Sailing with the silver darlings

Sailing and fishing from a 30-ton boat with no engine, entirely subject to the whim of wind and tide, is no mean feat, says Joe Gibbs, as he joins the crew aboard St Vincent, a restored early 20th-century 'Zulu' herring drifter

- Joe Gibbs

AT Foulis Point in East Ross, generations of motorists have diverted their child passengers by pointing out the ‘crocodiles’ that lie in the water there at low tide. These two oak skeletons are all that is left of 12 Zulu herring drifters that were last hauled up in 1914 at the safe winter berth of Ardullie with the help of a farm threshing machine. Many of the skippers never returned from the First World War and those that did found steam drifters driven by engines had replaced those that relied on sails and oars.

First designed by Walter Campbell of Lossiemouth in 1879, the year of the Zululand war in South Africa, Zulus were built up to the First World War. In their thousands they chased the herring—‘the silver darlings’ as they were known to Highland fisherfolk— down the coasts of Britain from early spring through to autumn. Family-owned boats from far-flung ports fished to sell to distant markets.

The Zulu took the best parts of two earlier Scottish fishing boats, the Fifie with its straight stem and the Skaffie with its raked stern, and combined them in one boat with a short keel. This produced a two-masted vessel that was easier to manoeuvre and had more deck space for the fishermen aboard. Now, only five examples of the Zulu remain in existence. Of these, the newly restored St Vincent, a 49ft dipping lug-rigged herring drifter, has just completed her sea trials and is ready to take up her role as a working museum, based between the Highland West Coast port of Ullapool and the nearby island of Tanera Mòr in the Summer Isles.