USA Today Trawler Article

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Marin, I don't want to create animosity. Aside from a differing point of view here, we probably have a lot in common as the most memorable boat I ever owned was a GB 36. The point of my messaging was simply that the USA Today article seemed generally positive about boating and "trawlers." I just didn't understand why so many want to condemn the writer because the article contained some errors. At least he wasn't presenting boating as a lifestyle that was harmful to the environment and something that needed more regulation. Best to you,
Curtis
 
Dawdler said:
The point of my messaging was simply that the USA Today article seemed generally positive about boating and "trawlers."
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Just because something is written in a positive way doesn't automatically mean it's worth the paper it's printed on. I, and apparently other people on this forum who know something about boats, are not willing to excuse inaccuracies just because an article has a "positive" tone. What it is, at least in my opinion, is sloppy, inaccurate, lazy, pandering writing and I have no tolerance for it.

The assumption of papers like USA Today is that the bulk of their readership is too stupid, uneducated, ignorant or lazy to figure out for themselves what's fact and what's fiction so they publish any old thing they want to as long as it keeps the readership numbers up.

The fact their readership simply rolls over and accepts it with the platitude that, well, at least their article was "positive" says more to me about the readers than it does about the paper. I know what what the paper is trying to do--- I came out of the commercial media industry. The paper's just trying to make money for the owners so they can afford the payments on their million dollar boats. (Actually that article probably allowed them to write off a good chunk of their boating expenses as "research":))

USA Today isn't all bad. I read it occasionally overseas on assignment because it's sometimes the only English language paper available in the hotel. They do have some pretty good guest columnists, for example.
 
Here are two things I know about newspapers:

1) They are in business to make money
2) Everything I have ever seen published on a subject about which I am knowledgeable has been riddled with inaccuracies

Richard
 
Ted said:
Early trawler yacht

Ted
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Trawler yacht two and a half decades later

10115-albums347-picture2037.jpg


Richard :)
 
It`s a superficial article written for a broad range of readers. I wouldn`t expect it be researched to the "n"th degree. It`s a thin not in depth newspaper I pick up overseas by default. Something for the masses on boating is better than nothing.
Newspapers here are little more than advocates for the kind of politics they support, I filter the reports for the political bias of the publisher. Knowledge, and intelligence, are not the same thing.
 
I thought it was appropriate that they credited Art DeFever as they did, but it would have been better to highlight a DeFever rather than a Fleming.
 
I think an article like that does more harm than good; particularly to those of us who call our boats trawlers. To the great unwashed readership of the USA Today comic book, your "trawler" is now a million dollar dream boat and virtually unachievable to the regular hard working proletarian, and therefore should be taxed accordingly.

Welcome to the perceived 1% club.

Hopefully this article will be drowned out by the fact that Rosie O'Donnell's daughter is home safe, thank God!
 
Marin said:
" they publish any old thing they want to as long as it keeps the readership numbers up. "

Marin,
So how is that different from this forum? It seems to me that there are many inane threads started on this forum. Might they be posted just to keep the traffic up so that the owners of the web site can tell the advertisers how many "hits" they're getting?
I'd be interested in your thoughts about the capitalistic underpinnings of TF and what the profits are from keeping the "readership numbers up." Do you have a financial interest in TF? Do you know who the owners are?
By the way, I'm personally glad that the paper is trying to make money for the owners--since when is free enterprise a bad thing?


Signing off this thread now--I'm going to spend the next 10 days cruising on my boat. I give you the last word. Hope no hard feelings. Cheers!
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I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I'm walking just a little bit taller today knowing that I've got a million dollar luxury trawler!! I've always wanted one of those things!
 
Dawdler said:
So how is that different from this forum?
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It's not.

It seems to me that there are many inane threads started on this forum.
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The understatement of the year.:)


I'd be interested in your thoughts about the capitalistic underpinnings of TF...
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It's irrelevant to me. As I've said before, TF for me is just mindless entertainment, something I use to amuse myself while I'm editing or writing (scripts) or waiting for a very slow CGI effects server to render an effect, which is what I'm doing right now, It's kind of like watching Family Guy. Highly entertaining but in the overall scheme of things nothing to take seriously. It beats watching a progress bar creep across a screen, though.

