Seafaring, carving tradition lives on with Belotes
It was depression years in the U.S. - 1933 - when Richard Belote was born in the small seaside town of Willis Wharf, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Food was scarce, money was scarcer.
“We were poor as church mice but so was everybody else,” he said.
Richard’s father - a market gunner - hunted the shallow waters of the Delmarva bays inside the barrier islands known as Hog and Cobb. Fresh-dressed waterfowl brought cash money from the markets in New York City.
“My father would leave out on a Sunday evening, be gone all week, and come back on a Friday evening. He’d have three to four potato barrels filled with ducks to ship north to New York,” said Richard. Larger than a 55-gallon drum by a fair amount, the wooden-staved potato barrels were designed to carry 100 pounds of potatoes.
“When I was 17, I decided I wanted to go duck hunting,” said Belote. “I had no decoys, no money to buy any, so I started carving.”
Now, 66 years, countless ducks and lots of blue ribbons later, Belote, 83, is still carving. He passed his love and talent for carving and painting decoys on to his sons Ames and Scott. Now, grandsons and great-grandsons are also taking knife and paint to wood to approximate the marvels of nature.
At the recent Ward Brothers World Championship decoy-carving competition held annually at the Ocean City Convention Center, Richard, Ames and Scott continued their tradition of coming home with ribbons and awards. Named for the famous Crisfield, Md., barber/carvers, the competition draws artists from all over the world. Ducks, geese, swans, cormorants - even fish - practically come to life in the hands of these skilled and patient artisans.
A seafaring tradition
Carving and a seafaring life often go hand in hand, and the Belote family exemplifies that. Richard set the course when he moved north from Willis Wharf to Lewes, where he captained the Philadelphia, which served as a floating, lower bay headquarters for the river pilots. He went on to captain crude-oil barges plying the East Coast from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean. Working six hours on and six hours off around the clock for two to three weeks at a time, there were blocks of time for carving - sometimes on board, but mostly at home during extended time off.
His sons followed in his footsteps. Ames worked his way up to captaining barges. Scott spent time in the Coast Guard before also captaining barges.
Ames remembers his first carving. “We were on a barge, stuck in the ice up the Delaware River, just a stone’s throw from the pier, but still stuck. Two weeks we were frozen in. One day I grabbed a broom handle, cut off a section at the end, and carved a small goose.” The carving fever took hold, and Ames eventually evolved toward carving and painting fish and shorebirds.
Painting and detail work take the mind away, said Ames. “You get in a zone. You get locked in and go. Sometimes I’m out in my shop working in the evening on a fish and I look up and realize it’s two or three in the morning.”
But it’s that attention to detail that takes competition entries to the top. “When you’re getting up to the Best In Show level, the judges are counting feathers on the decoys to make sure the carvers are staying true to nature,” said Ames. The decoys have to float correctly too, which makes the Belote men spend hours carving out bits of wood from the insides of their works. “They are judged floating in tanks. It has to sit just right and act like the real thing,” said Richard.
His life-sized cormorant did all of that this year and won first prize for its species and second prize in the Lem and Steve Ward Division - that’s the Best in Show division - for contemporary confidence decoys. Confidence decoys are decoys of birds sometimes put out in hunters’ rigs to fool ducks and geese into a sense of security. Blue heron decoys are occasionally posted on the shoreline near a decoy rig for the same purpose. Ames won a first prize for his black crappie entered in the intermediate, life-sized fish-carving competition. He moved up to the intermediate division from his previous novice status. His bluegill/sunfish earned him a third prize in the same division.
Scott earns Best In Show
For Scott, who has only been carving for 42 years compared to his father’s 66, the 2016 competition proved big. His miniature carving of a cormorant, its mouth upturned and cradling an eel, won Best In Show for the Champagne Waterfowl Division. The division evolved from a bar joke many years ago when a carver came back from the restroom to find a miniature decoy floating in his beer. Now it’s a formal division and includes decoys small enough to float in a cocktail glass.
Scott couldn’t show me his work. Best In Show carvings are kept on display at the Ward Brothers Museum until the next year’s competition.
Scott also won a third prize in the contemporary antique division for his carving of a cast-iron, sink-box decoy. “One person came up and looked at
Scott’s work and complained that it wasn’t eligible because it was made of iron,” said Ames. “It was wood of course, but that’s just how good it was, right down to the rust pits in the surface paint.”
Sink boxes are narrow, low-silhouetted, shallow-draft vessels that hunters often market gunners - anchored in the middle of decoy rigs to hunt from. The cast-iron decoys were set on the deck to weight the boat deeper in the water. “If things got rough,” said Richard, “you swept them off the deck to float the boat higher. That’s why there aren’t many left around.”
Sink-box hunting could be a high-stakes game in foul weather. So could carving decoys during off-hours on a tug and barge.
“Some of those rigs carry up to 400,000 barrels of crude oil,” said Scott. “Crude oil is volatile, highly flammable, because it has so many different chemicals and vapors in it. Carving can keep your mind off the fact that you’re living on a floating bomb.”
