Reaper (sailing vessel)
restored Fifie fishing boat
Reaper is a restored historic Fifie herring drifter which is registered by the National Historic Ships Committee as part of the National Historic Fleet of the UK, and currently operates as a museum ship.
History
Built by J. & G. Forbes of Sandhaven in 1901, she is 21 metres long and of carvel construction, using larch planking on larch and oak frames. First registered at Fraserburgh in 1902, she operated initially as a sailing lugger with a main dipping lug sail and a mizzen standing lug sail. There would have been a crew of around eight to work the nets which were set at dusk and hauled in at dawn. Once the haul was complete, a swift return to port would ensure the best prices for the earliest-sold catches.
Reaper later spent many years in Shetland fishing for herring in the summer and she was fitted with an engine between the Wars. During World War II she was requisitioned by the Admiralty and served in the southeast of England, often being used as a barrage balloon mooring. After the war, she resumed fishing in Shetland and continued until 1957. She holds the record catch for Shetland of 233 cran (almost 250,000 herrings).
From 1959 she served the local council as a general purpose cargo boat until the introduction of the roll on-roll off ferries when she was retired from service.
“Reaper (sailing vessel)” enters the record as restored Fifie fishing boat. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Reaper, sailing and vessel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reaper (sailing vessel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.