Couta boat country

Travelling from Melbourne to Sorrento involves more than just mileage; there seems to be a change in the atmosphere as you head south, deep into the Mornington Peninsula. By the time you reach Sorrento the city's tensions are far behind; there's a bracing ocean tang in the air and a holiday spirit amongst the smart-casually dressed shoppers in the main street. From the road, you get little more than a glimpse of the holiday mansions hidden amidst the sand dunes and tea-tree; it's not until you're afloat that the level of waterfront luxury is revealed.

There's a further surprise in store when you do reach the waterfront. Standing on the deck of the Sorrento Sailing Club, for example, can invoke the impression that you have entered not only a different atmosphere, but also a different time. Resting at their moorings in the bay below are dozens of traditionally-styled, open gaff-rigged boats. If not for the vividly blue sky and sea and some of the more ostentatious residences around the shore, this could be a sepia-toned photo pre-dating World War II.

Most of the boats share strong similarities: the long bowsprits; curved, plumb bows; beamy, dish-shaped hulls; round coamings and wide, planked decks. These are the Couta boats which have become so much a part of the Sorrento scene. Some are truly historic, dating back to the earliest days of this homegrown Victorian craft, originally developed from pre-1900 to the 1930s as a commercial sailing fishing boat working out of Queenscliff, on the opposite side of Port Phillip Heads, and elsewhere around the rugged Victorian coast. Others of these craft are near-new, but built absolutely in the traditional Couta boat style, reflecting a growing fervour to go back to the future.

Acknowledgement of the strength of this movement lies in the fact that the Sorrento Sailing Club now shares its premises with the Couta Boat Club, which calls itself "an association of enthusiasts dedicated to preserving these fishing work boats and the excitement of the era of sail. Especially the regatta days when crowds of locals and visitors would gather to see competing boats."

According to the CBC, its primary objective is "the revival, restoration and preservation of these craft and their heritage".

This is also the stated principal objective of The Wooden Boatshop, situated not far from Sorrento's main street. Tim Phillips and his wife Sally run the company, which for 20 years has been a driving force behind the Couta boat phenomenon. In the process, they have shared in the success of the revival and Tim Phillips has become something of a guru in wooden and classic boat circles.

"My particular influence is sailing fishing boats rather than yachts," he explains. "I've never been particularly interested in racing yachts. I like some of the classic yachts, but for 100 years fashion has got in the way of design. I've never been super-keen on later yachts, especially the ones in the 1970s."

HOME OF THE COUTA BOAT
Phillips says he got his start working with Ken Lacco, one of the best-known members of a family long associated with Couta boats. "Ken was really the doyen of the fishing boat designers and builders in Victoria," Phillips says. "He's 88 now, and he's well".

According to the Wooden Boatshop's website (www.woodenboatshop.com.au), a defining moment for Phillips was when he first spotted Mermerus sailing in Port Phillip Bay, then one of only two Couta boats still afloat. She had been built in 1938 by Ken Lacco.

According to this account, Phillips was inspired to turn his boatbuilding skills to the preservation and restoration of the Couta boat fleet of Port Phillip Bay, enlisting considerable assistance from Lacco and other Couta boat enthusiasts.

Another strong early influence Phillips mentions is Jack Norling: "a fisherman-come-boatbuilder who imparted a lot of information to us."

Given the Wooden Boatshop's emphasis on older-style boats, and the salty sea shanties that play on the company's recorded telephone message, you might expect the yard to be some sort of dusty throwback to the old days. In fact, it's a very big, very busy hive of activity, with two mobile hoists moving boats around three crowded hardstand areas, a long line of Couta boats being painted and spruced up for the start of the summer sailing season, and construction and restoration projects underway in two separate sheds and another covered area. There are boats of all descriptions, except that all are built of wood. There's not a scrap of fibreglass to be seen anywhere, nor the familiar toxic smell of GRP production boatbuilding. In various corners lie neglected hulks awaiting restoration, while the finishing touches are being applied to a brand new Couta boat called the Camilla Rose.

Shipwright Wayne Parr proudly explains that the new boat has been built of Huon pine planking with celery top ribs. "The boats are completely traditionally built with copper nails, copper rivets and what have you. We try to avoid modern glues as much as possible, but where a modern material will make a better job, such as the seaming of the decks and bedding compounds (we use Sikaflex to bed floor timbers and knees and things like that), it's so much better than just painting something and fitting it as they would have done in the old days, to get that physical barrier between the layers of timber to keep the water out. It makes the boats last so much longer.

