Sailing the seas of change
It sounds like quiz-night material: can you tell what a Shetland six-ern is? How about a Scarborough mule? A Plymouth hooker? Or a Beer lugger? If you guessed that a Plymouth hooker was not a lady of easy virtue plying her trade in the alleys and darkened doorways around England’s dockyard town, or that a Beer lugger was not the boat a Cornish smuggler might employ to carry contraband ashore at dead of night, ears cocked to the sound of the Revenue men’s hooves, you’d be right – and doubly so if you thought each one of them to be a long-lost type of fishing boat. You would be wrong, however, on one count: not all these crafts are long lost. Although some of the fishing vessels that were once shoaled like mackerel around the coasts of Britain are gone forever, some have survived, and not only as paint-peeling wrecks, broken planks and worm-eaten frames – bones up an Essex creek, in museums or memory – but afloat and earning their keep.
