This Essex Oyster Smack has an incredible history....
"The Burnham Oyster Company had Vanguard purpose-built for dredging and she was designed to turn in her own length. Her deck allowed six men to work in comfort hauling in the nets. The deckhouse provided the minimum of shelter. Vanguard certainly was not intended for the open sea and would roll like a pig in anything above force 5.
Skipper Grimwade took her across to Dunkirk in 1940 with Joe Clough as his engineer. They went with another oyster dredger, the Seasalter which also survived and a ketch called Ma Joie which was abandoned and lost. They could not get into Dunkirk harbour, so they picked up the men from the beaches and 24 hours later, arrived back at Ramsgate loaded with troops.
At the end of the war, Keeble & Sons of Paglesham, Essex bought the Vanguard and put her back to oyster dredging which their family had done on the rivers Roach and Crouch for fifty years on thirty-four acres of rented oyster beds. But the bad winter of 1962 decimated the oyster population.
Those which survived the ice and the cold and succeeded in breeding since then, are now faced with the increasing hazards of pollution. So W. Keeble sold Vanguard to Ron Pipe, a fisherman at Burnham-on-Crouch, who used her for in-shore fishing for a while and sold her again. Ten years later, Doug Whiting bought her back from another owner in a sorry state. Now he has enlarged her wheel-house, given up oyster fishing and has taken up shrimping on the Roach and Crouch."
CK69 is currently laying in Canvey Island after fire damage by vandals, as can be seen in this shot I took recently.
(Information taken form the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships Website
www.adls.org.uk/t1/node/641)
