One Chesapeake Bay skipjack outlasted an entire fleet of wooden sailing dredgers — the last of its kind still working the water long after the rest had vanished.

By the mid-1900s, the Chesapeake's oyster fleet numbered in the hundreds — sail-powered skipjacks dredging the bay under strict conservation laws that banned motorized harvesting. Storms, economic collapse, and the slow decline of the oyster beds took the fleet apart boat by boat, until only a handful remained.

This documentary follows the story of the last working skipjacks: the captains who refused to retire their boats, the shipwrights who kept aging hulls afloat, and the traditions of sail-dredging that survived against every economic pressure to modernize or quit.

Through rare archival photographs and firsthand accounts, we trace how one vessel and its crew held on as the rest of an entire industry disappeared around them — and what that survival cost.

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