Second life for a seiner

Ben Lowings looks at the history of the 17ft salmon seiner Shambler, and how it has become a true community boat

- Ben Lowings

Every boater will be able to recognise this feeling-your craft, gliding along the water as the sun sets, inducing a I wholesome sensation of peace, bubbles washing with satisfaction by the hull in line with how the boat's designers foresaw. It's a sense of coming home.

That feels especially true this evening on Devon's Exe estuary, where I'm one of four rowers being coxed by Richard Bentley.

Carrying us downstream with panache is Shambler, a 17ft GRP recreation of the salmon fishing boats which, until fairly recently, cast seine nets in these very waters.

She's proudly owned by Starcross Fishing and Cruising Club (SFCC), itself established in the village in 1959. Most, if not all, the rowers live within a mile of the boat's TetraDock pontoon berth.

Shambler is emblematic of community boat use and ownership. She's out nearly every other day in the season. Many empty GRP yachts clinking their halyards in British marinas cannot boast anything like that level of usage.

This craft-and this community rowing project-stems from one well-travelled creature: the Atlantic Salmon. Individuals who have swum up to Iceland have been known to journey back to this corner of southwestern England, through the sluicing tidal entryway at Exmouth and battle the approximately 50 miles up to their spawning grounds in the freshwater streams of Exmoor.

Seiners

Salmon fishing on the Exe has been recorded for a thousand years (thanks, Domesday Book). In the latter half of the 20th century, the business declined.

In the 2010s only several dozen would typically be caught over the course of a year's season and it was generally agreed that the fishery was unsustainable. The government ushered in the end of the Exe salmon fishery when the Environment Agency discontinued licensing in 2019.