Keeping Dingle’s maritime history alive
THE nobby fishing boats that were once at the heart of a thriving fishing industry in Dingle were remembered at the weekend during a festival that pays annual tribute to the town’s maritime heritage.
The Dingle Maritime Festival, held in Mara Beo aquarium on Saturday and Sunday, was described by co-founder Kevin Flannery as an event designed to “maintain Dingle’s long maritime history and the interest people have in it”. Following very much on that theme was the talk on Saturday by Dan Graham – of Grey’s Lane fishing stock - on the nobby boats that were ‘ the super-trawlers of bygone years’.
Nobbies were first brought to Dingle in the 1880s by Manx fishermen who came here in pursuit of the mackerel that were then abundant on the west coast of Ireland. The Manx men got on well with the locals and their sail-powered nobbies – measuring from 7.6m to 10.7m - were much admired. When grants became available from the Congested District Boards around the turn of the century local fishermen invested in nobbies and the boats became so common that the fleet moored in the harbour was a signature image of Dingle. Most of the nobbies were built in the Isle of Man but for a time between 1907 and 1911 four nobbies were built locally in Mike Long’s boatyard, behind where John Benny’s pub now stands.
The nobbies owned by Manx and local fishermen greatly increased mackerel landings in Dingle and a flourishing fish processing and exporting industry grew up around them before import tariffs and more refined tastes in the US diminished demand for canned and pickled Dingle mackerel in the inter-war years.
The trustworthy nobbies continued to be the fishing boat of choice in Dingle however, and they were still in use up to the 1960s when BIM opened a boatyard building more modern trawlers. Now the boatyard is gone and so too are most of the local trawlers. Only a handful remain serving as a reminder of a time when the fishing industry was a mainstay of Dingle’s economy.