Oyster Punts and the art of hand-powered oyster dredging
A draft brief for the National Maritime Museum of Falmouth in Cornwall states that in 1924 there were 148 ‘Haul-Tow’ punts licenced for one shilling, plus a further 3s per tonne and another 7s 6d for each dredge worked under oar. Today there are but a couple of handfuls of these lovely little craft and George Hogg of the Maritime Museum thinks they are important enough to warrant a special place in the museum’s initiative: ‘Local Craft For Local Waters’.
After the awful depredations from over-dredging of the Faversham fishing grounds in the late 19th century, Parliament issued orders in 1876/7 empowering local authorities to issue bylaws to regulate fisheries. In the River Fal, those bylaws prohibited the use of power in any part of the fishery: it remains today as one of the last fisheries to be worked under sail and oars.
The most obvious result of this was the Falmouth work boat, a long keel boat with a powerful gaff cutter rig to pull a sizeable oyster dredge. These were expensive bits of kit, however, requiring a crew and of course wind, so the oyster punts were a solution for a man on his own and windless days, and each tributary would have its own design according to the peculiarities of the tiny creek they had to negotiate.
Dredging oysters by hand required pure brawn. The boat would be rowed down to the beds, the anchor cast over the bow, with the warp fed through the freed port wink and the boat worked or
sheaved astern over the oyster bed. Then a single dredge (haul-tow punts could use up to 18-ring dredges, working boats tended to stick to 15-rings), perhaps two, and exceptionally three dredges, would be tipped over the stern. Getting the dredge to work at the right angle took some skill and practice and then a windlass of different design (the originals being called ‘monkey climbers’) was used to haul the boat up the anchor line while the dredge was hauled over the oyster bed. At the end of this exhausting haul, the windlass was used to lift the dredge which by then could weigh up to two hundredweight (100kg) up to the stern and the contents tipped onto a large clutch board so the minimum landing sized oysters could be separated from the ‘clutch’ of old shells and discarded materials, which is so essential for the health of the bed.
Time after time these little boats would be hauled by hand over the oyster beds with tired fisherman rowing or maybe sailing themselves back in the evening, hopefully with a couple of hundredweight bags of oysters laid in the bilge, though the history of the Fal oyster beds is of a delicate balance between the number of licenced boats and the health and productivity of those beds.
Most of the haul-tow boats are gone now, but a few remain, some still working. The Museum has had plans drawn up of some of local varieties of these punts, which were also known as ‘Wink Boats’ or River- or Oyster-Boats, depending on where in the extensive tributaries to the Fal they came from.
With names such as Orlando, Little Phil or Pill Creek, about 20 boats have been found and drawn up for posterity. While the basics are the same: carvel construction, a long keel with a narrow beam, and a tapered almost doubleended hull to make them slippery through the water with that beautiful wine glass transom, they all differed slightly.
“They weren’t principally designed to sail,” says Hogg, “nor were they built to last very long and most were much repaired. These boats are our roots, and need to be looked after.”