2000 Square Feet of Sail Rigged to the Dee of St. Mary's

When the Dee of St. Mary’s set out for the 1981 oyster season, her first working season, she carried 2,800 square feet of sail, roughly 2,000 square feet in her mainsail and the remaining in her jib.

 The vast surface of sail is for strength, not speed. A good sailing day’s work had the Dee dragging steel cages attached with steel elevator cable  running off both sides of the boat. The dredges’  maws were lined with chisels for teeth, each dredge able to hold a hefty sailor. 

"If you didn't have enough wind you threw out one to the windward," Jackie Russell said of the decade he oystered from the Dee.

Below Cedar Point, at Little Cove Point off the Chesapeake Ranch Estates, trying to get home to St. George Island, a “flaw” caught the Dee full sail and she heeled over. “Water was five or six feet up the deck,” Jackie  recalls.  “When she spilled her wind she popped right back up. Needless to say I had already spilled my wind back at the wheel.”

Flaws, erratic and unexpected gusts of wind, are prevalent along the Calvert County Chesapeake Bay shore cliffs, from Solomons Island northward.

“It was a sail day,” Jackie said of the day the Dee ultimately spilled her wind. “We were drujin’ down the shore. We had a conveyor chain on a clam rig off the bow. Hung it down right at the water line. We had it to break ice. It helped save the wood. In the morning, going out of the harbor, you’d go to the crick. The goddamn crick was froze up half the time, because we had winters at one time. No one would break you out. You had to do it yourself.”

In 1988, the U.S. Coast Guard certified the Dee as seaworthy to carry passengers with a double-reef proviso.  Reefing is the processes of lowering the sail to reduce its surface.

Reef points are lines of grommets that run horizontal from the boom on triangular sails. They are threaded through with short, secure lines. The Dee has four rows of reef points. The line threaded through each falls 18 inches from both sides of the grommet. To double reef her, the second row of reef points from the bottom are tied to the lacing holding the sail to the boom. The sail is considered double-reefed.

The sail is made of a stiff, laminate synthetic which in a 2,000 square foot chunk is heavy. Really heavy. Members of the Seafarer’s International Union attending classes at the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship at the Paul Hall Center in Piney Point, Maryland helped put the sail back on in early July 2012.