A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Anyway, by the Thursday it was obvious that we weren’t going to be blessed with a good catch, even if others were. That, in a nutshell, is fishing. The boat alongside you can be getting stone after stone of good fish, while you hardly get anything. The next time, though, it will be you getting the catches while they do not. The word on the radio, however, was that there was no hake around. Added to this, the wind increased from the northwest and Joe told us tales of how winds of force 10 could suddenly appear from this direction completely unannounced.

  It was definitely time to go. We hauled in for the last time, again taking about ten hours in the freshening seas, even though the nets weren’t being shot again. The mackerel was basketed this time, although we found on our return that it was not saleable. By midnight we were steaming eastwards at 10 knots, following a dotted yellow line on the Shipmate plotter. We clocked up 11 knots rounding the Runnelstone buoy just south of Lands End. We entered Newlyn on the Friday evening, and jostled for space alongside the quay. The others in our group arrived about half an hour later. We unloaded and weighed the boxes in: 170 stone of hake and 70 stone of white fish. The others, who had told us that their catches were poor, had over 800 stone. Oh, the lies fishermen tell over the radio!

  With the boat cleaned and damaged nets cleared out, the crew returned ashore, while I borrowed the skipper’s berth for the night. I didn’t fancy manoeuvring into mine for the last time. When morning came, I visited the market as the remnants of the catch were being sold. Ours had gone. However, prices were low.

  When I caught up with the crew later on after they had picked up their cheques, I was disappointed to learn that they had each earned just £225. This was a full share, calculated thus: the value of the catch (the hake was selling at £25 a stone), less £200 for the boat, the expenses of the trip (fuel, food, ice and oil – probably about £800), which leaves the profit. This is divided by eleven to determine the value of a share. The owners get five and half shares (they pay for the nets, boat upkeep, navigational gear, paperwork, surveys, etc.), the skipper gets one and a half share and the crew one each.

  So that day our crew got £225 for a hard week’s graft – and that’s every two weeks. The big catches probably raise over £1,000 per share. Why do they do it? Some say it’s in the blood. Generations of Newlyn families have gone to sea. On land, life appears as an intrusion – cars, traffic wardens, newspapers, telephone. At sea they’re forgotten. It’s the same for the nomadic sailor, of course, but his life doesn’t really touch reality; fishing somehow does. It’s a job on the one hand, and a way of life on the other. Who, though, would do it for £225 every two weeks?

  Notes

  1 Trygve Sørvaag, Shetland Bus, Lerwick, 2002. David Howarth’s The Shetland Bus (1951) also tells the story.

  2 Robb Robinson, The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery, Exeter, 1996.

  3 See Paul Lund and Harry Ludham, Trawlers Go to War, 1971, which specifically examines Harry Tate’s Navy.

  4 Walter Wood, Fishermen in War Time, London, 1911.

  5 Robinson, op. cit., 1996.

  6 Iain Sutherland, From Herring to Seine Net Fishing, Wick, 1985.

  7 Gloria Wilson, More Scottish Fishing Craft, London, 1968.

  8 Mike Smylie (ed.), Fishing Boats (the magazine of the 40+ Fishing Boat Association), issue 4, Spring 1996, has a brief description of the boat.

  9 Alan Villiers, The Deep Sea Fishermen, London, 1970.

  10 John Nicklin and Patricia O’Driscoll, Trawler Disasters 1946–1975, Stroud, 2010. The book details all losses and wrecking from Aberdeen, Fleetwood, Hull and Grimsby.

  11 Austin Mitchell and Anne Tate, Fishermen – the Rise and Fall of Deep Water Trawling, Beverley, 1997.

  12 Andrew Welch, Royal Navy in the Cod Wars: Britain and Iceland in Conflict 1958–1976, Liskeard, 2006.

  13 Angus Martin, The Ring-Net Fishermen, Edinburgh, 1981, as quoted in a letter from W.P. Miller.

  13

  FISHING BOAT DESIGN OVER TIME

  To the fisher, the fishing boat is their most important tool, the one they rely upon. It is their working platform, safety net, workshop, net store and fish hold all in one. They rely on it to take them to work, to keep them secure at work and then to get them back to port safely. Although many of today’s such vessels are often smelly, oily, dirty vessels, beneath the grit and grime of toil lie seaworthy, well-fettled and proudly owned craft. Annual paint jobs, constant engine maintenance, safety checks and updated electronics all ensure that vessels continue to safeguard life aboard as much as possible, catch fish to a maximum and operate under the strict rules that today’s European Common Fisheries Policy enforce.

