Port Isaac’s boats
Interviewer – Barbara: So how many boats would there be in the Harbour then?
Dennis: About 15 or 16 there was more than that before but in the 1950’s about 15.
Interviewer – Barbara: 15 boats.
Dennis: They started from about boats 17 – 18 foot up to 32 foot something like that. The Winifred and The Blue Moss which ended up in Jan’s Father’s yard in the pig’s house.
Janet: Lovely pig’s house that was.
Dennis: Canadian Lifeboat
Janet: Wasn’t it a lifeboat off one of the Liners.
Dennis: I think it was fairly big boat wasn’t it double diagonal wasn’t it, you know when the planks are that way (Dennis is crossing his arms) as opposed to being clinker or carval
Janet: I think somebody said once it was the lifeboat off the Lusitania
Dennis: could have been, Billy Pom Pom bought her and I think Fred Ball fitted her up.
Janet: Fred Ball did. When they put the housing on the top, didn’t it make it top heavy.
Dennis: She only had a little tiny wheelhouse. I got a picture over here somewhere. See she rolled, lifeboats are like that there (Dennis is showing with his hands a rounded bottom to the boat) but you can stop that you can put ballast in the bottom. They had these pig irons, they had bleddy great lumps of pig iron with hessian underneath ’em otherwise they would rust the wood out, put ’em the bottom on boards, they would move the ballast from one to the other. Course then when they went herring fishing they had to take all the ballast out, because the weight of the nets replaced the ballast weight, they were always damp all the time.