An Old
Marlinspike: Dan, seeing that you spearheaded the 1980s rebuild of Ernestina, formerly Effie M. Morrissey, I thought it was wonderful that the Massachusetts DCR reached out to you for the rig design. Dan Moreland: That rebuild was an amazing experience. I was incredibly fortunate — and also fortunate in that back in the 1980s, there were a lot of living resources, a lot of memories, that now only live in me and a couple of other people. We’re it. I was just a young punk in the eighties, but I was a sponge and I knew I didn’t know... I was a squarerigger guy, not a big schooner guy, but I was fascinated. MS: And 40 years later it’s become your task to design the rig for this completely-rebuilt schooner. Who could be a better guy for the job? DM: There are certainly very capable people that can design them a nice rig for the vessel, but what they were seeking, quite naturally, is her original, most effective rig. And that is quite wise, because it’s easy to say, “We’ll improve it.” No, no — easy does it, mate! This was a very evolved rig, highly thought-out. There was nothing random or half-baked about it. It wasn’t guys that went to law school and then decided to buy a schooner or something. These guys, building and rigging and sailing schooners, that’s all they ever did. There was a very sharp pace of improvement [in the fish12
ing schooners] from the 1870s, 1880s on. Quite a bit of scientific effort had gone into it. There was the Collins Report, there was the building of the Grampus. That was the government, saying “we’ve got to make these boats better.” And they did. They ended up with a hull design which was deeper, more stable, but still carried a lot of fish, and ended up being faster — which of course the fishermen liked — without losing capacity. Fishing schooners like the Harry Belden and the Carrie Phillips were just immensely powerful vessels. Effie M. Morrissey was just one of those with a clipper bow, basically. She was a little bit simpler, she had sort of a flatter deadrise, and she wasn’t so hollow. And that makes you faster. It gives you more displacement, but no more weathered surface. These were very much peak-design vessels, between 1885 and 1905. You can’t beat these vessels. The ones that came later were making room for engines and they were getting sort of complicated, but they weren’t better. In my humble opinion, the peak proficiency in the design of the Gloucester fishing schooner was basically between 1890 and World War One. That’s when they reached their highest and most effective development… MS: You’re not a fan of the knockabout? DM: …then they started putting engines in. They just lengthened them in order to keep the same amount of fish hold, they just made them 20 feet longer. So now they went
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