It’s red and it’s steel, breaking with the Stevens family tradition of wooden boats and black paint. But David Stevens senior agreed that times are changing and steel is the way to go now that the skills needed to maintain a wooden boat are becoming increasingly rare, and they decided to stick with the boat’s original red.
Crystal Sea is a name firmly linked to Newlyn, although it carries the St Ives registration that has been with the Stevens family for many years. The latest trawler to carry the name is only slightly larger than the old one, at 21.20 metres compared to the previous boat’s 20.80 metres, but this one is deeper and broader. The engine power is the same, but with a more efficient propeller and nozzle, so fuel economy and towing power should be improved.
‘She was prawning before. She’s in that good condition and has been so well looked after that if we worked the same way that Adam Tait does, we’d have been able to steam the boat home and start fishing right away. But we catch whitefish and we have a different way of working,’ he said.
So Rebecca went to the Macduff yard and emerged a month later as Crystal Sea, with plenty of work done to get the boat ready to fish on mixed species in Cornwall.
“The biggest job was the fish handling system,” he said.
The original fish hopper is still in place, but has been remodelled with the bottom cut out of it and a new conveyor fitted with gutting and sorting workstations for the crew to handle the catch. The gutting and handling setup incorporates a two-stage washer before the fish are passed to the fishroom to be boxed.
On the deck above a new 4-tonne gilson winch has been fitted to replace original much smaller gilson winch and a post has been fitted next to the fish hatch with a cleat for tying the sleeve of the trawl when handling the codend.
New Kobelt electronic control systems were fitted at Macduff, among the host of jobs the yard carried out before the boat was steamed south. The opportunity was taken to slip the boat at the yard, where the shaft was checked and the propeller was polished. All of the pumps were checked, new seals were put into the landing crane’s rams, a new banana bar was fitted and the icemaker was overhauled.
‘You couldn’t fault Macduff. Everything we asked for has been done and nothing was too much trouble,’ David Stevens said.
The winches forward have been remodelled with the winch barrels extended with wider flanges to accommodate the bridles, as Crystal Sea’s way of working is to haul the bridles onto the winch drums rather than the net drums. The Crystal Sea’s new 22m warps and the bridles are supplied by MarineCo. Trawls come from Faithlie Trawls, but to begin with the boat will be fishing with the old boat’s gear.
‘We didn’t want to go for new nets until we know what she tows like,’ he said, adding that the engine power is the same as that of the previous Crystal Sea, but with a bigger propeller and a better nozzle.
Crystal Sea was one of the first in the UK to start using Thyborøn pelagic doors to square its trawls, flying the doors off the bottom. Initially these were alternated with a pair of Perfect bottom doors used on spring tides, but as skippers David jr and Alec Stevens have become increasingly adept with the Type 15 Thyborøn doors, the bottom doors are making increasingly infrequent appearances.