...and what the profits are from keeping the "readership numbers up."
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Haven't a clue.

Do you have a financial interest in TF?
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Nope.

Do you know who the owners are?
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Beats the hell out of me.

...since when is free enterprise a bad thing?
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It's not. I just think it's telling that USA Today and other similar papers all over the world make a ton of money based on the premise that their readers are gullible, lazy, ignorant, and superficial. The fact that they DO make a ton of money shows that their premise is spot on, right?
 
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Maybe I have been boating too long as boats have gotten bigger. I have always had a self created distinction between Expedition boats and cruising trawlers with the Expedition boats being large enough to casually cruise to the South Pacific. Notwithstanding the numerous Nordhavn 46s which have circled the world I am thinking that an Expedition boat is generally in the 50+ ft range, something like the $1,000,000 trawlers cited in the article. These large boats are not ideal for cruising the ICW or the Great Loop.
 
Britannia said:
Here are two things I know about newspapers:

1) They are in business to make money
2) Everything I have ever seen published on a subject about which I am knowledgeable has been riddled with inaccuracies
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I agree with that but would add a couple of comments.

Newspaper real estate (column space) is limited.

Reporters are on challenging deadlines and don't have the time to completely research the subject that they may start out with zero knowledge of.

Many newspapers are in the entertainment business and not journalism. They make more money in entertainment.
 
I don't call it the McNews for nothing!!...;)
 
First motorboat across the Atlantic was Abiel Abbot Low (38' x 9'), she crossed in 38 days in 1902. Crew was a hired skipper and his 16 year old son. The boat in no way resembles a fishing boat.

AAL.jpg

In 1911 in the US if you were interested in cruising in a powerboat, you would pick up a copy of Motorboating Magazine where you would find adds like this.....

1911ad.JPG

The second motorboat to cross the Atlantic was Thomas Flemming Day's Detroit (35' x 9'), an open decked double-ender looking more like a lifeboat than any fishing vessel.

The third trans-Atlantic crossing by small motorboat was the 1937 voyage of Marin-Marie in Arielle. She was a better boat than the previous voyagers, 42'6" long with a 75 HP diesel, of heavier construction and with an enclosed pilothouse. But she still bore no relation to any fishing boats.

Arielle1.JPG

Arielle2.JPG
 
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@Tad: I think you may have misread the article, which was about trawlers. The author made no claims about first screw-driven vessels. And the early voyages were hardly cruises. And the vintage ads you posted do not advertise crossing oceans (as if ads are even indicative of fitness for use!)

The Beneteau reference was new to me, and conflicts with the history of the fishing trawler on Wikipedia. I can't really research that walking in the woods with my phone but I imagine there's a distinction there I'm not seeing. Which happens with damned near every "first" claim through the ages.
 
With Respect.... :D

Trawling is a fishing method, started long before 1800 under sail. Around 1830-40 steam engines started to be installed in sailing trawlers. Steam trawlers were prevalent until the second world war, when diesels took over.

Beneteau's boat with an engine (could have been gas, kerosene, or naptha) was (reportedly) a tuna fishing boat. In the photo's published she appears to be a typical French Lugger or Bisquinne, with straight stem and round stern. These boats fished by trolling, with poles and lines with hooks. No one has ever trawled for tuna.

I would mention that 95% of the "trawlers" on this forum are not intended for crossing oceans, they are power cruisers. From the number of postings I would guess that at least half the "trawlers" here are interested in inland and coastal cruising, mostly the Great Circle.

And to quote from the article....

"It was the French shipwright Benjamin Beneteau, best known in the boating world for his cruising sailboats, who designed the first fishing trawler powered by an engine. Beneteau’s power trawler was met with skepticism and became the target of a smear campaign by other boatbuilders of the day. However, while the sailing fleet was grousing and waiting for wind, Beneteau’s trawler was first to the fishing grounds and first back to market when prices were highest, a foreshadowing of the fishing fleets of the future."

