GLEANER
Below: Sailing at
Douarnenez in
2018, with musical
friends on boardT
he big old wooden boat looked an unpromising
sight as I peered down at her, as she was lying
alongside Penryn town quay, on the south coast
of Cornwall. Her deck was cluttered with ropes
and chain lying in seemingly random piles, and a pair
of boat’s legs and a water-filled canoe were scattered
to one side. For a few minutes, I wondered if I was
wasting my time. This formerly mighty Cornish lugger
was said to be the last surviving Lowestoft drifter, rescued
from almost certain destruction in Germany, dismantled
and transported in parts back to Cornwall, and then
painstakingly reassembled on a beach in Penryn. But,
I mused, standing there on the quay, perhaps all that
was nothing more than a romantic story; perhaps she
was more wreck than boat.
However, after a couple of cups of coffee, owner
Spike Davies and friends started sorting through the
debris; the anchor chain was stowed below decks, the
rope coiled and the canoe and legs neatly stacked. The
ancient Lister engine was fired up, the lines released, and
we headed down the Penryn River with a satisfying
chug-chug from the exhaust. It was glassy calm and
sunny, an idyllic autumn day – but too windless to sail.
So, while we waited for the breeze to come, Spike filled
me in on the boat’s surprising history.
Built at the yard of Richard Kitto in Porthleven,
Cornwall, in 1878 (that’s a year before the light bulb
was invented), Gleaner was an early example a new style
of drifter, with an elliptical stern and carvel hull. She
probably wore the ‘dandy’ rig, a hybrid of lug and gaff,
which was fashionable at the time. Apart from that,
there was little to distinguish her from the hundreds of
wooden sailing drifters operating from her home port of
Lowestoft in Suffolk (see panel, p10).
Gleaner went through a string of owners during her
first 15 years in England, before being sold to Norway.
Initially based at Skudeneshavn, in south-western
Norway, she again had a succession of owners, gradually
working her way north until she ended up in Holevik at
the north-western tip of Norway in 1939. She was
probably fitted with her first engine, a 20hp Askøy,
sometime between 1912 and 1919. By 1962, she was
stationed in the Faroe Islands and owned by Ivo Iversen.
Her rig was correspondingly reduced, and pictures of her
at this time show a modest gaff ketch configuration.KEEPING THE FAITH
Sometime between 1978 and 1980, she was bought
by a pair of priests, who planned to use her for ‘Church
youth work’, and who commissioned German
shipwright Stephan Karsten (aka Stefan Kiesow) to
make the necessary repairs. Inevitably, the work turned
out to be more extensive than initially realised, and,
when the priests ran out of money, Karsten ended up
taking on the project himself. Wooden boat enthusiast
(and the boat’s eventual saviour) Elmar Specht visited
the boat at this time.
“It was a marvellous scene in a shipyard called
Schnalles Harbour at the entrance of Hamburg,” he
writes. “She was standing at the hillside close to the
Elbe shore. Over her stern – or what [w]ould in future
be her stern – you could see the ships going into
Hamburg. The place was so nice that many peoplecame, and it was often nicer to have a beer than to
go on. Work stagnated. Stephan’s wife worked for
a living, and he for the boat. The couple divorced.
The boatbuilder became depressed and committed
suicide. If Shakespeare had written about boat
restorations, he couldn’t have invented a better drama.”
Gleaner entered the new millennium (and her third
century) with no owner, until Bernard Lang stepped
up and bought her in return for the yard fees. The new
owner was clearly of a romantic rather than practical
nature, and did little or no work on the boat. After six
years, he was forced to move the whole operation when
a leak from a neighbouring oil refinery flooded the
boatyard and threatened to flow into the Elbe. Gleaner
was put on a barge and carried up the river to the nearby
town of Stade, where the Technology and Transport
Museum had been set up by a band of enthusiasts.
An enormous lean-to with its own storeroom/tea-shed
was built, but once again no work was actually
undertaken on the boat itself.
Lang vanished and Gleaner languished, apparently
abandoned, until in 2012 the local council decided it
wanted to develop the site into a supermarket complex.
The whole museum was moved 100km (62 miles) away,
but the council had no interest in transporting an old,
half-restored wooden boat to the new site. Instead, it
announced that, unless the ‘Schoner’, as they called
Gleaner, in German, was moved by a certain date,
it would be demolished.
Spike Davies hadn’t even been born by the year
Gleaner was first taken out of the water in Germany.
His parents were living on the 37ft (11.3m) East Coast
smack Ibis in Penryn when he was born in 1983, and
soon after acquired another wooden boat, the 44ft
(13.4m) Mount’s Bay lugger Snowdrop. When they
separated a few years later, his mother Helen kept the
smack and his father Chris kept the lugger. Spike spent
most of his childhood living between these two boats
and on a Silhouette MkII that he and his father
converted into an annexe. For his 18th birthday, he was
given a dilapidated 1945 Belgian fishing boat, which he
and his girlfriend restored and sailed to the Caribbean
and back, before selling her and dividing the proceeds.
Davies was in between boats when Falmouth
boatbuilder Ashley Butler sent him photos of an old boat