For nearly 20 years, oyster buyboat captain David Wright has searched the shore for beachcombed treasures beside his old restaurant. The Northern Virginia property is now vacant and abandoned thanks to developers. In the beginning, Wright didn’t know the difference between low tide and high tide, and would just pocket random objects he found interesting. But over time, his knowledge and collection grew as he mined the shoreline, which was once a Victorian dump site where tons of garbage was hauled by train from Washington, D.C.
I met Wright years ago, when he came to the Eastern Shore Sea Glass Festival where I was lecturing. We started beachcombing together and became friends. Our birthdays are two days apart, though I’m quick to remind him he was born the same year as my mother: 1944. We are jokingly competitive about beach finds, and if I find something good, he says I should thank him for leaving it for me. Sometimes he says, mock-sternly, “You’ve got five more minutes on this beach.”
At low tide almost every day, he combs the shoreline of the Potomac River. In nearly two decades, he has amassed a collection of thousands of beach-found handmade German marbles, porcelain figurines, beautifully detailed bottle stoppers, blob-top soda bottles and many other treasures from the Victorian era and beyond.
He has so many beach finds, displayed in bubble gum machines, old retail shop and bar displays, and organized neatly into every type of jar imaginable, that his wife Brenda lives in a separate house. When they married over a decade ago, they felt it was just too much trouble to move all the sea glass. Today, his house serves as a working nautical history museum of sorts.
Among his houseful of artifacts, Wright doesn’t have a favorite, but enjoys the many colors of the beach, in addition to the peace and quiet and exercise that his daily walks offer.
Besides beachcombing, Wright’s main passion in recent years has been restoring his beautiful 1925 oyster buyboat, Prop Wash, which celebrates her 100th birthday this year.
PropWash is one of the few remaining oyster buyboats, sometimes called deckboats, still underway on the Chesapeake Bay. It’s estimated that roughly three dozen oyster buyboats remain afloat.
Buyboats were prominent in the first half of the 20th century, when most oysters from the Chesapeake Bay were harvested by tongers in small, flat-bottomed rowboats using long tongs to pull oysters from the bottom, or dredged by sail-powered skipjacks. There were no bridges spanning the Chesapeake, so it was faster to haul seafood by water than land. Watermen offloaded onto the large-decked buyboats. Many buyboat captains also used their vessels to transport other freight including produce, grain, livestock, and lumber to market during the oyster off-season from May to August.
The buyboats also served a little-known military purpose. During World War II, German U-boats were wreaking havoc in Virginia shipping, so the U.S. government commissioned a number of Chesapeake Bay buyboats for wartime service as patrol vessels to hunt for U-boats just offshore. These patrol boats were lightly armed with machine guns and manned by their former owners and crew, brought into the service to operate them for the government. One of the boats blew up while docked at Cape Charles, killing some of its crew. After the war, the surviving buyboats were returned to their former owners.
As a Navy veteran himself, Wright always had a love for boats and for years wanted a patrol torpedo (PT) boat—a small, fast, lightly armored motor torpedo boat used by the Navy in World War II. He wasn’t able to find one, but at an auction, he stumbled on a model of an oyster buyboat. Someone at the auction mentioned there was a full-sized buyboat for sale nearby. Dave and Brenda went to take a look, fell in love with the history and style of the boat, and ended up settling on a restored vessel for sale they flew to see in Florida. The captain met them halfway in North Carolina to complete the sale in 2003.
Despite her roundabout path, Prop Wash is now back on the Chesapeake Bay under Wright’s loving care. He is active in the Chesapeake Bay Buyboat Association, a group of historic vessel owners in multiple fleets that strives to keep their history alive through education and by promoting and showing the remaining oyster buyboats to the public.
Wright’s waterfront pastimes have certainly been shaped by his military service. He dropped out of school at 18 to escape a troubled childhood and joined the Navy in 1962, going on to serve 20 years as a fireman, engineman, and gas turbine tech mechanic. “This was a whole new world I didn’t know existed. I earned My Air Crew wings as a black shoe while flying in Vietnam and became a Navy diver to support the SES 100-A experimental surface effect ship on which I was assigned to the position as the ship’s test craft engineer.” He took care to finish the requirements for a high school diploma, however, graduating ten years into his Navy career, with the class of 1972.
Post-Navy life brought Wright two children, a restaurant career, and now grandchildren, leading him to an idyllic retired life of maintaining a century-old buyboat and walking the beach in search of treasure.
Beachcombers are typically very secretive about sharing their beach locations. And there have been many jokes shared over the years about the onslaught of internet enthusiasts arriving in search of treasure. That’s why he keeps his Northern Virginia location somewhat vague. Truth be told, most of the good stuff has already been found during Wright’s daily walks. He says he’ll be done looking when he finds a rare red bottle stopper.
He compares keeping the secrets of the beach to the war in Vietnam—and the time he was dropped off in a parachute for a week with only a knife during prisoner of war training. “In beachcombing and war, you learn how to keep your mouth shut.” For my part, I’m happy anytime I get to have time on the beach with Dave.
Mary McCarthy is the former Education Chair and Vice President of the North American Sea Glass Association and will be speaking at the Eastern Shore Sea Glass Festival on the weekend of April 12-13, 2025 at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, Maryland.
