Well smack

Well smack

ca.1775-1875 also known as cod boat: a 50-foot gaff cutter welled smack used for long-lining for cod, ling, turbot and other bottom-living sea fish.

ca.1875-1920 they were extended to make 80-foot gaff ketches, sometimes by the cut-and-shut procedure. Some were built as new 80-ft welled smacks; some were turned into dry ships for use with ice.

These smacks were heavy-hulled, buoyant fore and aft, with the well contained amidships. Augur holes were drilled in the sides of the hull so that water could flow freely for re-oxygenation. Fish placed in the well could then be carried upriver to market (from 1750 especially Billingsgate, London; from 1900 the Faroes) in fresh condition. The swim bladders of the fish had to be pierced to prevent them from floating. Turbot and other flatfish had to be suspended on thin rope to prevent them from clogging the augur holes.

From about 1854 the Thames was too polluted for the use of welled smacks, and fish had to be left in floating cod boxes in the Thames estuary near Ipswich. Many fishermen moved out of Thames fishing ports such as Barking, and went to the east coast, especially to Grimsby and Lowestoft. Some cod boats, including some welled smacks, did continue to fish out of Barking until around 1900. However most continued to carry the Port of London port-registration LO.

Until the 1870s these smacks used to travel from London to Iceland in summer, and return via North Sea ports, including Holland. From the 1870s those which were converted to dry ketches were used in fleeting in the North Sea, especially in the Silver Pits. From 1900 the last welled smacks were sold to the Faroe Islands. The last welled smacks sank in the Faroes in about 1920.

These ships were considered safe and stable by their crews, according to the Faroes crewmen who remembered sailing in them before 1920.

There is no way today of seeing or touching a welled smack, apart from the drawings, and a fuzzy, distant photo or two, in Edgar J. March's 1950 book (see below). There is no film, photo of the deck, marine wreck site or souvenir anywhere to be seen. A welled smack should be easily identifiable at a wreck site due to the unusually heavy hull-construction around the well. There may be one copy of a Faroese film of sou-westered fishermen on the rolling deck of a welled smack, pricking swim-bladders and placing the fish in the well - but one cannot check because it is not available to researchers.

Reference: Edgar J. March, Sailing Trawlers (1950); also my own research.

Storye Book--213.162.110.32 18:17, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)