The Essex smack

Every boat is different to sail but sailing an oyster smack requires some specific skills that are increasingly lost on a more modern craft. So sought after were the skills of these sailors, they were often called up for racing duties by rich owners elsewhere. Many were relied on as key members of crew on J-class yachts during the heady days of the early 20th-century America’s Cup.

Anyone who has sailed a long-keeled boat will be familiar with the particular skills required to sail one. With their very deep full-length keels, relatively small, shapeless rudders hung aft of the keel, manoeuvring a heavy smack under steering alone is a very tricky thing indeed. As such, a great deal of skill and understanding of sail control and balance are key in order to enable the boats to sail well. This control comes from understanding setup and balance.

When looking at the boats beam-on the first thing you notice is how far forward the main mast sits – not to mention how short the mast seems. But the sail plan needs to be looked at in the context of all spars. Typically smacks have a bowsprit that extends almost half the length of the hull again. As such, My Alice is around 46ft bow to stern but her length over spars is nudging over 70ft. The gaff-rigged main means the centre of effort for the mainsail sits much further aft than a Bermudan rig would.

It does not take that much thought to realise that with significant sail forward of the bow (at least two sails are usually flown from the bowsprit upwind) and the mainsail sitting over the stern that balancing these forces is the key to ensuring the boat sails in a straight line or is able to turn. Interestingly, however, these overhanging spars make a long-keeler much closer to a fin-keeled modern yacht than you may imagine. In essence, when sailing a fin-keeled yacht, you can easily use foresails and the mainsail to get the boat to pivot around the mast and keel on the sails alone. What the overhanging spars do is provide a greater amount of sail fore and aft of the keel, despite it running the full length of the hull.

All this is necessity in a smack where low speed manoeuvring under sail was key when they were being used for fishing or dredging, and enables the boats to be manoeuvred with little way on, despite the rudder doing very little at low speeds.