Rocking Rose of Sharon returns.

A familiar name on a lifebuoy has appeared in the harbour...

with her old fishing number FR23 still clearly visible atop the wheelhouse...

the old St Ives trawler now sports a number of deck lights indicating her new role as a live aboard...

registered in Dartmouth...

sporting the initials ES...

gone are the days when her stern was home to a net drum...

as can be seen in this shot when she was one of  'the clan', a fleet of around ten trawlers that worked from Newlyn (two of the boats in this picture were lost at sea)...

like every trawler, on the odd occasion she was 'mopped up' with her own trawl ...

unlike this shot where she shows another St Ives registered trawler, the Keriolet, her net drum.

The Rose of Sharon is, in some ways, an historic boat. She was built in 1969 for the Stevens family (Crystal Sea II). Although St Ives owned, she, like all the big St Ives boats, worked from Newlyn. As a long liner, on average the boats of this size worked around 26 baskets of lines fishing mainly for ling, skate and pollack. In Summer, the boats could be found fishing over 100 miles West of the Scillys. In her later years the boat was skippered by youngest son Peter Stevens and trawled for white fish. She was also one of a small fleet of boats that prosecuted the prawn fishery in the eighties.

Newlyn, despite being for many years the largest port in England, has never witnessed a new build programme on the scale of that found elsewhere, especially when compared to Breton ports - where many of the boats fish exactly the same grounds as the local fleet. What makes the boat significant in the history of Newlyn is that she was, until the Girl Pat III, the only boat built new to sail from Newlyn since 1969 that required a ticketed skipper (>18m) – to this day. Recent new builds just under the 18m, Sowenna, Intuition and Silver Dawn all represent considerable investment for the local fleet.


Not too sure what father Stevens would make of her current role as a stage for rock music in her home port of Dartmouth!