The buyboat Linda Carol, an icon to Chesapeake Bay watermen, returned to her roots last week after spending five years deteriorating in a New York salvage yard.

To the untrained eye, the vessel looks a bit of a wreck, with paint and pieces of trim peeling off and big plywood patches along her side. But to thenew owner, William "Bill" Mullis of Gloucester, she’s a treasure.

Mullis had always admired the Linda Carol and looked up to her owner, Maurice Snow, who owned a dock on Davis Creek in Bavon.

A 1974 Mathews High School graduate, Mullis had his own boat, the Norman T, that he used for catching crabs that he sold at Snow’s dock. He said there were "a whole lot of talented fishermen" who fished out of Davis Creek in those days, and he rattled off a long string of names—Lowry Hudgins, Edward Grinnell, E.G. Hutson, Roland Hudgins, William Nelson Haywood, to name a few. But of all of them, Snow was the most popular and best loved by all.

"When you met him, it ...