small craft

For love of a boat – Trechandiri

/ Bill / 3 Comments

Paleochora, Crete 2009

I have started reading Mike Smylie’s ‘Fishing the European Coast’.

In 153 pages, he has written a comprehensive series of notes and reminiscences on the very wide range of boats found around the European coast.

It is the perfect overview for someone who enjoys differences in boat design  from port to port, from local conditions to local conditions, from culture to culture . . . as well as for someone interested in the evolution of craft.

For example, over the past year, I have posted many images of Greek trechandiri. Smylie writes:

“The trechandiri is the workhorse of Greek coastal fishers . . . . . The advent of motors in the 1920s simply produced a fatter, fuller body section, while in profile they were unchanged. Once the rig was removed, superstructures were added! They are ubiquitous throughout the Aegean – that sea of thousands of islands, and have one thing in common, a length/beam/depth ratio of round about 9:3:1. There are two schools of thought on their origins. Some say they developed from a particular type of caique, first built in Hydra in 1658, while others suggest they evolved from the trabaccolo, a type of sailing vessel used for trading in the Adriatic.”

Agios Nikolaos, The Mani, Greece 2007

Length/beam/depth ratios have taken on a new meaning :-).

Mr Smylie adds to what I learnt from the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth earlier in the year and from Denham’s book on ‘The Aegean’.

And the images have taken on a new meaning too.

For the origins of this image series, here


For love of a boat – 40+ Fishing Boat Association

/ Bill / 15 Comments

Last Thursday’s (6th August) edition of the Western Morning News had a centre spread entitled “One man’s love affair with old wooden boats.’

It featured historian Mike Smylie, whose book “Fishing Boats of Cornwall” has just been published by The History Press.

In the article he is quoted:

‘”For this book on Cornish fishing, I spent a lot of time in Newlyn talking to local fishermen and the people involved with the local fishing industry . . .

“Something which particularly saddens me is seeing boats being chopped up – there’s a photograph in the book of a perfectly good wooden fishing boat being demolished in Newlyn in 1998 with a JCB. This happened because of the European Union fishing policy which encouraged fisherman to take boats out of fishing and scrap them.”

In 1995, Mike co-founded the 40+ Fishing Boat Association to fight that policy and help preserve old, decommissioned fishing boats.’

I am ashamed to say I have not heard of this association up to now. However, those of you who have been following the For Love of a Boat series will know this is precisely my own view on what has happened as a result of the European policy. Captain George’s video shows a Greek fishing boat demolished in just the way mentioned above for exactly the same reason.

Looking at the 40+ website I have not discovered how to join the Association yet, but will pursue it and let you know how I get on. The link to the equivalent Greek website is here. (To translate into your own language, I find Babel Fish works reasonably well).

I have ordered Mr Smylie’s “Fishing the European Coast” and look forward to reading it. The Cornish book will come later.

In the meantime, I wish Mike Smylie well – and encourage him to keep up his good work.

For love of a boat – keep them alive

/ Bill / 1 Comment

Last week, I admired this boat in Padstow, Cornwall

and early last month, this one in Finikas, Crete

They are about the same size, both registered fishing boats.

One is built for fishing inshore in the Atlantic Ocean off Cornwall. the other in the Lybian Sea off Southwestern Crete.

To look at, these are totally different boats – but there are many similarities – similarities that come from their function and the work that is put into building, maintaining and running them.

Without a specific function and the people who use them, working boats become mere objects to look at (albeit very fine objects). Add in the people who built them and run them and they take on a life.

Someone decided to build them, lay the keel, add molds, timbers, planking, decking, an engine. Someone finished them. Perhaps the same people, perhaps someone else now takes them to sea, fishes from them, maintains them. These people have families, friends, fellow fisherman, customers – a community of people who know the boats.

Well, they have one other thing in common, they won’t last for ever. As time goes on, and fishing becomes more regulated, and plastic and metal construction finally takes over from wood, and universal design takes over from local design, and costs become more and more prohibitive, so these boats and those like them will disappear into history. Maybe this generation. And the skills that come with them will likely dissolve or resolve into some other field.

Celebrate them now, while you see them working.

