Month: January 2008

Four Months in a Sneak Box – a small boat or dinghy cruising classic

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Nathaniel Bishop’s sneak box

Bill Serjeant’s recent editorial on the Melonseed skiff reminded me of Nathaniel H Bishop’s account of a 2600-mile voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and along the Gulf of Mexico in a 12-ft sneak box, clearly a classic little duck hunting boat with a strong family resemblance to the Melonseed.

Titled Four Months in a Sneak-Box, it’s one of the classics of small boat sailing and can be read online here. Find out more about Nat Bishop and his amazing travels here.

It’s difficulty to guess how long this particular resource might remain available, so I’d suggest saving the text and drawings somewhere on your own computer – the home pages for this site are gone, which doesn’t bode at all well for the rest of the content.

1939 Hillyard 6-ton yawl for sale in Spain

1939 6-ton Hillyard gaff-rigged ketch for sale in Spain

•1939 6-ton Hillyard double-ended gaff-rigged yawl for sale in Spain

Also:

•36ft Frans Maas Breeon class sailing yacht for sale at Portland

•43ft Laurent Giles cutter for sale in Malta

•50ft larch on oak trawler yacht for sale in Waltham Abbey

•17ft wooden fishing boat project for sale in Torpoint, Cornwall

•1960s 15ft Simmonds aluminium speed boat for sale in St Neots

•23.4m Dutch barge for sale in Amsterdam

Ocean Pearl – zulu, fifie or baldie? Scots fishing boat expert Jay Cresswell explains

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Regular visitors will remember I recently put up a photo of Nick Gates’ boat Ocean Pearl, which he believed to be a zulu skiff because of her vertical stem and raked stern. I must say that I thought the same – and was very pleased to be able to publish a photo of her.

Nick acquired her as a motor-powered fishing boat some years ago, brought her back to a condition where she could again put to sea, and added a sailing rig. The result is that she’s a handsome vessel, as the earlier photo shows.

However, the ex-trawler skipper and authority on marine history Jay Cresswell, who has for many years lived near Aberdeen, recently saw the photos and got in touch to put the matter right.

It seems that Ocean Pearl’s stern is not sufficiently raked and that she was built too late to allow her to be called a zulu. In support of his point, Jay sent us a fistful of photos of zulus shot while he was trawling in the ’70s and ’80s.

I’ll let him explain.

‘If Ocean Pearl was berthed up here in the North-East of Scotland, there is little or no doubt that she would be regarded as a fifie and, to confuse the issue further, a yawl too.

‘The boat below is a case in point – a fifie called Poppy on the Caledonian Canal, and one with the same rake to her sternpost, give or take a degree.

Fifie in the Caledonian Canal

Fifie Poppy on the Caledonian Canal
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