  Things, though, were different in the old days. In the days when men were men, and fishing boats worked under sail and their crews fought the waves with sheer strength of mind, their boats meant more: they might have been platforms of terror and discomfort at sea, but when they journeyed safely home they were really well looked after. They were scrubbed and scraped, painted or varnished and the sails tanned in various mixtures (as we shall discuss later) to protect them from the rotting effect of seawater. Often, they were keenly raced in annual regattas that many fishing fleets became renowned for. Indeed, because of their expertise in sail operation, fishermen were often crew aboard the large Victorian yachts that were often built just to race. In the parts of Britain that became centres of yachting in the nineteenth century – the Thames, the Clyde, the Solent – it was fishermen who were central in providing the manpower able to sail these picturesque craft.

  It is generally regarded that early boatbuilding was influenced from various directions. In northern Britain it was a German/Scandinavian (Saxon/Viking) influence that led to the use of open clinker-built craft, while a Dutch influence gave some of the keel boats seen on parts of the east coast. Powerful French three-masters often were seen closer to the southern English coast and resulted in similar three-masters being adopted for fishing which in turn led to the Cornish luggers and many other southern types. And back beyond that, skin boats had been in use ever since mankind took to the sea and their development is somewhat more unclear.

  Britain has had a most diverse collection of fishing craft. To describe them in full would take up far more pages than are available here and readers are directed to the author’s book Traditional Fishing Boats of Britain & Ireland (Shrewsbury 1999). Nevertheless, it would be an omission not to give an overall appreciation of them.

  To many a layman it is Scotland that is renowned for its quality of boatbuilding, although this is in blatant disregard for many class-quality boatbuilders around the UK. Two reasons that Scotland has such a reputation might be a) their proximity to good supplies of boatbuilding timber such as oak, larch and Douglas fir; and b) the fact that documented details of Scottish boats go back to the mid-nineteenth century whereas for craft south of the border the evidence is not so forthcoming.

  In the Scottish case it was Captain John Washington who was summoned by the government to enquire into the aftermath of a gale on the northeast coast in August 1848 when some 124 boats were wrecked and at least 100 fishermen’s lives lost. Of course, this wasn’t the first storm to cause such damage on the fishing fleets of the whole country, but it was the first time that people began to wonder why such losses of life went by without question. Part of Washington’s remit was to consider the design of boats in use on that coast and to compare these with others around the coast.

  In his resultant report, released the following year and running to many pages, he produced plans and/or details of craft from both sides of Scotland, from the Isle of Man, St Ives, Penzance, Kinsale, Galway, Hastings, Deal, Yarmouth and Scarborough. Of those on the east coast of Scotland, he gives details of boats from Wick, Buckie, Fraserburgh, Peterhead, Newhaven and Dunbar, all of which were double-ended, which has given modern-day historians an insight in the vessels the fishing fleets were using. However, as to their suitability of purpose, he was not impressed. Among his r
ecommendations – and he added drafts of four proposed fishing boats drawn up by renowned naval architect James Peake of the Royal Dockyard in Woolwich – were that boats should be decked over, harbours should be improved upon to allow access at all stages of the tide, crews should not be engaged from landsfolk and fishermen should not be paid by the fish curers in whisky. Decked boats, in the views of many of the fisherfolk, were unnecessary as it was believed they took up space and that this meant less fish could be carried. The obvious advantage of decking boats was they would have been able to stay at sea longer in the extreme sea conditions and survived, whereas the small, not particularly seaworthy boats headed straight for home when the weather turned, most being wrecked when they were unable to enter harbour at low water.

