A boat in every harbour

In France at the beginning of the century, three enrolled sailors out of five, and one boat out of two were Breton. Thousands of sailing boats, of all sizes and with all sorts of rigging, filled the harbours of the littoral, practising fishing, coastal shipping, and sailing for pleasure. Each harbour, big or little, fitted out its own flottila, which was adapted to the type of work and the local conditions for navigation. Trawls, "bolinches", pots, fishing lines, nets, and "palangres" (fixed cords with hooks on them) differenciate each type of fishing boat, but each have in common the deep hull well protected behind in order to counter the swell and to tack between the rocks.

In the 30s, the navy got through a decisive stage with the appearance of the diesel engine, which fishers judged a priori to be too noisy and very expensive. The size of the first wooden trawlers, the "malamoks", which were about fifteen metres long, increased gradually as the men enlarged their fishing zones, reaching in the 60s a size of 35 to 38 metres.

2650 fishing vessels are still registered in Brittany, that is to say 50% of the national tonnage. The Breton fleet, extremely diversified, brings together all types of boat, from the gigantic deep-freezing ships to the modest motorboat used for the traditional coastline fishing, which is inseparable from the breton landscape.
After countless hours of navigation at sea, the last working sailing ships laid up in the 60s, finishing their long journeys at the bottom of the estuaries.

In a state of neglect, this memorable flottila could have been layed to waste if it hadn't been for the intervention of a few enthusiasts, worried about preserving the vestiges of the maritime past. Various associations soon took over, with the aim of making these traditional boats live and navigate again in their birth waters. They won over the Regional Federation for Maritime Culture, and the public, who after having turned its back on the sea, now discovers again the wealth of this buried heritage, revealing a once major economic activity.

A croncrete manifestation of this movement of great scale was the competition "Boats of the Coasts of France", which allowed the participation of a greater number of people in a maritime culture which had up till then been reserved for the initiated. "A boat in every harbour", this was the challenge launched in 1989 by the magazine "Chasse-Marée, by Ouest-France and the "Marin" (sailor), to all groups wishing to participate in the construction or the restoration of a sailing boat representative of the local tradition. It was a very ambitious challenge, since the volunteers had no definite plans at their disposal. In fact, the construction of boats has always depended on the empiricism, the experience and the instinct of the carpenters of the navy.

In the cemeteries where the sailing boats lay at rest, some discovered hulls that had been hastily condemned. Others rummaged through chapels, museums and lofts in search of paintings, half-hulls, or logbooks. They gathered, at last, the accounts of the last survivors of this great period. From this patient research were born new boatyards of reconstruction. Often implanted in the centre of harbours, these boatyards incited the enthusiasm of the population, right up to the glorious day of the launching of the boat in the old way on wooden rails greased with animal fat. In this way, the sailors have been able to get back in touch with the ancestral manoeuvres which they had to learn again.