Mike Smylie
The 50′ Zulu ST. VINCENT of 1910 (left) and the 37′ Lochfyne skiff CLAN GORDON of 1911 (right) were relaunched in spring 2023 within a week of each other; within days, they joined for their first sail together out of Loch Broom in northwestern Scotland, bound for the Summer Isles.
Halfway down the hill on a walk to a small boatyard in Corry, near Ullapool on Loch Broom on the northwestern coast of Scotland, it’s the smell that hits you first—“boat soup,” as they call it: pine tar, linseed oil, and turpentine. The proper stuff for wood. On May 6, 2023, the scent seemed to hang off the trees and settle on each blade of grass. Like the aroma of oakum, it was pungent yet delightful. Then, as I turned the corner past salmon-farm buildings, suddenly the boat on the ways towered over the bunting, over everything. Two huge masts with two huge, dark-red lugsails hanging limp over a black hull spoke of tradition in every respect.
This was relaunching day for the 1910 herring fishing boat ST. VINCENT, 50′ from stem to transom, after her restoration by Dan Johnson and Tim Loftus and their team at Johnson & Loftus Boatyard. And even as she stood on the marine railway, another historic fishing boat with deep roots in the west of Scotland, CLAN GORDON of 1911, lay to a mooring just off Johnson & Loftus, where she had arrived under sail a couple of days before. She had been relaunched on April 29 after a full restoration at Isle Ewe Boats, Alasdair Grant’s boatyard on the island of that name in Loch Ewe, west of Loch Broom.