  Of those Scottish boats the report gives drafts of, it was only the Fraserburgh type that had any suggestion of a foredeck. Between this one and that from nearby Peterhead, there is influence of more upright stems (the front bit) and sternposts (the back bit) in what is considered to be Dutch, and it is widely thought that this emerged after many Dutch fishers moved to Fife in the seventeenth century when their countrymen were masters of the North Sea herring fishery. However, it must be said that the similarities end there as many Dutch vessels of that era were bluff-bowed, flat-bottomed craft. Nevertheless, Washington’s drawings appear to be the earliest of the type that became known as the fifie. In time these vessels became up to 70ft in length sporting two huge dipping lugsails on masts, the fore of which was so big that a man had difficulty stretching his arms around.

  To the north, in the Moray Firth and up to the north coast, the favoured boat was more Viking in shape and was obviously influenced by Scandinavian boats, which isn’t surprising since the country’s proximity to the countries across the North Sea. The double-ended scaffie, as they have since become known, had steeply raking sternposts and cutaway forefeet on upright but slightly rounded stems.

  In the Northern Isles the Norse influence was even more obvious. With Shetland being part of the Norse empire until 1469 and being geographically nearer to Norway than to, say, Aberdeen, as discussed in Chapter 3, and having a dire lack of trees, boats were imported from Norway aboard ships. At first these were rigged with one squaresail though the lug-rig was adopted in the eighteenth century. The boats often came in kit form and were pieced together by Shetland boatbuilders until they simply imported the timber and cut the patterns themselves to build boats with subtle changes to suit local conditions. Boats came in various sizes depending on the type of fishing and all were eventually lug-rigged so that we have sixareens (six-oared deep sea boats), fourereens (four-oared inshore craft), and various yoals (yols from the Norse ‘jol’ meaning small boat, a term used in various parts of eastern Britain). In Orkney we have ‘yoles’, both from the north and the south of the islands. All these craft are double-ended. In Orkney the main difference between the boats was that those to the south – the South Isles yoles – were sprit-rigged as against the lug-rigged northern versions, with some differences in hull shape. The southern boats were the largest and were almost identical to the Stroma yoles from that tiny island in the Pentland Firth close by Duncansby Head, and which worked further along the inhospitable northern coast.

  Then, in the very late 1870s, one of the most effective and lovely of British sailing fishing boats was built as a hybrid between fifie and scaffie, taking the most salient points of both to combine into one boat which became known as the Zulu: with the loss of life of Scottish soldiers on the battlefields of South Africa, the ensuing public outcry caught the attention of fisherfolk who somehow used the name for their new vessels. Whether this was for one particular vessel at first, or the whole type, is not clear but evidence does support the first supposition. The Zulu had the upright bow of the fifie and the sloping sternpost of the scaffie although at a more acute angle which gave it a huge overhang at the back end. Like the fifie, the Zulu had two large lugsails and the largest, the Laverack, BF787, built in 1902, was 84ft in length excluding bowsprit and bumpkin on a 54ft keel length. With many Scottish harbours charging harbour dues based on keel length, these were kept as short as possible.

  Two small Orkney yoles and a fifie, Rose K365, on the beach at St Mary’s in the very southeast of mainland Orkney, where boats were once built. (Orkney Library Archive)

  On the west coast of Scotland, although various small boats (bata in Gaelic) display Viking influences, it was the Lochfyne skiffs that have been called the prettiest of all British workboats. These were double-enders again in the Scandinavian style and had one standing lugsail. They developed purely out of setting ring-nets as discussed in Chapter 2 from earlier line skiffs that worked drift-nets in and around the loch. On the eastern side of the Clyde similarly shaped vessels, with one standing lug each, were called nabbies. Indeed, evidence supports the belief that the lugsail was introduced into Loch Fyne by the Ayrshire fishermen who, in turn, had imported the lug from Fraserburgh district. Thus, as is expected, this is proof that fishermen themselves were largely responsible for introducing innovative ideas into inherited traditions in the fishing fleets.

  In the Outer Hebrides the sgoth Niseach (Ness skiffs) have been described in Chapter 3, while the small lobster and line boats of the southern isles (Barra, the Uists, Grimsay and Eriskay) were introduced from the Oban area of the mainland.

