| Charleston fishermen typically procure second-hand boats and adapt them for current local fishing use. Boats used for the same fisheries vary widely in hull size, shape, structural make-up, and construction, in original use, builder, place of origin, age, and color scheme. Common adaptations unify the assortment and identify each boat with one of the five local fisheries--salmon, albacore tuna, Dungeness crab, shrimp, bottomfish--or with typical combinations of them--salmon/tuna-crab, salmon/shrimp-crab, shrimp-bottomfish.; The routine and active participation of fishermen in the alteration, maintenance, and repair of these boats indicates that users influence the design of large folk artifacts such as houses, barns, wagons, and boats by changing them as a matter of course according to their experiences with them. Interviews with longstanding full-time professional commercial fishermen and with veteran fishboat repair experts in the Coos Bay area, 1976-78, showed that fishermen not only alter their boats according to personal use, but that they do so in customary ways. These alteration, maintenance and repair customs serve practical functions of increasing fishboat safety, seaworthiness, and efficiency; artistic and social functions of expressing a fisherman's individual tastes and skills, his identification with other fishermen, and his adherence to a specific fishing philosophy; and psychological functions of assuring fishermen of success and smooth sailing in a dangerous and changeable occupation.; In taking on his own boat work, the Charleston fisherman integrates non-specialized and specialized fishing traditions. With the mentality of the self-sufficient, diversified fisher-crofter (who fishes alone or with only a small crew and operates a small boat and gear which he may have built himself or procured from a friend or neighbor), today's Charleston fisherman uses a vessel that qualifies as a ship, requires specialized care, and forces the fisherman to conform somewhat to deep-sea fishing traditions (where the skipper delegates the operation, maintenance, and repair of his vessel to a large number of specialized crew members and craftsmen to do). By adopting large boats and adapting them continually, the Charleston fisherman signifies his desire to keep up with the latest in fishing technology. But by choosing to upgrade older, second-hand boats, he reflects the spareness of the local fishing grounds, his geographical isolation, the economic uncertainty of his job, and in response, his frugality, ingenuity, and adherence to old fishing ways. The fisherman's ability to use and maintain these boats is fostered by the persistence of shipbuilding experts in the area, enabled by the economic well-being of the local wood products industry over the past 125 years and its dependence on water transport. But by taking on his boat work the Charleston fisherman frustrates the specialist roles of these craftsmen and expresses his reluctant reliance on them. In fact, fisherman boat modification represents a user-based building tradition with its own set of rules and aesthetic dimensions which oppose yet simultaneously influence and depend on local new boat building practices. Local boat design thus occurs in several spheres and the port's existing boats fall into families of forms representing interactions and webs of relationships among fishermen and maritime craftsmen. |
