Updated 31 May 2024:
Not to be confused with the working skipjack Ida May, we found this Ida May in spring 2016 on land, being worked on at Tilghman Island. She was built as a pleasure craft, with a full-size cabin, and likely never was generally considered a skipjack. She is currently in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland.
We found two boats named Ida May after we began the Last Skipjacks Project. One was a true skipjack (see Skipjack Ida May) and the other a three-sail bateau. Since the bateaux are basically two-masted skipjacks, we decided to list a few on the site.
The three-sail bateau Ida May was built as a yacht with a full cabin in 1959 somewhere around Reedville, Virginia. Other than Coast Guard records indicating that a previous owner had been Beatrice A. Brickell, we have little information about her life prior to when we found her in 2016 on the hard at Severn Marine on Tilghman Island, Maryland, where she had been for some time.
She was owned by David Lee, whose father, H. Bruce Lee, had been a deckhand on the Skipjack Ida May and had built a model of that boat. The elder Lee died in 2015. It is assumed that this Ida May was named because of his father's regard for the skipjack. The bateau had been tied up next to a charter boat in Wittman for years, and used by the Inn at Christmas Farm as another room for guests.
In tracking down the fate of the boat since 2016, it was learned that David Lee had sold his property in Wittman and donated Ida May to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. The person who bought his property ended up also buying the boat at auction from CBMM, but it proved to be too much for him, and he sold her to someone else. The new owner had her towed to the Rod and Reel Club at Chesapeake Beach, on the other side of the Bay, with plans to fiberglass her and keep her going.