Fishing Boats - Great Britain: Books and Ships

British Motor Fishing Vessels

British traditional working boats are famous - Morecambe Bay prawners, Manx luggers, Scots fifies and zulus, Lowestoft and Yarmouth drifters, Yorkshire cobles, Colchester smacks, Hastings beach boats, Brixham trawlers, and many others.
Over a century ago, progressive fishermen began to install engines in their boats. Motor fishing boats have been part of our coastal scene since then.

Local boatbuilders built local kinds of boat to suit each home port and its fisheries; examples include Cornish pilchard boats and long liners, Devon crabbers and beach boats, motor bawleys and cocklers, motor drifters and seiners, and the famous ring netters of the Clyde ports. These boats have gone or are fast disappearing. This book tells their story.

The British Herring Industry - The Steam Drifter Years 1900-1960

At different times of the year, herring were found in commercial numbers in the North Sea, the Moray Firth, the Minches, the Firth of Clyde, the Irish Sea and the English Channel.
Because the herring grounds were close to land, British fishermen were generally able to land their catches of herrings within hours of catching them. Their French rivals, who had to fish further away from their home ports, used larger drifters with a crew of up to thirty men (compared to the British drifter with a crew of ten) and they remained at sea for several weeks.

As they hauled and emptied their nets they started the salting and barrelling process on board the vessel. On arrival at their home port, the herrings were repacked and then marketed.
The fact that the British herring were caught, gutted, properly salted and packed in barrels within twenty-four hours was the reason that Russian and German buyers preferred them.

Christopher Unsworth tells the story of this once huge industry, and the advent and decline of the steam drifter.

Viola : The Life and Times of a Hull Steam Trawler

Deep in southern latitudes, in a desolate corner of Cumberland Bay on the east coast of the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, hard by the rotting quays of the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken and almost within a stone's throw of the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton, lie three forsaken steam ships: rusting remnants of our industrial past, unique survivals from a vanished age of steam at sea.
One of these ships is 'Viola', the sole surviving Hull steam trawler from the huge fleet which put 'fish & chips' on Britain's plates more than a hundred years ago.

In this absorbing account, maritime historians Robb Robinson and Ian Hart describe her ancestry and origins in the Victorian and Edwardian North Sea fishery - vividly depicting life for her crew in the most dangerous industry of its time; they record her Great War service as a U-boat hunter - one of the many merchant vessels largely unsung for their contribution, and often sacrifice, in wartime; and they recount her subsequent career hunting whales off West Africa, then later sealing and exploration work in the South Atlantic, before her final abandonment in South Georgia.
Here she became quarry for the infamous Argentine scrap metal expedition of 1982, in the initiating action of the Falklands War. This improbable yet true story of a humble working vessel and those involved with her is a highly readable work of social, as well as maritime, history.

Scotland's Fishing Boats : Old and New

The coasts of Scotland are a goldmine for fishing boats new and old, and this latest selection from James Pottinger covers a huge variety of them - from early trawlers to seine net boats, to modern twin rig side and stern trawlers.
As it does so, it demonstrates the changes that evolved in the design of the boats themselves, as progress marches on: the numbers of handsome wooden boats have declined, while the smaller boats have flourished, now rigging themselves for trawling, lining and shellfish catching.

With over 200 photographs, many previously unpublished, Scotland's Fishing Boats is a photographic journey through time at a variety of locations around Scotland and the Isles.

Wooden Fishing Boats of Scotland

With the gradual phasing out of wooden fishing boats of Scotland it is timely to record some of these handsome vessels. In the years from 1960-80 boat builders produced some of their most shapely and graceful craft, a testament to the skill of both the builders and designers.

Initially the designs were a collaboration of builders and skippers, but later the implementation of statutory rules demanded a more structured approach by qualified naval architects, which inevitably resulted in a certain degree of standardisation.

James A. Pottinger's illustrated volume concentrates solely on the graceful wooden boats, large and small, regarded by many to be the best looking boats of all. Many boats are photographed at sea, while other views range from repairs being carried out to the more melancholy sight of beautiful classic wooden craft being cut up.