"The hulls aren't caulked, they're all fitted planks. This boat will go in the water and it'll take up just like a barrel does and it won't leak. To fully take up will probably take a couple of weeks - you can't sail the boat too hard until then, otherwise the nails work."

Camilla Rose is a 26ft 6in Couta boat, the most common size. But Parr explains: "They go all the way down to 18ft; some are much smaller but they're still Couta boats built for catching fish under sail. The bigger boats are generally what we call the Queenscliff type Couta boat... nice, big deep, wedgy sailing boats, built to sail fast and carry a load in pretty nasty conditions all year around on Bass Strait, so they are a very, very seaworthy boat.

Tim Phillips says the Camilla Rose is the 28th new Couta boat to be built at the Wooden Boatshop, with work due to begin immediately on the 29th one.

"The Couta boats are going really well," he says. "We've just developed a new design, taken off a boat that Mitch Lacco built in 1916. It was 25ft; we've blown it up slightly to 26ft 6in."

Meanwhile, restoration projects have been ongoing over 20 years. According to Phillips (who in an understated aside says, "We're fairly experienced at doing this sort of thing now"): "I haven't counted them up but there'd probably be about 100. It's amazing how many we've done, I should count them up one day."

His own Couta boat, the Muriel, is one of these restorations. Designed and built by Mitch Lacco and launched in 1917, Phillips believes the 26ft 6in New Zealand kauri craft has sailed well in excess of 300,000 miles.

Phillips says, "We've done a helluva lot of work here, a lot of drawing and marine archeology. There's one of our boats in the Na tional Maritime Museum in Sydney - a restoration of a 1901 boat [the Thistle]. There's another one [the Patsy] in the Melbourne Museum.

"A new Couta boat takes about 1500hrs and you'd call a major restoration 800-1000hrs. An absolute major restoration would be 1500 hrs, as long as a new boat."

Part of the reason for the high labour, Wayne Parr explains, is that: "We do everything here - everything on the boats is manufactured more or less by us. We make all the patterns and wooden blocks and get fittings cast in traditional bronze."

Parr has been working at the Wooden Boatshop for eight years since starting as a 17-year-old apprentice, and clearly loves his work and the boats. "I've sailed on a lot of boats since I was a kid, and since I found these Couta boats I haven't sailed anything else," he says. "They're a beautifully balanced boat, which is something that's unfortunately been lost in yachts, especially with rule-driven design in the '70s and '80s.

"These Couta boats are built to sail themselves. They're a good, stable, dry boat and they're very versatile - you can have 10 or 12 people on the boat, inexperienced sailors, all with champagne, and everyone has a ball because the boats are so big and open and everyone's on the same level, not like a yacht where you have to cram everyone up onto the side-decks... They just really lend themselves well to social sailing and racing as well.

"They make a great motor boat as well - they have 20 or 30hp Yanmar diesels and they'll steam along at 6-7kt really comfortably."

Parr is certainly not alone in his enthusiasm for the Couta boats. According to Tim Phillips' estimates, there are around 180 Couta boats sailing in Victorian waters, a "substantial fleet of about 14 good boats" in Perth and some six to eight boats scattered around Sydney. When asked if he thinks the Couta boat wave has crested, Phillips says, "I don't think we've even started with them. We're building two new ones, we've got a couple more on order and we haven't even started putting them into Sydney yet. There's a lot of interest in them up there."

New standard-sized Couta boats from the Wooden Boatshop are priced at around $95,000 sailaway, built in kauri or iroko (African teak). "We can still build them in Huon pine but it's more expensive," Phillips says.

CLASSIC CABIN CRUISERS
While the Sydney market beckons for the Couta boats, the Wooden Boatshop has also been investing in the development of a range of classic motorboats and motorsailers. Phillips explains: "We've taken the Couta boat as a generic type of boat which we build and love and maintain here, and we've sort of branched off to do other things.

"After the war, Alec Lacco built a lot of wooden pleasure boats with cabins on them and we're now taking that type of boat generically and turning them, hopefully, into a production boat in three basic sizes - 24, 27 and 30ft - which we're offering as a motorboat or a motorsailer.

"We just reckon they're a really good type of boat and that they'd go well anywhere, really, as a displacement motorboat, as opposed to something that people want to go fast in, especially around somewhere like Sydney or Pittwater where everything's in close proximity."

