Two shipwrights were working at re-decking her forward. "Yes," they said, "this is the Albion."
While men on the trawler wrestled with steamhammers, these were shaping their oak with an adze-a tool like an axe with a razor-sharp blade at right angles to the handle. Traditional decorations in red, blue and white paint on the wherry's tiller and cabin sides shone brightly in the sun. I went aft and, at the skipper's invitation, ducked into his cosy little cabin. It was like stepping into last century.
Jack Cates was a tall, brown faced man with a ready smile. His grandfather and father were both wherry skippers. His mother sailed aboard his father's ship up to three weeks before Jack was born. Yes, they had lived on a ship just like this one. There were two bunks, one either side, with a coal stove between them opposite the cabin doors. Its top and oven door were brightly polished; the kettle was boiling. Jack made tea, and we sat on the bunks with a steaming mugful each, to talk.
Before wherries, he said, Broadland trading was carried on by craft called Norfolk keels. They had a square sail like the ships of the Vikings who raided and settled there centuries before. The wherry was in its day a startling new development. Its towering mainsail was supported by a long gaff, but there was no boom, and the canvas was hoisted with a single halyard by a winch. The mast was set forward clear of the hold, and had no rigging except the forestay, which was used for lowering it for Broads bridges. A ton of lead on the heel helped swing it up again.
"The old price for building a wherry was £10 a ton," said Jack.
So the Albion, with a carrying capacity of forty tons, cost £400 new. She was 60 ft. overall, with a beam of fifteen feet, and a mast 40 ft. high. Unlike the first wherries, which-like the Viking ships-were traditionally clinker built with twelve strakes on either side, she had a smooth carvel-built hull. She had been a hulk lying at Norwich when the Wherry Trust was formed to bring her back into commission on the Norfolk rivers, and it cost £1,300 to have her patched up and refitted with a new sail.
The old time wherry skipper was very particular about his ship, Jack said, and very superstitious. Everything had to be in its place. A hatch upside down was unlucky. The quant pole had to lay forward on the port side with its foot pointing towards the stern, and the boathook on the starboard side spike forward.
The Albion's first skipper was fanatical about keeping things polished. Going across Oulton Broad one evening, his mate was in the cabin frying fish for their supper. The fat spluttered. The skipper made a grab and flung the frying pan and the fish into the broad.
"Mess up my stove, would yer?" he roared. "Take yer dirty fish out of it!"
Jack's mate on the Albion had a grandfather who was a wherryman and water bailiff. "I picked him," said Skipper Cates, "because he'd have it in his blood." When they sailed from Yarmouth to Norwich on the refitted ship's maiden trip, she was the first trader to make the passage under sail for ten years. It was a great occasion for the Wherry Trust, and there was a load of celebrities aboard.
"I had half a cargo of timber in the hold for 'em to stand on," Jack explained.
There are times when a wherry will lean against the smooth mud of the river bed and sail herself. If she is turning (tacking) in narrow water, the mate has to be forward to help her come about with the quant. The skipper tends the sheet with his hands, and moves the tiller with his behind.
"Many a sore backside I've had from that," said Cates, thumbing at the tiller through the cabin doorway, "sailing her in a smart breeze."
The Albion won wherry races at Oulton and Barton regattas, and then began trading. For cargo she took "anything what come to the net"-freights of reeds, sugar beet, corn, coal, cement, tiles, sand, shingle.
Then from May to September, the Albion became a training ship for hundreds of Sea Scouts. A score at a time, they brought their hammocks and slung them in the hold, set up tables and primus stoves and made it a snug floating home. Jack Cates and his mate sailed the ship. `'[ victualled for 'em, too, and often cooked all their grub on my galley stove here," he said. "Three meals a day and sometimes four, and a parcel of sandwiches for the journey back home."
