[ANON POST] Historical fishing boats and crossing the English Channel

[kutsuwamushi]

Here's the situation: I am trying to get my characters from Dover, Kent (of white cliffs fame) across the English Channel to France. Setting is late 19th century, but for various reasons, the ferries/mail packets are not an option. My working assumption is that they can find a fisherman with a boat that can make the crossing if they offer him

Comments

[stormwreath]

This page has dozens of old photographs of Folkestone harbour from 1880 to the present, and gives a very good idea of the kind of boats fishermen were using:

http://bbhilda.topcities.com/Folkestone/FolkestoneFishingIndustry.html

Folkestone is only ten miles down the road from Dover, so I imagine the general look will be very similar! Note that Folkestone was a fishing port, while Dover itself was more of a commercial port for big steamers, so it might actually be more realistic for your character to go there if it's important to use a small fishing boat.

A fishing lugger, the type of boat shown in the older pictures, was around 40 feet long and 20 tons displacement. Two masts, with a decked-over cabin at the front and the rest of the boat open. Crew would normally be four to six. There were also a lot of much smaller fishing boats used - the open boats with a single mast - which would normally only have two people on board. They'd stick to the coast rather than heading out to sea.

Main types of fish caught (note; this is based on a modern source., I don't know how accurate it would be for the 19th century):

Summer: dover sole, bass, mackerel.
Winter: herring, cod, shellfish.
Year-round: brill, turbot, pollock.

[stormwreath]

All of those old photos are absolutely wonderful! Thank you so much.

It's not important what kind of a boat they ultimately end up on. The real issue is that it's the middle of the night, they need to get to France ASAP, and the next ferry is not leaving until the morning. I thought that, since they are in a port (albeit a commercial one rather than a fishing one, as you pointed out), there must be SOMEBODY with a boat that they can convince to take them across if they throw enough money at him.

Fishing lugger is officially going on the research list. Do you think a smaller boat with only two or three people as crew could make the crossing, or would you have to be crazy to try? (Presumably the hypothetical fisherman is not going to want to endanger his livelihood no matter how much they pay him, after all.)

[dorsetgirl]

Do you think a smaller boat with only two or three people as crew could make the crossing, or would you have to be crazy to try?

it's only twenty-odd miles, and at that time they didn't have to worry about crossing endless streams of container ships with Liberian flags of convenience failing to keep adequate watch. I'm not an expert but I really don't think a competent fisherman is going to worry about crossing the channel as long as he's got enough people to work the ship, which I think is pretty much 2-3 people anyway for a fishing boat (the others are there to haul nets etc). You basically need one to steer, one to run around getting sails up and down and one spare.

Your fisherman knows the tides, he knows the waters in all weathers, and I reckon he knows half a dozen ports on the other side if only by repute.

[stormwreath]

Thanks! That's sort of what I figured, but the whole never-saw-the-ocean-till-a-teenager thing makes me doubt my instincts when it comes to boats and sailing.

[dorsetgirl]

That's understandable. I've got the opposite problem - I was brought up by the sea, my forebears all went to sea, and I did a lot of sailing myself in my twenties and early thirties, but I've never been on a fishing boat or worked a passage, so I have all these instinctive answers that I can't back up with facts!

Oh and by the way, we don't have ocean here! In general we have "sea", and the English Channel is usually just referred to as "the Channel" unless there could be some doubt about which channel is meant.