  Moving down the west coast, we’ve already explained the influences behind the Isle of Man nickeys and nobbies in Chapter 6. Similar craft worked from Northern Irish harbours such as Kilkeel, Ardglass and Portavogie, while smaller boats such as the drontheims, which worked along the Irish shoreline between Dublin and around the north coast to Donegal, were Scandinavian in influence and bore many similarities to western Scottish boats. Many of these, especially on the east coast, are called yawls.

  The Lancashire nobbies, on the other hand, bear no relation to the Manx craft except in name. Various explanations have been given for the term ‘nobby’. Dictionaries refer to a nobby as a ‘rich, influential man’ or ‘nob’, coming from the Scots ‘knab’ which itself was shortened to ‘nab’ to produce ‘nabby’. This seems justifiable as the Clyde nabbies were in existence prior to the first Manx nobby arriving, mirroring the Clyde boats, but this doesn’t explain its adoption in Morecambe Bay. Yet there is a belief that the early Morecambe boats evolved from Solway Firth boats so it is possible the name might have been loosely applied in that way. Another possibility is that ‘nobby’ refers to ‘smallness’ in various walks of life, and thus is to differentiate between small cutters and large vessels.1

  Nevertheless, the Lancashire nobby – variously called a Morecambe Bay nobby, prawner or sprawner – developed into a fine working boat after the intervention of naval architect William Stoba who singlehandedly altered the design to produce what we now identify as a boat of 35ft in length on average, rigged with gaffsail on single mast with topsail and foresails. A long counter stern enhances what is a boat of low freeboard, necessary when working nets and trawls over the side from the cockpit. Some boats had a small cuddy, while smaller boats worked shrimp trawls in Morecambe Bay and larger boats worked out in the Irish Sea. Indeed, the design gained favour with fishermen from the Solway Firth right down to Aberystwyth in Cardigan Bay.

  Cornwall’s luggers are world renowned and, as for the Lancashire nobbies, many are still sailing today. Generally there are two types, split by the infamous Lizard peninsula. To the west are the double-enders of Mounts Bay and St Ives while to the east are the transom-sterned luggers of Falmouth, Mevagissey and Looe. However, of course, nothing is ever as simple as that and Porthleven, to the west of the Lizard, was home to several lugger builders who launched many transom-sterned versions. To the west there were two distinct variations, the fuller shape of St Ives and Mousehole where boats had to dry out on the tidal harbour sands and the later models in Mounts Bay that were able to stay afloat in the harbours of Newlyn, Penzance and Porthleven after their construction and development in the mid pa
rt of the nineteenth century. To the extreme east of the county, at Polperro, they preferred the gaff rig on their ‘Polperro gaffers’ as did the Plymouth fishers on their ‘Plymouth hookers’.

  The smaller crab boats of Cornwall were all transom-sterned to work pots over the square stern where buoyancy was greater. From Sennen Cove in the west to Cadgwith, Gorran Haven, boats were similar in hull shape though the latter were sprit-rigged. Across the border in Devon, crab boats worked around the South Hams peninsula though they were, too, sprit-rigged. Other Cornish boats worthy of mention are the pilchard seine boats and the Falmouth Working Boats that dredge for oysters wholly under sail and are mentioned in Chapter 9.

  Likewise the powerful Brixham trawlers have been mentioned in Chapter 7. These ketch-rigged vessels really were powerful out of the necessity of dragging beam trawls along the seabed. Similar trawlers worked out of Plymouth and Dartmouth in the southwest and Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Scarborough on the east coast. The main builders were in Brixham, Galmpton, Rye, Lowestoft and Grimsby, though building was not exclusively confined to these ports. Once motorisation gained a foothold in the early twentieth century, many of these trawlers were sold to Scandinavia where they worked well into the second half of that century and have since been restored to, or at least near to, their original state. Names like Leader, Pilgrim, Vigilance (all from Brixham), Keewaydin (Rye), Excelsior (Lowestoft) and City of Edinburgh (ex-William McCann, Grimsby) have become household names among traditional boat enthusiasts.