the log canoe was decked, with hatches covering holds created by subdividing the hull with bulkheads. Brogans typically used the same sail plan as the log canoes of the Tilghman Island region, a leg-of-mutton (i.e., triangular) foresail, mainsail and jib, with the foremast taller than the main. Both masts raked rather sharply aft, with the mainmast raked significantly more sharply than the foremast.¹

Brogans were still too small to effectively haul dredges, and continued to be enlarged and improved. By the early 1880s, or possibly even earlier, the first bugeyes were being built.² Over the next twenty years, the bugeye became the dominant type of vessel employed in oystering, but by 1893 construction of new bugeyes began to decline with the introduction of the skipjack, which was less expensive to build, operate and maintain yet was very well suited to dredging for oysters. No working bugeyes appear to have been built after 1918, but bugeyes continued to be employed in oystering and freighting until the middle of the Twentieth Century, albeit in ever-decreasing numbers.³

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