Wooden Boats Around the Cornish Creeks (pix)

[John R Smith]

Wooden Boats Around the Cornish Creeks

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Well, folks, perhaps it's time for a little exploration of our local creeks and foreshores, in search of interesting old (and new) wooden boats. Despite the gradual but inevitable loss of older craft to the ravages of rot and neglect, a few still remain, hidden amongst the flotillas of plastic yots and rubbery RIBs. They are tricky to track down, to be sure - but your intrepid team, comprising my goodself and the First Mate, left no muddy rill unvisited in our quest for nice old boats.

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Let's start with one that's not even Cornish. "Poppy" is a delightful clinker praam dinghy, of about 10 feet. The builder's plate tells us she is from the yard of Edgar Cove, Salcombe, Devon (close to my boyhood home). The fun bit is the nameboard on the transom - it reads "POPPY. When I grow up I want to be a Gig".

Clinker tenders like this used to be ten-a-penny when I was a kid. Now tenders are either plastic or inflatable, and the reasons are pretty obvious - at least to anyone who has ever re-painted the inside of a clinker dinghy.

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By the bye, we are on Restronguet Creek at the moment, down by the old Carnon Mine engine house on the Devoran to Point road. You can see the engine house in the background of this photo. I have to admit I'm not entirely sure what this boat is, except to say that it is a heavy carvel-built rowing boat (or punt) of about 15 feet - well maintained, typically Cornish and certainly old. It could be an oyster punt (of which more later). However, there are a couple of strange features about it, which I will let you spot for yourselves.

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This one is definitely a "furriner". We saw her at Roundwood Quay some weeks before this photo was taken, and then she just disappeared. We wandered down to Tallack's Creek, and there she was again. Now, this is really one for ACB, and doubtless he will correct me if I'm wrong, but I shall tell you that I believe this to be a Deben "Cherub", of which only 17 were built. Her name is "Lufra". An East Coast boat, heaven knows what she is doing down here. As you can see, the owner has started burning-off the topsides, and she seems to be in good condition. A sweet little gaff cruiser of about 21 feet.

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Now we are looking at something quintissentially Cornish - a Tosher. This one is at Martin Heard's yard at Tregatreath, on Mylor Creek, and as you can see has just had a new sheerstrake and gunwhales. A Tosher is the basic Cornish inshore fishing boat, carvel-built, about 20 feet long, used for hand-lining mackerel, or potting for crabs and lobsters. Almost all surviving toshers have an added foredeck and wheelhouse.

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This is "Charm" at Sunny Corner, and she is a bit special. Again she is a Tosher, built on the Fal, but she is particularly deep for her length, more like a Mounts Bay boat. Although she now has a diesel engine, "Charm" was probably built as a sailing boat, and would have had a standing lugsail on a mast stepped well forward. She still has her mizzen, which keeps the boat head to wind when drifting with the mackerel shoals. The present owner has removed a rather poor plywood wheelhouse, which means that you can now see the original layout of thwarts with bulkheads underneath, dividing the boat into a series of compartments.

Mevagissey was the best known home of the Toshers, and the very best Toshers were built by Percy Mitchell of Portmellon.

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Well, me 'andsomes, now us be down Coombe Creek. And here, for a change, we do have a new wooden boat. This lovely clinker pulling boat was built locally about four years ago, and is about 12 feet overall. Her present owner bought her at a boat jumble (!) and tells us she is a delight to row.

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To finish our trip round the creeks, while we are down at Coombe we had better have a look at the oyster boats. This is now just about the only place to find the traditional wooden oyster punts or "wink boats", and as you can see they are carvel built on steam-bent timbers, 14 to 16 feet long, fairly narrow in the beam and usually with thole-pins rather than rowlocks. In use, these boats and their dredge were hauled across the oyster beds using an anchor and a winch. At intervals, the dredge would be hauled aboard, emptied onto a tray in the stern-sheets, and the mature oysters would be retrieved and placed in sacks. A small number of local fishermen still work the beds this way (engines are not allowed on the fishery), but the boats these days are mostly fibreglass.

Kate and I will leave you with this sobering thought. All these small boats, save one, are well over forty years old, and hardly any new ones are being built. Photos like these will soon be the only reminder we have of a wooden boat tradition which has now almost completely vanished on our river.

John

[Thad]

Thank you John and Kate

[ACB]

Yes, "Lufra" is looks to be a Cherub. They were not really designed, just more or less guessed at, like most of Everson's boats. There is a rumour that the grandparent of the design was the Bombay Tomtit. As a class, they have a very high survival rate.

