Yacht Builders - Early Adopters

ecause of the highly competitive nature of yacht racing, whether at the club, national, or international levels, the yachting fraternity almost zealously embraces advances in small craft design and technology. Yacht builders and owners rush to incorporate new equipment, materials, and ideas. They act as enthusiastic, unofficial research and development partners. Commercial- or fishing-boat builders and operators are slower to adopt these same advantages. They use their vessels for business and must maintain complete reliability and trust. New fastenings, such as ring nails; new shapes like the deep Vee or planing hulls; or, in earlier times, the gaff-free Bermuda or the Marconi sailing rigs, were all found in recreational craft before fishing vessels. Not least among these technical changes was the adoption of glass reinforced plastic (GRP), more commonly called "fibreglass". The pleasure craft fraternity embraced fibreglass for sail and power boats in the late 1940s, and almost universally converted to the new material on both sides of the Atlantic by the mid-1950s.

New Materials in the Fishery

n 1961, Nova Scotia started to explore and promote the advantages of the new material in the fishery. The Nova Scotia Department of Industrial Development commissioned the building of a fibreglass inshore fishing boat. A contract was awarded to the Atlantic Bridge Company of Lunenburg. The new Cape Island style boat was designed by William Hines of the Department of Fisheries and was christened Cape Islander when it was completed in 1962. The Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries demonstrated the boat throughout the inshore fishery, allowing fishermen to use the vessel in selected areas, under varied conditions, and using various fishing technologies.

The vessel was not an instant success despite the benefits of the homogenous leak-free hull, low maintenance costs, and other apparent advantages. It seems the tradition-minded fishermen were unwilling to accept the new material. Some said it made alterations to the vessel difficult to achieve, while others claimed the material was too rigid and too hard on the legs of men spending longs hours at sea. After some years as a trial-horse, Cape Islander was retired to the government-owned Liscomb Lodge for use as a pleasure boat by tourists who wanted to go fishing. She has since been retired and can be seen in the collection of the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg.

Fibreglass

ibreglass boat hulls are built within a mould just as a jelly is moulded. First a full-sized hull, called a plug, must be built in the exact form and shape of the desired finished product. Since the plug is disposable, it can be built from a variety of materials. When completed, the important exterior surface of the plug is finished to the desired standard. It is covered with a coating of a wax-like release agent and a series of layers of fibreglass cloth and fibreglass matt, a less expensive felt-like material. Each layer is impregnated with a synthetic polymer resin that cures and hardens. When the desired thickness is achieved, the exterior of the mould is reinforced and made rigid and self-supporting. It is then divided at the centreline from the stemhead to transom cap. The mould is taken apart, and the plug is removed and discarded. The edges of the division are reinforced to make them remountable. A boat can now be built within the connected mould after waxing the interior of the mould, starting with a gel coat. The gel coat will form the exterior finish of the new hull. After the successive layers have been built up again and the chemicals have cured, the mould is separated, and the new hull removed for finishing.

A newer and more efficient method of producing hulls has almost universally replaced the hand lay-up of successive layers of impregnated fibreglass cloth and matt. Materials are now sprayed into the interior of the mould with a special gun that combines the resin and chopped strands of glass fibres. Sometimes a combination of the layer and spray methods is used.

Fibreglass and Wood

ibreglass boatbuilding is completely different from traditional wooden boatbuilding because the materials are completely different. Natural wood has been replaced with oil-based chemicals and mineral-based glass. There is no direct comparison between the materials, just as there is no direct comparison between the finished products. While they may look the same, the wooden boat is built from scores of interconnected components skillfully assembled by experienced hands from a carefully selected combination of woods, fastenings and protective materials. In contrast, the fibreglass hull is a completely homogenous entity, with no fastenings, openings or transitions throughout the structure. This means that maintenance is much reduced on the boats when they are new, although atmospheric elements and sun degrade their components in time.

The choice lies between a high-maintenance, traditional, reliable product and a low-maintenance, longer-lasting boat that most fishermen found more acceptable despite the fact it was less comfortable on the water. The homogenous hull is more rigid and does not "give" and flex with the sea as wooden craft do. In other words, fibreglass boats are less comfortable, but older fishermen who appreciated the wooden boats are more aware of this discomfort than younger men who have totally embraced the new technology.

Commercial Production of Fibreglass Boats Begins

fter 1962, almost a decade passed before anyone in Nova Scotia considered building fibreglass boats commercially. Reginald Ross of Clark's Harbour was a grandson and son of wooden-boat builders in Clark's Harbour. He launched his first fibreglass Cape Islander in 1971 and christened her Enterprises. She was 40 feet long overall, just 8 percent longer than Atlantic Bridge Company's Cape Islander, but almost 20 percent wider, illustrating the continuing trend in Cape Island boat design.

