13 minute read
Around the Yards
NORTHEAST
Massachusetts yard delivers 90-foot clammer; Maine boatshop building lobster-dragger combo
By Michael Crowley
Fairhaven Shipyard built the 90-foot clammer Joey D for Oceanside Marine. She was designed by Farrell & Norton Naval Architects.
Boricua Custom Boats is building the 44-foot Grin-N-Barrett as a combination lobster boat and dragger.
airhaven Shipyard in
FFairhaven, Mass., delivered the Joey D to Oceanside Marine at the beginning of October. The 90' x 28' clammer, designed by Farrell & Norton Naval Architects, is working out of Atlantic City, N.J., supplying clams to LaMonica Fine Foods.
“Basically they are upgrading their fl eet,” says Farrell & Norton’s Tom Farrell in New Castle, Maine. One diff erence between the Joey D and many other clammers is how the towing wire at the top of the gantry leads out to the drag. “A lot of boats have a fi xed sheave up there,” says Farrell, “that isn’t able to travel with the wire as it starts going outside the boat.” It’s a hard point that wears out the towing wear.
The solution was to go with a diff erent type of sheave, “a fairlead instead of a fi xed sheave to try to save the wire,” says Farrell. The “sheave will twist with the wire as the drag is being brought back into the boat or as it is being towed.”
When the clams come aboard, they end up in cages in the hold, which has a 44-cage capacity with possibly 12 more on deck. An 800-hp Cummins QSK18 powers the Joey D. That’s “an upgrade in power compared to their other boats,” says Farrell.
Currently, Farrell & Norton has two scallopers being built to their design. One is for Warren Alexander of Atlantic Shellfi sh at Jemison Marine in Bayou LaBatre and the other is for Eastern Fisheries at Duckworth Steel Boats in Tarpon Springs, Fla.
“People are defi nitely interested in building more,” Farrell says. “I think they are realizing that the fl eet is old.” Kevin McLaughlin at Fairhaven Shipyard would probably agree with that. While Fairhaven Shipyard has a number of commercial boats in for repairs, there hasn’t recently been a lot of interest in new boats. But now McLaughlin says he has “quite a few people interested in building new boats.” He’s talking with two parties interested in new scallopers and two wanting draggers. It “just gets down to the age. Those are older boats,” says McLaughlin of the existing New England fi shing fl eets.
In Steuben, Maine, it won’t be the usual Maine lobster boat that comes out of Boricua Custom Boats. Nope, when the 44' x 18' 10" Grin-N-Barrett, being built for Harrington’s Dean Barrett, emerges from the shop’s doors it won’t be just a lobster boat, but a combination lobster boat and dragger. It’s probably not a surprise that combining the two fi sheries on this 44-footer is taking place at Boricua Custom Boats. Moses Ortiz, the boatshop’s owner, says, “I like to do things diff erently.”
The hull started out as an Osmond 47 that its builder, H&H Marine, also in Steuben, shortened to 44 feet. “This is the fi rst one. There’s not another one like it,” says Ortiz. He is building her “light enough and strong enough” for both fi sheries.
The trawl winch will go between the wheelhouse and the front of the lobster tanks. That area of the deck is constructed with heavily fi berglassed ¾-inch Coosa Board with a ¼-inch stainless steel plate over it. Supporting posts are beneath the deck. “It will be very rugged in that area,” noted Ortiz.
He describes the changeover from one fi shery to another as “plug and play.” For bottom fi shing, the trawl winch will be bolted to the stainless steel plate. When it’s time for hauling lobster traps instead of a bottom trawl, the winch is removed and stored. Then ½-inch plastic bolts seal the winch plate’s bolt holes, “so nothing leaks into the engine room.”
On lobster boats, Ortiz normally runs a stainless steel plate the length of
Moses Ortiz
SOUTH
Chicken grow-out house doubles as a boatshop; Cecil Robbins 29 in for repairs at Virginia yard
By Larry Chowning
Sinepuxent Boatworks in Berlin, Md., delivered this 22-foot glass-over-wood skiff to a Chestertown, Md., waterman to trotline for blue crabs and to harvest catfish.
oey Miller of Sinepux-
Jent Boatworks of Berlin, Md., continues to turn out boat after boat inside a chicken grow-out house that he uses as his boatshop.
Throughout the south and over the years, this NF reporter has covered commercial fishing boats being built in deserted fertilizer plants, abandoned oyster shucking and vegetable packing buildings, seine storage sheds, Quonset huts, hay and tobacco barns, inside the family car garage, and under the sky in the backyard. A chicken grow-out house is a bit different but it just goes to show a good boatbuilder can build a quality boat most anywhere.