Eversons also built what are regarded as the best yacht tenders on the East coast; little stem dinghies with a lot of sheer, a wineglass transom and rather a full chested look about them, in sizes from 8ft up. These now change hands at fabulous prices. Legend has it that the dinghies were built, at £1 a foot, by the Misses Everson, who never married and who lived in the back part of the shed, which rejoices in the name of the Phoenix Works because it was rebuilt after a fire, many years ago.

Eversons survives too - indeed right now Mirelle's spars are in the shed being varnished and her standing rigging is in the basement streched out and getting its coats of linseed oil on the galvanised bits and Stockholm tar on the served bits.

Sadly, there were piles of moulds in the basement but none of them were marked with what they were and they had all rotted with the damp (it is below HW mark, although on the landward side of the wall) so they all went on the bonfire. What holds the Phoenix Works up is a bit of a mystery; it is the most ramshackle building I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few Third World shanty towns. Possibly the fact that it is built round a handful of old trading schooner masts helps.

Credit where credit is due - Eversons would not survive had it not been for the generosity of Frank Knights who bought it when Peter Darby retired and who in turn sold it to his workforce, two years ago, at a far lower price than he was offered by developers.

[John R Smith]

Thank you, Andrew, fascinating stuff. I'm really pleased to hear that the Phoenix Works survives. Any chance of a photo?

I see in YM this month that Frank Knights has finally retired (aged 84 or something?). You are privileged indeed - your spars in Eversons, sailing on the Deben, and with Sutton Hoo next door ;)

John

[Bruce Hooke]

Many thanks for the wonderful tour...

[Scott Rosen]

Thanks, John.

[Andrew]

Ian and John, thanks for erudition. Is the term "creek" used as indicrimiately there as it is here (NC coast) to refer to fresh ,salt or brackish bodies of water?

[John R Smith]

Andrew

down here in the West Country (Cornwall and Devon) a "creek" has a quite specific meaning. It refers almost always to a tidal arm of the sea running off a drowned River valley or "ria" (otherwise an estuary). Thus we have the estuary of the River Fal, with the various creeks running into it as tributaries of the main river. However, further up country on the Bristol Channel the same thing is called a "pill", not a creek. Just to confuse you ;)

Coastal inlets which are not drowned rivers or streams would be just that, bays or inlets, never creeks.
John

[ACB]

Our terminolgy seems a little less precise here in East Anglia. We don't really have rias; no rock at all, in fact, just sand and mud. The whole place is a huge glacial moraine. But we use the word "creek" to signify an inlet which is not as grand as a river estuary, but which the sea enters. At least I think we do. Come to think of it, Martlesham Creek, just below Woodbridge, is a creek off the River Deben but it is itself the baby estuary of the little River Fynn. Now I really think about it, a stream of some sort enters at the head of most of the creeks that I know; one notable exception is the Dardanelles in Walton Backwaters (The Straits of Magellan in Secret Water, if you have read Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books!)

But certainly a creek is an inlet, possibly just about navigable, by a Thames barge probably, but not by a large ship, which contains tidal salt water.

Yes I must do something about pictures; but we seem to have lost the camera...we will probably find it when we move house in a few days' time.

Actually, my first memories of messing about in boats are of Lulu's stamping ground; my parents lived abroad but spent their summer holidays on "Sarah John", my father's ex-RNLI lifeboat which lived in what was then a quiet little yard near Falmouth. Like Lulu, she had a centreplate, which definitely helped, except on the one occasion when the lifting wire parted and we had to go on the grid and ease it back in as the tide fell!

[ 03-25-2002, 12:58 PM: Message edited by: ACB ]

[Andrew]

Actually, I may be misrepresenting the "downeast" use of the term creek. Inland, a creek (or crik) obviously refers to fresh water, usually a smaller stream, small enough to throw a stone across.The bodies of water I know of at the coast called creeks are salt water intrusions along the coast line that may be fed by a fresh water source at some point. Some are really straits between islands or sandbars. As one would assume the migration of people and terminology was from the coast to the mountains, the term would seem to have come across from the british use for a salt water body.

[John B]

Thanks for the tour John. I'm going away in a few days myself. I'll look out for some interesting stuff( and try to return the favour).

[ken mcclure]

Thanks for those! BTW, what ever happened to that old "stray" that Kate picked up awhile back?

[Tom Galyen]

Thank you very much for the photos and for the discussion of creeks. Here in east central Illinois (about 150 miles south of Chicago, the terms creek, river, stream etc are used most indiscriminently. I can step across some rivers and most creeks. Even streams are quite small. The largest river near here is the Wabash in Indiana, and it can be forded at many places. Its feeders are almost always called rivers aka the Big and Little Vermillion, and the White river. But one of the strongest feeders is Sugar Creek, which is larger than any of the 3 other rivers but called a creek. The mix up was originally caused by the early white settlers who named a body of water just what they wanted to no matter what is should have been.

