Mystery Work Boat
Today’s photo comes to us from Lew Redwood’s fb, & show a very nice work boat towing a barge – the boat & location are unknown.
The barge has quite a crowd aboard, both females & males, so it must have been an outing / picnic.
Anyone able to ID the vessel for us, I wonder if she is still afloat?
Angus Rogers sent in the video below of a barrel cooper/hopper at work. Almost as such skill required as building a clinker dinghy.
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Yes, looks like a scow, about 70 long judging by the people on board. Are those three marks on the bow, her name.?..three letters, perhaps Ida, Era, May ??which like so many scows was deregistered and converted into a barge in the 1920’s.
Could be almost any river or inlet…Mahurangi, Mokau,…or anywhere!
Perhaps the photographer might give a clue.
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My Great-grandfather was a cooper in Gloucestershire. I’m sure he would have appreciated access to much of that machinery and mechanical advantage. Cooperage in his day would have been much more of an artisanal skill.
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Top pic might be Conrad taking the Robertson boatbuilding team for their Christmas party 🙂
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Corrected. Thanks.
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Thanks for that video…it brought back memories of watching my dad at work under our house in Ponsonby…..how he never set fire to the house I’ll never know……..the way he measured for the head size using a set of dividers is still a mystery to me and while he explained the formula many times it was too much for my very young brain to absorb and retain. And the amazing thing about the film was the brand at the end….almost looked like dad’s name (Schultz)…….couldn’t quite work out the last two letters……….however it definitely wasn’t him as he never had all that ‘new fangled machinery’ and his barrels were much more ‘hand made’
PS and I think you meant ‘cooper’ instead of ‘copper”
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Don’t know the boat or place, but it seems to be some kind of excursion or maritime celebration. The “barge” looks to be a de-rigged scow (Note the chine at the bow and the scow rudder) with a marquee set up on her deck. I’ll take a wild guess from the appearance of the launch towing the outfit and put the time in the 1930s??
Re “almost as much skill as building a clinker” – building a clinker what? 😉
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