James Norton usually picks his own subjects. Then his brother Patrick sent a few photographs of Galway hookers — na hucaerí — and suggested he build one.
These boats once carried turf, or dried peat, to the Aran Islands. They almost vanished by the early 1970s, when natural gas replaced peat. They are pleasure and regatta boats now. Norton had a closer reason to take one on.
Pickup trucks of the Connemara coast
Hookers moved people and goods among the coastal communities of Connemara and the Aran Islands for centuries. One of their main jobs was bringing fuel to islanders who had little wood to burn. Very few Irish actually call them “hookers.” Richard Scott’s book The Galway Hookers notes a possible Dutch line — hoeker, a hook-and-line boat — but sailors on that coast use Irish names for four types: the bád mór, thirty-five to forty-five feet; the leathbhád, about thirty to thirty-five; the gleóiteog, twenty-four to twenty-eight; and the púcán, with a slightly different sail plan.
Norton’s grandfather came from Spiddal, a trading stop along that coast. His grandmother came from Inverin, just down the road. The two neighbors did not meet until Portland, Maine.
In 1969 Norton followed incomplete directions to the family cottage and found Great Uncle Bartley O’Malley on the peat bog in the Gaeltacht, an Irish speaker, cutting and stacking peat. Some of that turf, he realized later, may have gone to a dock at Spiddal or Rossaveel and onto a hooker bound for Inishmore, eleven miles across Galway Bay.
Plans are scarce
These boats were built by people who did not need drawings. Whatever lines exist now were taken off boats that survived. Norton used tradboats.ie and wrote the Galway Hooker Association. The 1/32 model is plank-on-bulkhead, with hand-fashioned ribs, a tapered “telephone-pole” mast, and a hold of simulated turf cut to match a real peat log from the family cottage.
The boat on this issue’s cover is Bád Mhichíl. This is Part 1. The plans, the ribs, the mast, and the turf cargo are in the July/August issue. Part 2 is still ahead.
James Norton’s “Building a 1/32 Scale Galway Hooker, Part 1: From the Connemara Coast to the Workbench” is in Ships in Scale Vol. 29 No. 4. Print + digital is $44.95 a year in the US.