Sailing the seas of change
The days of fishing and trading under sail may be over, but Britain’s many traditional coastal craft are adapting well to new roles
Britain’s traditional coastal craft are adapting well to new roles, as Adrian Morgan reports
It sounds like quiz-night material: can you tell what a Shetland sixern is? How about a Scarborough mule? A Plymouth hooker? Or a Beer lugger? If you guessed that a Plymouth hooker was not a lady of easy virtue plying her trade in the alleys and darkened doorways around England’s dockyard town, or that a Beer lugger was not the boat a Cornish smuggler might employ to carry contraband ashore at dead of night, ears cocked to the sound of the Revenue men’s hooves, you’d be right – and doubly so if you thought each one of them to be a long-lost type of fishing boat. You would be wrong, however, on one count: not all these crafts are long lost. Although some of the fishing vessels that were once shoaled like mackerel around the coasts of Britain are gone forever, some have survived, and not only as paint-peeling wrecks, broken planks and worm-eaten frames – bones up an Essex creek, in museums or memory – but afloat and earning their keep.
The craftsmen spilling from boat-building colleges, such as the International Boat Building Training College at Lowestoft or the Boat Building Academy at Lyme|regis, and the many charitable foundations offering young people adventure-training in restored working boats (or the opportunity to achieve a skill and a qualification) keep traditional wooden boat-building and sailing alive. Take Alasdair Grant as an example. From his base on an island in Loch Ewe, on the West Coast of Scotland, this young boatbuilder is bringing back to life a Loch Fyne skiff, Clan Gordon, the last of a kind that once hunted the herring in their billions, before overfishing killed the industry. The shipwrights and volunteers at Blyth Tall Ship, in Northumberland, are not only the guardians of a 106-year-old, gaff-rigged trading ketch, The Williams II, but they are also building from keel up a new 70ft Zulu (the largest of a class of herring luggers that owes its unusual name to the Zulu wars then raging). While in Ullapool, a pair of boatbuilders, Dan Johnson and Tim Loftus, are beginning the long restoration of one of the last surviving Scottish Zulus, St Vincent, a two-masted herring lugger of which once there were thousands. Every year, the Scottish fleet followed the annual migration of herring down the North Sea and the arrival of its huge, tan-sail luggers to the ports of Great Yarmouth or Lowestoft was a big event.
Those who witnessed it swear that a man could walk from one side of the harbour to the other with only fish scales on his boots to show – not that a self-respecting skipper would allow his crew ashore until every inch had been scrubbed, fish hold washed, and sails, dressed with a mixture of horse grease, yellow and red ochre and sea water, hung up to dry.
But why so many types of boats around the coast of such a small island? The seas an East Coast fisherman would encounter as he headed – more by instinct than compass, with perhaps just a salt-stained chart bearing a few lines to show known rocks, shoals and distances – out from Grimsby to the North Sea haddock grounds would differ hugely from those a West Coast fisherman in The Minch might experience. Each 10-mile stretch of coast would require a subtly different shape of hull to cope with the character of the waves (short, steep, long) and the varying conditions, from the shallow Thames Estuary to the open seas west of the Hebrides, where the swells roll in without check from America.
The species of fish caught in each area would dictate the boat and its rig. Trawlers required buoyant sterns and a handy, powerful sail plan to drag the ballasted nets across the sea bed, whereas doubleended Zulus, which would shoot their mile-long nets and wait for the herring to ensnare themselves, needed sail power to race to the grounds and back to catch the best prices at market. Tragically, if the wind should die on the dash back, the catch, no longer fresh, would be jettisoned; sails would be tacked – a laborious task on a lugger – the bow turned seawards again and the night’s work would start afresh.
Most fishing boats of the 19th and 20th centuries could be described as racing vessels. Speed made the difference between food in the children’s mouths or hard times ahead. The patched, tanned sails may appear thrown together, but every panel would have been stitched to form a perfect foil. Those hulls look identical when rafted up, propped up on their legs in a drying harbour, but appearance would be deceptive. So old Ben Harris of the Guiding Light might envy the weatherliness of his friend and fishing rival George Smith’s Two Boys, and when next he had the funds to have another boat built, he might instruct the builder to give her a little more depth in the keel, or finer lines in the bow, “so’s I can keep her head up to the wind a half point more, and beat the old bugger back home once in a while”.
Hull shapes evolved through the exigencies of their working roles, the whims of their skippers and fashion. The result was an ever faster, safer, more efficient craft, although the word ‘safe’ must be taken with a pinch of salt water, as life aboard was horribly dangerous, with some of the inshore boats open and others not having a lifeline or bulwark. But fast they were and story has it that an astonished member of the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes discovered just how fast when witnessing an annual race for the local fishing fleet in Stornoway. These rude vessels, with tanned sails, crewed by a bunch of Gaelicspeaking ‘heathens’, must have seemed crude in comparison to the polished racing yachts on the Solent – until, fob watch in hand, he recorded the start as the fleet struck out to the east and the finish as they stormed back. The winner, he calculated, had covered the course faster than any of the crack cutters and schooners owned by fellow Squadron members might have done (they would perhaps suggest he take the matter up with his watch maker).
Sights such as this are rare these days, although Essex smacks compete in fair numbers on the East Coast (and some even dredge for oysters or catch sprats), while Thames barges race annually and, in Falmouth, the sailing fleet alone is licensed to catch oysters. And if you listen carefully, boat sheds from Norfolk to the Outer Hebrides still resonate with the tap of the ball pein hammer, or caulking mallet, as
These rude vessels covered the course faster than the crack cutters