“Skipjack Sunday” … the Story                    by Bill Peterson

     This story began thirty-five years ago.  An idea burning bright to film the Deal Island Skipjack race, and a brand new Arriflex film camera (itching for exciting subjects to film), took a younger me to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

     Or … maybe the exhibit’s story begins as a battered film can, dusted in light surface rust, still sealed with a band of yellowed brittle tape, pops back in front of me most of a career later.  I could still make out the faded magic marker title, “Skipjacks, Deal Island Ekta original.” 

Why did that old can get a smile and a remark, “here was a good idea that never got made?”  I wonder. It was in the wrong pile and it certainly wasn’t germane to the vault search that was underway.   

      Now  if you  know Julie, (the “nose” as she’s fondly known) then you know she has a strong need to know … everything.  So a half-hour of questions ensued, about Skipjacks, the film, her recollections of my talking about Skipjacks over the years … and that, I thought, was that.  

     I should have recognized that Julie look.  Several days later, a faded photo paper box in hand and a look-what-I’ve-got grin, here she was with several rolls of negatives.  “That’s right,” I suddenly remembered, “I shot stills too.”  The poorly marked, half crushed little red box was something she  just happened to recall, from poking around in my not quite discarded collection of things I’m holding on to. 

      By chance, the week before any of this occurred, a new scanner arrived that could scan two and a quarter negatives, so it just so happened that we had a way to look at the images.  While practically none of this could be proven truly serendipitous, consider this chain of events, all within a couple of weeks of the film can's appearance.  

     My best pal-sailor-artist-writer-machinist extraordinaire, upon my mention of the discoveries, told me his daughter rented an apartment from some folks much interested in Skipjacks.  She’d become friends with her landlady whose husband, Angus, turned out to be the Director of the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum, and the Museum had just restored a Skipjack.  My pal Doug mentions our find to his daughter Tina, who mentions it to her landlady friend, who mentions it to her husband who was… well, interested!   After all, Skipjacks are the last working boats in North America under sail.

     This sort of thing happens I know.  Still the near perfect timing of all these chance happenings remains, plus a couple of more things. Angus just happened to be planning a summer exhibit on Skipjacks at the Museum and proposed displaying and later touring the still photographs.  The two and a quarter negatives and transparencies were digitally restorable and I now had the ability to do the digital restoration, which wouldn’t have been the case even a few months before. 

                                   MORE SKIPJACKS ! 
    The first pages posted about the Skipjack find including a
             gallery of frame captures from the film original.