Perhaps a steam engine is not really an engine?
 
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Tad Roberts said:
First motorboat across the Atlantic was Abiel Abbot Low ...
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Note that the early long-range motor vessels pictured provided for the hoisting of sails.
 
With mutual respect.... :D
Tad Roberts said:
With Respect.... :D
Around 1830-40 steam engines started to be installed in sailing trawlers.
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I don't actually remember this - it was a bit before my time - but the Wikipedia article Fishing Trawler says:
"The earliest steam powered fishing boats first appeared in the 1870s and used the trawl system of fishing as well as lines and drift nets. These were large boats, usually 80–90 feet (24–27 m) in length with a beam of around 20 feet (6.1 m). They weighed 40-50 tons and travelled at 9–11 knots (17–20 km/h; 10–13 mph).

The earliest purpose built fishing vessels were designed and made by David Allan in Leith in March 1875, when he converted a drifter to steam power. In 1877, he built the first screw propelled steam trawler in the world. This vessel was Pioneer LH854. She was of wooden construction with two masts and carried a gaff rigged main and mizen using booms, and a single foresail."​

So...screw propelled, steam powered, trawler...with masts and sails. I can see that trawlers used steam power prior to that but I believe it was for net retrieval, not propulsion.

Tad Roberts said:
Beneteau's boat with an engine (could have been gas, kerosene, or naptha) was (reportedly) a tuna fishing boat. In the photo's published she appears to be a typical French Lugger or Bisquinne, with straight stem and round stern. These boats fished by trolling, with poles and lines with hooks. No one has ever trawled for tuna.
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Well, the Beneteau history page says:
"1884 - Benjamin Bénéteau, a fully qualified shipbuilder, founds the Bénéteau boatyard in Croix de Vie (Vendée) to build trawlers for fishermen.

1910 - Ahead of his time, Benjamin Bénéteau launches the first engine-powered boat. Christened the "vainqueur des jaloux" or conqueror of the jealous, it generates fear among the local communities, who accuse the "oil boat" of scaring the fish away."​

So...screw propelled, oil powered, what type? Don't know, but I can see someone assuming it was a trawler, coming from a firm that was founded to build "trawlers for fisherman". And it too appears to have had masts and sails.

So...maybe Benjamin Bénéteau built the first diesel-propelled fishing boat. Was it a trawler? Again, I don't know, but it appears to have been for the sardine industry - which, today, appears to mostly use gill-nets.
 
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Refugio,

Wikipedia is an awesome resource, but there's always another opinion...;)

This is from A History of Fishing (1992), by Dietrich Sahrhage & Johannes Lunbeck. It does not mention the use of screws....

steamtrawlerhist.JPG
 
As Tad says, Wikipedia is a great resource, but it's written by whoever wants to contribute. And these people are very often wrong. For example a lot of the stuff on Wikipedia about Boeing is totally off the mark and historically inaccurate.

Often this is simply because the person writing the entry didn't have access to the actual facts, or didn't know how to get access to the actual facts, or was relying on what other people had written previously.

You remember the game of "telephone" that teachers used to have little kids play in school? The kids sat in a big circle, the teacher whispered something to the kid next to her or him, that kid whispered it to the next kid and so on all the way around the circle. Then at the end, the last kid said out loud what he'd been told by the previous kid and they'd compare it to what the teacher had said at the outset. Often the discrepancy between the original and the last statement was downright bizarre.

Well, Wikipedia, and history in general, is often just like that. For people really interested in preserving the correct facts, like Boeing's long-time archivist, for example, preventing the "telephone" effect is very important to them.
 
Marin said:
...
You remember the game of "telephone" that teachers used to have little kids play in school? The kids sat in a big circle, the teacher whispered something to the kid next to her or him, that kid whispered it to the next kid and so on all the way around the circle. Then at the end, the last kid said out loud what he'd been told by the previous kid and they'd compare it to what the teacher had said at the outset. Often the discrepancy between the original and the last statement was downright bizarre.
...
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Little kids? As a grownup, I was introduced to this at a supervision training seminar.
 