Phillips says the powerboats are priced from about $60-70,000, "depending on what's in them".

TRADITIONAL DINGHIES
The Wooden Boatshop has also developed an interesting sideline in traditionally-styled, gaff-rigged fishing dinghies, equipped to sail or row off the beach.

"They're a knockabout kind of thing," Phillips says. These dinghies are priced at about $12,000 sailaway.

OTHER PROJECTS
The Wooden Boatshop has carried out complete restorations of several classic wooden runabouts bearing the Chris-Craft, Hammond Craft, Lewis and Riva names.

Occupying a large part of the front shed now, however, is a very different type of craft, called the Storm Bay. The 52ft fishing smack was built in Tasmania in 1925 by Percy Coverdale to a design by Alf Blore, and was a sistership to the Winston Churchill, the vintage sailing yacht tragically lost in the 1998 Sydney-Hobart Race.

Phillips says, "We're restoring her into a sailing fishing boat, a gaff cutter with a centreboard, drawing 12ft with the board down, and a wet well which allows seawater into the hull for keeping the fish alive."

While this is a long-term project, there are other, smaller timber craft lying around various corners of the Wooden Boatshop yard, awaiting their turn for thorough restoration. Couta boats remain the dominant force, but it's easy to imagine all sorts of timber craft gaining a new lease of life here in the years to come.

Couta class rules

Hard-fought regattas for big fleets of Couta Boats are a feature of the Sorrento summer scene. The Couta Boat Club has devised a comprehensive set of class rules to govern the racing, with the intention "to protect the integrity of the traditional Queenscliff Couta boat ... and to promote fair racing between restored older boats and new boats."

New boats must be built to the rules, while restored or older boats must remain in original format to obtain dispensation to race.

An important rule states that "There shall be no fibreglass affixed to any part of a Couta boat." The hull planking shall be wooden, plank on edge, with steam-bent frames, a one-piece hardwood keel, and planked deck of solid dressed wood.

The mainsail may be gaff or lug rigged, with the angle of the yard (gaff) to the mast between 15o and 20o. Backstays are not permitted, while stays shall have thimbles and be fitted with rope lanyards or directly shackled: no roll swages or turnbuckles are allowed. Winches are not permitted and most tackle blocks must be wooden-cheeked.

During the racing season the mainsail shall remain bent onto the yard and boom at all times that the boat is in the water, other than removal for repair or maintenance. Materials such as Kevlar, Mylar, Spectra and carbon fibre are not permitted in sails, halyards, control lines, hull and spar construction. All craft must be fitted with engines of a size sufficient to propel a boat at "hull" speed in calm conditions. No electronic instrumentation of any kind to aid sailing is permitted.

Chasing the 'couta

The barracouta (Thyrsites atun) was one of the most important food fishes found in Australian waters. 'Couta', as they are known, grow to about three or four feet in length and are hooked by trolling lines baited with a strip of rawhide wired to a barbless hook. This fish became the mainstay of the fish and chips trade, supplying Melbourne with an abundance of inexpensive fish.

One fishing fleet was based in Queenscliff, a port two miles inside the notorious Port Phillips Heads (the Rip) of Melbourne, Australia. From a small community in 1850 it had expanded to a thriving community of some 120 families with fishing as their primary income in the 1930s.

From 1850 the records describe a flat bottomed type of net boat being used for inshore fishing in the estuaries of Victoria. By the 1890s when fishing had moved offshore, the fishermen needed a better boat to negotiate the Rip and the open waters of Bass Strait and beyond. The boat that evolved was deeper in draft and decked in forward to produce a dry boat in all but the roughest of seas.

The typical dimensions of the Couta boat were 26ft in length with a 10ft beam and a draught of 3ft 3in. Built of New Zealand kauri, they were usually planked full length on ribs that were also commonly kauri, although some builders opted for blackwood. Their draught was increased by a substantial steel centreplate making an overall draft of 8ft.

The design development was a product of the fisherman's knowledge combined with the builder's skill. The fishermen knew what they wanted of their craft, and as each new boat came out of a yard, its performance was watched with considerable interest - if a new design proved successful, the builder would often receive more commissions for similar boats.

Before the First World War all the boats were engineless, but soldiers serving overseas were introduced to small inboard engines and when they returned to Australia they brought the new technology with them. The transition from sail to power was nevertheless slow and some boats continued to fish under sail right up to the Second World War.

(Courtesy of the Wooden Boatshop website, www.woodenboatshop.com.au.)