Record them and share them

. . . and admire those who are working to keep those skills alive.

Try the boatbuildingacademy site – here, or Charlie Hussey’s marinecarpentry site – here.

Enjoy Mark Harris’ video on building the Isolde, then go to his woodenboatbuilding site – here.

For love of a boat – one year on.

/ Bill

A year ago, I started the Love of a Boat series following a holiday in Croatia.

I had seen an old boat arranged ‘tastefully’ on the sand as a piece of beach furniture for tourists. I was saddened that something as complex and special as a wooden boat should be left as a casual prop for those who probably wouldn’t care whether it was there or not.

This was slightly naive of me but, as it turns out, a good basis for learning.

Since then I have shared some of my collection of boat images on a weekly basis. These are images that I take, firstly, for the pleasure of looking at boats and, secondly, because I have always been interested in how the design of working boats varies according to their location – (form following function).

In sharing them, I have found that:

  • There are many people all over the world who share my enthusiasm and care very deeply about wooden boats – (and not just wooden boats).
  • Some confine their interests to particular types of craft, interests which they pursue intensely and exclusively.
  • Thanks to blogging, it is possible to follow what they are doing and thinking, and watch new ideas emerging

Above all, I note in this group a genuine desire to learn from the past and to build the best of the past into new projects.

This may sound self-evident to you – of course we learn from the past, don’t we?  The older I get, the less sure I am.

I have banged on about this before. The way modern technology advances in leaps and bounds seems to have created a rather blinkered environment, one in which we look intently forward hoping for solutions to our problems, often ignoring the fact that man has been facing many of the same problems for generations and the core solutions are already there. Yes, technology gives us new ways to deal with them, and, yes, technology is a source of new creativity – (excitingly so!), allowing us to enter areas we have never entered before.

But for some solutions we don’t need technology . . .  just a way of dealing with them at a more human level.

to be continued . . .

On sailing a Folksong – update

/ Bill

“Looks like a new boat” said the man in the marina who kindly walked me out of the berth.

Indeed, she does. Blue Mistress has finally become the boat I thought I glimpsed the first time I saw her four years ago almost to the day. Ever since that moment, I have been working towards this.

What she has become has more to do with ownership than anything specific. Instead of coping with someone else’s ideas, (however good they may have been), it comes down to owning a boat where all the positives and all the negatives are now the product of my own collaborations and my own final decisions. I guess everyone who sails a boat for any length of time will know what I mean.

For example, it could be because I am sitting at my new chart table, notebook open, pencil at the ready, able to make notes whenever I choose.

It could equally be because the galley has been cleaned up and I’ve bought a smaller kettle which comes to the boil more quickly.

Or that the loo facilities have been thought through properly and, suitably primed, are now satisfactory.

Or the new feel of spaciousness thanks to Robin Leach’s excellent finish to the repainting and retrimming.

Perhaps it’s because I have rethought the locker stowage so that more gear is to hand – gear that, in the past, had been ‘put away’ to be sorted out later.

It could be that, sitting here, with this excellent cup of tea, listening to Handel on the radio and watching people enjoy their Sunday on the water, I am mesmerised by the reflection of the sunlight on the water. In a boat with low freeboard you feel closer to the water- if you write about the sea, you are writing closer to the source!

It could also be that the rudder and tiller that have been bothering me for so long have been dealt with for the time being and I have the enjoyable prospect of sea trials ahead.

It’s all these things, of course, but, above all, it is the knowledge that every time I come aboard I won’t be looking around seeing all these jobs to do – jobs that in no way did I have the skills to complete to this standard. This bulk of unfinished business was getting in the way.

At my age, I have, in Jon Wainwright’s words, “only so many tides” to catch.

Blue Mistress now fits – and I feel freer to catch those tides.

~~~

This was my first post written on the boat – albeit with notebook and pencil to be copied later. I hadn’t realised how deep my ambition has been to do this comfortably.

No, I didn’t buy the boat to have a table to write at. I bought the boat to be able to sail. Writing about it has come out of owning it and given me the chance to find ways forward.

I shall continue to post. I wonder if my emphasis will change.