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My Boat. (20/07/04) | |
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The following two stories are fictional works, based on loose facts, by The Hawk Road. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had moved from Newellton to Clarks Harbour, and was just getting by building houses. As the need for a carpenter's hand became scarce, I tinkered around building dories and was amazed at how much I enjoyed it. I dove into the work, and soon found myself buying Charlie Kenney's boat-shop on the Clarks Harbour waterfront. Most of my boats were flat-bottomed and sail-driven, about twenty feet long with a pointed stern. I had heard that a jeweler in Chester, Hawbolt I think his name was, had succeeded in sticking a gasoline motor in a boat, the first recorded case in Nova Scotia. It was said that after he cruised around his home harbour, he was hoisted on the waiting mens' shoulders at the wharf and carried the whole way home. He had made wooden patterns, cast the cylinder and crankcase, and machined the fittings... a local triumph, to say the least! When I was approached in 1905 by a sharp-dressed fellow from Saint John, New Brunswick, and asked to build a power boat using his own blueprints, I happily accepted. About a year later, the vessel was completed, sporting a twin-cylinder "make or break" gasoline engine. The motor was crude and unreliable by current standards, but I was proud just the same. After that job was completed, I started reflecting on the ways it could be improved on to sell to the local fisherman. Cape Sable Island relied on the fishing industry, and although the boat I'd just finished had sides that were too high for fishing use, I had a few ideas. My next design defined the hull shape that would stay relatively the same for many, many years. This "Cape Island Trawler", with its oak keel and hackmatack hull and deck, was stable and could brave the worst weather Mother Nature had to offer. It was a tough and long-lasting boat, and often would sell for more after thirty years of use then it cost to build. Myself, I thought it was a damn fine boat, and over the years I listened to the fishermen that would hang out at my shop, making small changes suggested by them to fine-tune the Cape Islander to perfection. In 1926, I sold a Cape Islander to William Frost from Maine, the grandfather of famous marine designer Royal Lowell. This boat quickly gained respect and admiration, and was the model of what would become the "Downeast Lobster Boat". Today, 80% of Nova Scotia's fishing fleet under sixty feet long are Cape Islanders, proof of their toughness and capability. Thousands of my boats have been built in the last decade alone, although they are now made of fiberglass instead of wood, and are pretty much the standard for lobster fishermen from Labrador to the West Indies. If you see Bill, don't listen to him. He's been trying to take credit for my boat since the beginning. We used to get in arguments about who designed it first, but now we just look at the ground when we pass each other. My name is Ephraim Atkinson, and I built the first Cape Island fishing boat. |
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