1928 Fishing Trawler, etc.

A month and a half ago I posted photos here of Picton Castle as a freighter and a barque and only alluded to its previous incarnations as Swansea motorized fishing trawler and minesweeper.  Below is what she looked like as a minesweeper.  A crewman wrote:  “The minesweeper service lost more ships than any other branch of the Royal Navy as sweeping mines was very dangerous work. In fact, one day while on patrol a mine exploded under the ship and lifted her clean out of the water — all 300 tons of her. Fortunately, no real damage occurred.”  The really serendipitous story in the link above is how this minesweeper became known as “liberator of Norway.”

Many thanks to Nobby Peers for use of this photo.  As of this writing, the barque Picton Castle is in port in Madeira,  a little over 500 miles west of Morocco.

The Bath ME built trawler Georgetown, 1928, also went from trawler to minesweeper USS Linnet. although I’ve found no record of what became of her after WW2.

Second Lives 22

Take a fishing trawler built in 1928 and converted to a minesweeper some 10 years later.  After the war, convert it into a North Sea freighter, which then crosses the Atlantic to Kingston NY, where the photo below was taken.  To digress, I recognize Matilda (click and scroll)  on the hard behind the freighter but have no information of the two tugs to the right.  The photo below comes thanks to Nobby Peers, who worked on the old freighter in the mid-1990s, and it changed the course of his life.

So you might wonder about the connection of the freighter to this barque in Vanuatu?   The next four photos come thanks to Mike Weiss.

Here’s the same barque at sea.

Ditto, the barque seen here of Mangareva in French Polynesia.

And the answer is . . . they are all the same hull!

And finally, here are three photos I took when Picton Castle was in the Hudson in May 2012.  Tomorrow morning she sails out of Lunenburg NS for a five-month voyage. 

She’s registered in the Cook Islands. 

 

Many thanks to Nobby and Mike for use of these photos.   Fair winds . . . Picton Castle.

And here, verbatim again, is my call for collaboration for November posts.  Thanks to those of you who have already responded.

“…I invite your help for November posts.  All month long I hope to feature different ports–harbors–waterways and their workboats, which means not only towing vessels, but also ferries, fish boats, maintenance vessels, even yachts with professional crews.  I’ve been traveling a lot the past few months and have a fairly large backlog of boats from ports–harbors–waterways mostly in New England.  But as a social medium, this blog thrives on collaboration, so no matter which waters are near you,  I’m inviting you to send along photos of workboats from ports I might not get to.  I’d need at least three interesting photos to warrant a focus on a port.  Here are examples I’ve already done that illustrate what I’m thinking to do.”