Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum prepares to christen historic buyboat

(ST. MICHAELS, Md) – Crews are hard at work both above and below deck of the Winnie Estelle as the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum prepares to re-christen the ship.

Where we also learn just how much a buyboat like this has been through since the early 20th century.

“It worked on the Bay for decades into the into the 1970s. And then, like a lot of old Chesapeake work boats, it got sold down to the to the Caribbean, actually to the Gulf of Mexico, went all the way to Belize and Honduras…” says the museum’s Chief Historian, Pete Lesher.

Those international trips normally being one way…

Lesher tells WMDT, “Usually when boats went south like that into those warm tropical waters, the rod accelerated and that was the end of them. We never heard from them again.”

The Winnie Estelle was brought to the museum’s shipyard a few years ago to do this restoration.

“We’ve rebuilt the bulwarks. So when you’re staying on the deck of a vessel, sort of what forms almost the wall going up above the deck on the outboard sides of the boat, that is called the bulwarks. And that has been restored,” says CBMM Shipyard Manager, Sam Hilgartner.

All of those years of hard work are paying off as the Winnie Estelle: A boat once nearly condemned to rot at the bottom of the sea has its next chapter written on familiar waters.

Pete tells us, “This new mission is going to be eco tourism, getting a better understanding of the changing environment of the Chesapeake, and specifically the way that manifests itself right here in the Miles River. And that mission will be carried out not only with the public, but with public school students here.”

The christening will take place during CBMM’s Oysterfest, Saturday, November 7th.