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Tad Roberts said:
Wikipedia is an awesome resource, but there's always another opinion...;)
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Yes, I think that was MY point when you said the "facts" in the article were wrong. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but I'm willing to go with crowdsourcing for this kind of thing. And that's coming from a guy who was a developer on the 1st version of Encarta. :)

I don't really give a hoot who was first, but I can see some justification for the narrative in the article.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll get back to re-reading "The Daughter of Time" :flowers:
 
Face it folks... We be the proud members of an (in general) aging and rather exclusive group of "pleasure-existence" persons; i.e. users of usually slow moving, well accommodated pleasure boats.

Problem: We are dying off faster than new boaters of our type are entering. The industry is shrinking. IMHO any article that may become enough of an attraction to bring new entries into our pleasure boating domain is OK with me.

That article was incorrect in some of its statements... yet, it was close enough to maybe draw interest enough that some new pleasure boating members may join our ranks.

And, that is not a bad thing - at all!
 
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Tough crowd indeed!
Glad to see a large publication print about our beloved Trawler!
I tend to believe that we have done our homework and made the best decision for our needs, and that most of you have done the same! Do I own a True Trawler?
Probably not, but to get the comfort that we we were looking for with somewhat of a seaworthy vessel, I think we did all right.
As I looked back on the material we were given some seven years ago on the "Trawler" boats, glad we didn't believe all that was printed.
So we will struggle with our little floating wanna be trawler and enjoy the journey, and hope that you all do too!
 
Art said:
Problem: We are dying off faster than new boaters of our type are entering.
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I fail to see that as a problem. Once you're gone, it's not a problem anymore because, well, you're gone and you'll never know what happened next, right?. It might be somebody's problem but it sure won't be ours.:) So why waste what little time one has left worrying about it?

IMHO any article that may become enough of an attraction to bring new entries into our pleasure boating domain is OK with me.
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It might bring new entries into Nordhavn's and Fleming's pleasure boating domain, but it's not going to bring anybody into the "used Tollycraft" boating domain.

....maybe draw interest enough that some new pleasure boating members may join our ranks.
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If by "our ranks" you mean the majority of the ranks that make up TF-type boaters, there are precious few buyers of the kinds of "trawlers" the article was about that will have any interest in mucking about with pond scum like us.:)
 
Marin said:
I fail to see that as a problem. Once you're gone, it's not a problem anymore because, well, you're gone and you'll never know what happened next, right?. It might be somebody's problem but it sure won't be ours. So why waste what little time one has left worrying about it?
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Marin said:
Worry does not come into my train of thought here. Helping to keep boating active for the enjoyment of all does. Additionally, to help keep the boating industry alive so that there are continued good services available for all we old salts to have places to tend to our boating needs.

It might bring new entries into Nordhavn's and Fleming's pleasure boating domain, but it's not going to bring anybody into the "used Tollycraft" boating domain. IMHO, there are many “mid-range” persons who just wish they could get kicked into gear to purchase some mid-range classic boat and begin to enjoy pleasure boating. So… I believe… any article that lifts peoples spirits about boating is a good article. USA Today reaches millions in motel/hotel rooms. Many it reaches are dads on biz trip… dads who just need a bit more push over the top to dive into pleasure boating. That silly article just might be the ticket to get some dads into “boating gear”!

If by "our ranks" you mean the majority of the ranks that make up TF-type boaters, there are precious few buyers of the kinds of "trawlers" the article was about that will have any interest in mucking about with pond scum like us. Geeezzz Marin, place a bit higher feeling about yourself. I surely do about myself!
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Marin you are an odd chap - to be sure (not saying that I am not one also). You’re smart, accomplished, ready to back up what you say, sarcastic at times, and a kick to argue with… but, also, capable of reading (looking at) things in what I believe is an incorrect stance (as I at times do too). You and I've played around on this forum for years (since I joined in 2011). Please read embeds in your quote above to best discern how I see things… here…

Cheers! - Art :D
 
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