Of Boats on the Collar
by Hilda Chaulk Murray

In Elliston by the 1920s, upwardly mobile fishermen had acquired traps, necessitating changes in the boats they used for this type of fishing. Because of its function the trap boat or trap skiff was an open boat with its lowest section being amidship. Built first as a sailing boat, it carried one or two sails. The masts were movable, and each was secured by passing it through a semicircular hole in a thwart — the circular hole for the mast was completed by an iron band — and then fitting it into a hole its exact size and shape in the “kelson” on the bottom of the boat. When they were not in use, the sails were furled and laid to one side. Oars and the sculling oar were also standard equipment in a trap boat. However, it was steered by a rudder when under sail. Many trap boats, even when they were fitted with engines, retained their sails, and the oars and sculling oar remained essential equipment. Fishermen were not going to travel miles from shore trusting to a marine engine only. I remember the masts, the oars, and the sculling oar, in my father’s and uncle’s boat in the 1940s and ’50s.

We must keep in mind the fact that the type of boat used by a fisherman depended on the scale of his fishing operation. In the same community it was possible to find seine boats, small, open handline punts, trap skiffs, and decked or semi-decked bullies, in the days before the marine “make-and-break” engine was introduced. However, the marine engine did not herald a new-type boat. Often a fishing crew used the boat they already had, and if changes were necessary to accommodate the engine, these were only made in the “after” part of the boat, nowhere else. A motorboat needed a heavier sternpost to accommodate the shaft from the engine, and a square stern had to be altered to a transom stern because of the propellers.

Boat-builders are often very conservative because they have to deal with the safety of the men who go in the boats. They are not fools, however, and new ideas have always been considered and worked into their designs. These ideas have come from all directions and at any time. Here and there geographical conditions, scarcity of materials, or simple poverty, have led to the survival of very ancient forms of boats, but these instances have not affected the universal trends of evolution and amalgamation. The boat-builder carried on the tradition of his father or uncle or whoever it may be. Generation after generation the simple design and the manner in which it is to be turned into a boat is carried in their heads. A successful type of hull shape may be handed down in this way for 2000 years or more. It does not follow, however, that something else in that boat form has not altered. Only the very simplest elements in it are more or less static. (T. C. Lethbridge, Boats and Boatmen (London. New York, 1952), 7.)