Ross built fibreglass fishing boats in quantity in the old Vimy movie theatre in Clark's Harbour which had been converted for the purpose. Notably, he hired two local women for part of his production staff. His first fibreglass boats were small, open-hulled craft, larger but similar to regional mossing boats. They were fitted with either outboard or small inboard engines. The small craft were forerunners of larger vessels, and when they were well received, Ross began to design their successor. Unlike traditional builders, he drew his design on paper. He then discussed his plans and the proposed idea with Ernest Atkinson. The plans of Enterprises can be seen in the Achelaus Smith Museum, Centreville, Cape Sable Island.

It is not known how Ross built his plug, but, in most cases, a plug was built like a boat with a supremely well-finished exterior. The plans were expanded to full size on the floor of the mould loft, and station moulds, or templates, were built. The templates were erected on a strong, keel-like back and planked over. There was no framing because the plug had only to be strong enough to be self-supporting.

Enterprises generated much local interest and, though the new fibreglass boats were much more expensive than their wooden counterparts, fourteen examples were built and sold from that first Cape Island hull mould. Ross' health unfortunately deteriorated, and he died prematurely. The doors of J.D. Ross Enterprises, the island's first fibreglass boat shop, closed forever in the mid 1970s.

Reginald Ross had done what the government had not been able to do, and interest in fibreglass Cape Islander boats rapidly increased. Hulls were soon being built in Dartmouth, and elsewhere in the province. Freebert Atkinson began finishing bare fibreglass hulls, following a mainly shipwright or carpentry process, but using fibreglass cloth and polyester resin to connect and protect the wooden portions of the structure. Freebert had gained enough experience by 1977 to start his own fibreglass boatbuilding shop. He built the hulls and also finished them, but, as his business increased, he concentrated on moulding hulls for other builders.

The rapid acceptance of fibreglass soon eclipsed the wooden boatbuilding industry. Like Freebert Atkinson, a few wooden boatbuilders retrained and began manufacturing boats in the new and strange chemical materials. They made a leap into a technology that was not an adaptation of the old, but a completely different method of building. Those too slow to make the transition were soon confronted with empty order books, and they quietly closed their doors. Occasionally, traditionally minded fishermen decided to stick with the much-trusted wooden craft and ordered new ones, but faith in tradition was not enough to sustain the old industry.

A parallel business developed at about the same time, and for a few years combined the old and new boatbuilding technologies. It was discovered that a covering of fibreglass cloth and resin over the outside of a wooden hull could give an old boat extended life, as well as lower maintenance costs. This enabled less affluent fishermen to obtain some of the benefits of a fibreglass boat at a much lower cost.

Fibreglass Boatbuilding Dominates

ibreglass boatbuilding expanded throughout the province to supply all the requirements for inshore fishing boats. Builders could be found in every area, but the heaviest concentration of fibreglass boat shops was to be found on Cape Sable Island where numbers rose to the extent that chemical and other suppliers were prompted to establish warehouses there. The new production process meant that operators had to be trained, and the trend started by Reginald Ross continued: builders employed increasing numbers of women. They were found in almost every boat shop, a place where women formerly had rarely been seen, and they were engaged in boat production. Before the adoption of fibreglass, women occasionally helped their husbands with the building of wooden boats. More frequently, they were found keeping the books or doing the paperwork for the small business. Now they actively moulded hulls - creating the boat.

The new material has enabled progressive builders to alter hull shapes and make changes that were prohibitively expensive or impossible when using wood. At least one innovative builder devised methods of constructing various sizes of fibreglass hulls within one convertible mould. Perhaps more significantly, traditional Cape Island hull shapes have changed only slightly since fibreglass has been introduced. They are wider, deeper, and have greater displacement, but essentially all this is done using the basic hull shape that has remained virtually unchanged for 60 years. The single, most constant characteristic is the flat aft run of the lines which has endured like a pedigree from the early power-boat hulls of Atkinson, Kenney and their followers.

These new hulls are virtually unrecognisable today, however, because they are hidden under modern enclosed wheelhouses, atop raised forecastles without cuddies. Some have extended hull platforms for extra capacity without breaking construction size rules; others have insulated holds under watertight decks that in turn allow open transoms. With sword-fishing towers and pulpits at the end of extended bowsprits, some new craft are almost completely new designs. But their owners and builders still cling proudly to the "Cape Island Boat" as their title and heritage.

Today fibreglass Cape Island boats completely dominate the inshore fishery. Whatever their guise, in small, almost traditional, styles used mainly for lobster fishing or as deep, fat, almost ungainly fishing machines fitted as seiners, scallop draggers, trawlers, longliners or swordfishermen, they can be found all along Canada's east coast.