In August, Miller delivered a 22' x 9' glass-over-wood deadrise skiff to Matt Strong of Chestertown, Md. Strong is working the skiff in Maryland’s blue crab trotline fishery and to harvest catfish.
The keel and frames on the skiff are made of fir, and frames are set on 20-inch centers. The sides are strip-planked with 1-inch-wide juniper fastened with stainless steel ring shank nails driven every 8 inches. The bottom is made of 1/2-inch fir plywood, and bow deck and washboards out of 3/4-inch fir plywood. The bottom is glassed with 1708 biaxial fiberglass cloth and epoxy. The bow deck, washboards and floor (ceiling) are glassed with 1-1/2-ounce mat and epoxy. Miller delivered the boat unpainted as Strong finished off the skiff himself. The boat is powered by a 90-hp Suzuki outboard.
At his shop, Miller currently has 25-, 30- and 32-foot deadrise boats underway for sport fishermen. “I’m seeing more demand for sportfishing boats than commercial fishing boats,” says Miller. “I’m a former commercial waterman. I know their challenge. I wish more commercial watermen could afford new boats.”
Myles Cockrell of Cockrell’s Marine Railway in Heathsville, Va., has several commercial fishing boats at his yard there for repair and has an order to build an aluminum “davit” fish bailer rig for a pound net fisherman.
A Cecil Robbins-built fiberglass 29-footer is inside Cockrell’s boatshop for repair. Before retiring from the trade, Robbins built quality wooden and fiberglass boats in the late 1990s at his shop at Drawbridge, Md. The Robbins 29 belongs to waterman Jimmy Foster of Virginia’s Northern Neck. He had Cockrell reduce the engine box size and repair the Cummins Diesel engine.
To reduce the size of the box, Cockrell had to reconfigure the exhaust system. A large portion of the exhaust was mounted above the floorboards (ceiling), which limited floor space and got in the way of work and storing payload. Cockrell, using fiberglass conduit elbows, reconfigured the exhaust so it is now located below the ceiling. “This enabled us to open up more floor space and shorten the engine box, which gives Jimmy more workspace inside the boat,” says Cockrell.
Foster uses the boat, named Addy G., to fish crab pots and dredge oysters. The boat is powered by a 270-hp 5.9BTA Cummins Diesel engine. Cockrell is installing six new fuel injectors, rebuilding the injection pump and installing a new fuel lift pump.
Inside the yard’s covered railway is the sailing skipjack Claud W. Somers owned by the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum of Reedville, Va. Cockrell installed two new bottom planks on the boat and shored up the area around the mask for an
Larry Chowning
The skipjack Claud W. Somers was on the rails at Cockrell's Marine Railway in Heathsville, Va., for replacement of two bottom planks and other repairs.
upcoming U.S. Coast Guard inspection.
The Claud W. Somers, built in 1911 at Young’s Creek, Va., by W. Thomas Young, is used by the museum to carry charters and as an education boat. It was named to the National Register of Historic Places in Maryland in 1985 and in Virginia 2005.
WEST
A gillnetter with a very different wheelhouse; good-bye hatches, hello manholes
By Michael Crowley
he last time Jeff Johnson at
TPeregrine Boats in Chugiak, Alaska, built a Bristol Bay gillnetter like the one that’s currently under construction was 23 years ago. That was for Kim Mikkelsen, the father of Caleb Mikkelsen, a Palmer, Alaska, fisherman who is having the current boat built.
The 32' x 15' gillnetter has similarities to the bow- and stern-picker style that features an elevated wheelhouse on deck stanchions, with the reel passes beneath the wheelhouse as it goes from bow to stern. The reel turns 180 degrees so it can fish off either end.
Johnson built an elevated wheelhouse design for the 2020 Bristol Bay season and a pair for the 2019 season, after not building one for 20 years. But Mikkelsen’s bow and stern picker “is a little different,” Johnson says.
It features a 5-foot-wide by 9-footlong wheelhouse not on stanchions over the deck but built on the side of the deck with the reel passing next to it, as it travels between the bow and stern.
Mounting the wheelhouse on one side of the boat “provides quite a bit more deck space since there aren’t a pair of 3' 6" x 4' deck stanchions taking up space,” says Johnson. In addition there’s not the
Hansen Boat Co. Peregrine Boats’ new Bristol Bay gillnetter features a net reel that travels bow to stern in the tracks on the deck.
blind spot of not being able to see the deck beneath the stanchion-mounted wheelhouse, and with the wheelhouse on deck there’s less windage. Johnson says, he “doesn’t know if anyone else has recently built a similar boat.”
