Bugeye: A Chesapeake Legacy
Sid Dixon plans to sail it out of historic St. Michaels piled high with watermelons. He'll point the bow north into the calm shallows of the Miles River, pray for a stiff breeze, and hope it will push him up the Chesapeake and into Fells Point.

Dixon, a colorful Eastern Shore entrepreneur and self-proclaimed Renaissance man, is eager to set sail for the port of Baltimore in the latest hand-crafted boat to emerge from his well-worn work shed.

It's a Bugeye, a working replica of the Chesapeake Bay's water-borne workhorse that plied this region’s waters for more than a century. As the precursor to the Skipjack, the Bugeye did it all – oyster dredging, fishing, and long- and short-haul transport of just about any kind of cargo – even watermelons grown on the Eastern Shore.

Maryland Public Television started following the story of Dixon and his Bugeye in 2004, visiting his St. Michael's boatworks shed regularly to capture the tradition of hand-built boatmaking first-hand. The finished product is Bugeye: A Chesapeake Legacy, a fun-loving look at Dixon's labor of love from keel-laying to launch to time under sail on the open Chesapeake Bay.