MARGARET PEARL

When Tim Phillips called Jim Woods one day in 2015 to alert him to the plight of an old crayfishing boat, Jim’s interest was piqued: “Tim told me that he wanted to save the boat, but what he really meant was that he wanted me to do so!” The boat in question was MARGARET PEARL, designed by R.H. (Dick) Thompson and built by Jack Behrens at Battery Point in Hobart, capital of the Australian island state of Tasmania, in 1958. She had a small gasoline engine and a single mast on which to set auxiliary and steadying sails. And she was a mess.

MARGARET PEARL had suffered a number of mishaps over the years, but somehow survived them. In the late 1990s, she grounded on rocks that stove a hole in the port side big enough to drive a small car through. Her crew somehow managed to beach her and roll her over to her starboard side to make temporary repairs, and then motored her home while listing her to starboard, to keep the repaired area clear the water. “They used these boats very hard,” Jim said, “and while they loved them, the money was more important than the boats. Repairs and maintenance weren’t necessarily carried out to a particularly high standard.”

Thompson, the designer, was a commercial mariner and a sometimes-harbormaster of Devonport who designed hundreds of Tasmanian fishing vessels, both commercial and recreational; Behrens was a very successful fisherman, and a well-respected boatbuilder. This duo created MARGARET PEARL for Cyril “Dodger” Long, who had been a gunner in Lancaster bombers during World War II, then an auctioneer, and then a crayfisherman based at Stanley on Tasmania’s north coast. Long fished MARGARET PEARL for 23 years before selling her in 1977 to Keith Ford, who for two years continued her career pursuing crayfish and went longline shark fishing in the off-season.

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