[ken mcclure]

Heh. My favorite is the Platte River. In places it's a mile wide and 3 inches deep!

[bugeye]

Hello,
Thanks for spending the time and effort to share some of your area's treasures. I love to see examples of working craft from your side of the pond. Too bad that I'm not more high tech, or I could do the same for you. There's alot to see in Rockland, Maine. Thanks again!!

[J. Dillon]

Thanks for the tour John. Nice to see some of the wood boats you still have around. Here in Ct.USA, wooden boats are rare but some are still around.

About the strange features of the boat up Restrounguet creek, the only thing I could spot is the position of the thwart in relationship to the row locks. It appears the boat was ment to be rowed facing fwd. Also there is a mast thwart but I cannot see a trunk, or does she have lee boards somwhere ? Could you tell us more ?

JD

[John R Smith]

Aha, JD, at last someone takes up my challenge. And you get the Mars Bar smile.gif

Yes, the thwarts are arranged very strangely. As you say, how would you row this boat except forwards? And I could find no evidence of a missing centre thwart, either.

Indeed, the other mystery feature is what appears to be a mast partner up forward. However, there is no provision for a tiller, and no centre-board. Do not jump to conclusions - some oyster punts worked their dredge from a short pole-mast and gaff in the bows, so just maybe . . .

John

[ 03-26-2002, 10:44 AM: Message edited by: John R Smith ]

[ACB]

The aftermost of the two thwarts that are in place would prevent you from rowing normal way round anyway, I think.

My hunch is that the thwart was relocated at the time when the outboard bracket was added, and it is positioned so as to get the single occupant forward and clear of the stern when under power, so as to avoid her sitting down by the stern.

Moving the thwart to this position would give a nice big clear space to work a dredge from - but I think that there should be a place to tip the dredge out - probably a board running across the gunwales, with sides to it to stop the water and muck getting into the boat. If the mast hole was there to support a short mast and boom for getting the dredge aboard, then everything seems to fall into place - but I would still rather have a nice smack towing four dredges, and tip them out on deck!

[John R Smith]

I think maybe ACB gets a Mars Bar too smile.gif

John

[B. Burnside]

Anyone else but me having trouble seeing the images? I got them the first time I checked this thread, but now they have been red-exed.

Barb

[Donn]

I can still see 'em, Barb.

[ken mcclure]

Aw heck! If I'da knowed there were a Mars Bar involved, I woulda looked closer!

Um, ah, I think they put the pointy end on the wrong end. Y'got a left-handed boat there.

[nedL]

John, Wonderful pictures and narrative, thank you. Beautiful little boats you have in that part. They remind me a bit of the small craft that used to be all over Bermuda years ago, simply built & nice lines.
And how is Kate's dinghy?

[ACB]

Kate's punt, perhaps?

John - you use the term "punt" to signify a small boat, where some would say "dinghy", and I recall that my late father, who did much of his sailing in, around and from Cornwall, also used the word this way, as in "We had better pull the punt up" or "We had better get the punt on board". Is this a Cornish usage?

[John R Smith]

Well, ACB, it does seem to be a Cornish usage. I don't recall anyone using "punt" that way in Devon when I was growing up.

But now I live down here it seems normal. And certainly I would not use the term "dinghy" for any of the boats above other than Poppy. Kate's boat is certainly not a dinghy, so I suppose it must be a punt!

Anyhow, Kate's punt - As it is stored outside in our garden, just under a blue polytarp, no work has been done all winter. But now things are a bit more spring-like, Kate has got going again scraping the old paint off. Progress report will follow, as soon as we have some progress smile.gif

John

[Alan D. Hyde]

That 15-foot or so rowing boat didn't look that odd to me. Many watermen I saw as a boy rowed standing up, and facing forward. Was that so uncommon?

Alan

[Donn]

Very common, Alan. There's even a pic of it happening in the surf dory story in the current issue.

Seine skiffs are almost always rowed standing up and facing forward.

I row my dory standing up and facing forward in the calm and in shallow water when I'm looking for fish, crabs and shellfish.

[Bill Perkins]

Nice legs on Lufra . They're uncommon here so I'll ask : Is the foot metal so the leg stays down when the boat's afloat ? If so can you just buy such things at the local chandlery ?

[ACB]

Legs. Had them on Mytica. Very Cornish; you notice Charm has them too. Because the Cornish are a bit short of nice soft mud, they have to leg their boats on hard beaches. The picture of Lufra shows the lines taken fore and aft to keep them in place when she floats. Nice feet, but I have never seen such in a chandlers, I think they must have been made up specially.