River Exe Salmon Boat
At Topsham there’s a wonderful mural of the salmon fishing in the river; an epitaph to a lost fishery. For in 2019 there were 3 boats fishing whereas 50 years before there were over 25. Then the fishery closed – supposedly for a ten year moratorium but in reality for good as at the end of the ten-year period there will be no one left knowing how to fish – and one of the last boats, E19, was chopped up. The other two simply disappeared.
It’s a fact that the traditional West Country salmon net boats are all pretty similar. Thus the river Exe boats were shallow in draught for the shallow rivers and low in the water, as much to keep the windage down as to allow the fishermen to step ashore on the river banks, and anywhere between 16 and 18ft in length. They were sharp in the bow to allow being rowed by one man and full in the stern where the net was carried and shot from. Most were clinker built.
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