ANGELS WATCH OVER HER

For a boat to survive for a century or more, a slice of luck is needed, or more likely several slices: of equal importance are the avoidance of catastrophic disasters, and the owners who have loved her enough to spend the necessary time, money and energy at crucial times. Angele Aline has benefited from her share of the latter but has come perilously close to the former – several times.

While she was being built by Société de Construction Navale on the beach in Fécamp, she was called Jean but when she was launched in November 1921 she was christened Jules Talleux, the same name as her first owner, whose family already had a fleet of fishing boats in Gravelines. She was a Dundee, the name given to French ketch-rigged fishing boats of the time, and a derivative of the dandy, a similar type of vessel based on the English east coast.

was built with oak planking on oak frames and with about six tonnes of concrete ballast. She may have originally had a 40hp Otto Deutz engine, although this was probably used just to drive a capstan for pulling in her nets: very few Dundees had propulsion