The wheelhouse will have windows all the way around, a rain-gear locker and a head. In the fo’c’sle will be four bunks, a head and a small galley. This gillnetter is designed to fish in very shallow water. It has a 15-foot beam on deck as well as on the bottom, with only a 4-degree V. “It’s super shallow. He’s hoping to get 2 inches less draft than the guy next to him and fish in 14 inches (of water),” says Johnson.
In the engine room will be a pair of 550-hp 6.7-liter Fiats matched up with 18-inch Traktor Jets, which should be enough power to get up to the mid30 mph range and on step with 10,000 pounds aboard. The fish hold has a 24,000-pound capacity.
At Hansen Boat Co. in Everett, Wash., the 105-foot Royal American, which the boatyard built in 1980 and sponsoned about 15 years ago, was in the dry dock for a deck alteration that Hansen Boat’s Rick Hansen says, “I’ve never seen done before.”
The Royal American, which is basically a pollock boat, had three fish holds, each with a large steel hatch cover. Like most steel hatch covers, these get beat up, leak and occasionally have to be rebuilt. Well, no more because those hatch covers are no longer there. “The owners just said, forget it and deck them over,” says Hansen. Thus the holds were decked over and in place of the three deck hatches are
three 24-inch manhole covers.
With the manhole covers, there’s “less chance of leakage into the tanks and a nice smooth surface for bringing the nets up and pushing fi sh around” and into the holes, says Hansen. The pollock, which are fl oating in seawater in the fi sh holds, will be pumped out. While the Royal American was in the dry dock the tail shaft and shaft bearings were replaced.
Also into Hansen Boat was the Odin, a 58-foot combination boat out of Petersburg, Alaska, that was hauled to have the bottom checked over. Due into Hansen Boat this coming April is another older dragger, the 95-foot Nordic Fury, which was built by Martinolich Shipbuilding in Tacoma, Wash., in 1972, as a crabber but was then sponsoned 20 years ago and turned into a dragger. Not long after the sponsoning, Hansen Boat replaced the wheelhouse. “Now they come in every two years to do a haul-out,” Hansen says.
Speaking in general of the larger commercial fi shing boats that show up regularly at the Everett boatyard, Hansen says, “These guys, every two years they dump a lot of money into the boats to keep them moving.”
Around the Yards: Northeast
Continued from page 34
the starboard washboard, making that section of the hull, “pretty much unbreakable,” he says. Where the trawl doors will be situated, the underside of the starboard and port washboard’s last 5 feet are being heavily fi berglassed.
The split wheelhouse has dual steering stations. In the engine room is a 1,000-hp MAN, and aft of the engine room the fi sh hold has a 36-crate capacity for lobsters. Up forward are a hydraulic room, four bunks, a microwave and spaces for toolboxes.
Around the Yards: South
Continued from page 35
Pound “trap” net fi sherman Thomas Gaskins of Northumberland County, Va., has an order for a new aluminum “davit” fi sh bailing rig. The new one will be modeled after one made of steel that Gaskins is currently using. Chesapeake Bay trap fi shermen use a variety of one-off bailing systems to bail fi sh out of the head, or main fi sh pocket of the net.
Variations of hauling systems, usually powered off main engines of boats, are used to lift heavy dipnets loaded with fi sh from the pound net head and then dropped into the bottom of a carry-away boat.
On a fi nal note, Edward Nelson Diggs of Mathews County, Va., died on Nov. 26 at the age of 93. One of the last of Virginia’s old-time wooden boatbuilders, Diggs’ fi rst recollection of being a part of the trade was as a boy in early 1930s, where in his backyard he would blow sawdust from his father’s saw mark.
He learned the wooden boatbuilding trade from his father, Edgar, and his father’s boatbuilding partner, Ned Hudgins. Most of his life, Diggs built wooden boats of some kind. After retiring from building commercial fi shing boats in the late 1990s at Horn Harbor Railway, he built boat models and fl at-bottom and deadrise skiff s in his garage at his home in Redart, Va. Late in life, he took up the game of golf and was darn good.
His boatbuilding legacy will live on for generations as anyone with knowledge of Chesapeake Bay wooden deadrise boats will certainly confi rm that Edward Diggs built some of the prettiest, sturdiest workboats on the bay. Always a gentleman, soft-spoken, and always taking time to talk, he welcomed any arrival to his boatshop or at his home in a kind and friendly way. Amen!
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