The Connection Lives On
By Jim Woods and Terry Long
MARGARET PEARL 1969
Back in February 2023, I wrote an article for SWS following the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart. The article was entitled "I Didn't Know It Meant That Much" and talked about the close association between the coastal fishing community and the boats on which the fishermen earn their living.
During the 2023 AWBF, I was overwhelmed by the interest and deep connections of a very large number of people in the restored fishing vessel Margaret Pearl.
That connection included members of the extended Long family based in Stanley. Cecil "Dodger" Long commissioned Margaret Pearl and his second daughter Barb lives in the original Long family home in Stanley with her husband Danny Dwyer. Our summer cruises on Margaret Pearl usually include a visit to Stanley where we have always been exceptionally well looked after by Danny and Barb and the other residents of this beautiful part of Australia. Indeed, Barb and I resurrected the tradition of waving a white tea towel from Margaret Pearl to the Long residence as we round the point coming into Stanley. This tradition was started by Dodger and his wife Pearl in the late 1950s when the boat first came into service.
So when Danny approached me and asked if Margaret Pearl would be available to host the Long family reunion in Melbourne, I had no hesitation in agreeing.
Unfortunately, I couldn't be there on the day and I thank Greg Phelan and Jacqui Thomas who were the skipper and crew.
Terry Long reports:
“It can be a place. Or a performance. Or a set of circumstances. Maybe a person. But whatever it is, you feel warm and fuzzy when you recall it.
There’s an offshoot of psychology you may have heard of, called ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’, and within that extensive framework, there’s a thing called an ‘anchor’. They don’t mean a physical anchor, but a metaphorical one. And when your mind wanders down your life’s timeline and snags that ‘anchor’, that’s when the warm and fuzzies arrive.
In the fishing village of Stanley, on Tasmania’s far north-west coast, the ‘anchor’ as often as not, will be a traditional timber fishing boat, known colloquially as a ‘cray boat’. They’re of a certain type, evolved over the decades to satisfy two fundamental requirements – the capacity to handle big seas at the same time as providing a living for the people who depend upon the income they generate.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘cray boats’ were central to the life of the town. Moored along a wharf, ready to leave port and travel westward to the fishing grounds on the West Coast, the ‘cray boats’ were crewed and skippered by the townsfolk. Many of the village’s families had people on the boats. Everybody knew that when easterly weather was on the horizon, preparations on the boats was in train. Pots were repaired, built or checked. Bait and supplies were put on board, fuel taken on and an eye kept on the weather for a fortuitous time to leave port.
The easterly weather was important. It meant the big seas would be flattened on the West Coast, allowing the boats relatively safe access to the lobster (locally called ‘crayfish) grounds.
Wives would wish husbands and sons goodbye. And then the boats would be away.
The boats also floated, to some extent, the economy of the village. They bought material for maintenance, supplies for fishing trips, groceries and the like for their families when they were in port and fuel for the diesel engines which powered the cray boats. The townsfolk all knew each other and were linked socially as well as through the fishing fleet or the little enterprises which supported it.
One of these boats was the Margaret Pearl, owned – and built for – Cecil Long, in the late 1950s. Few people knew his name was actually ‘Cecil’. He was known everywhere as ‘Dodger’. He’d had smaller boats before, but the Margaret Pearl was big – approaching sixty feet and more than equal to the big seas she would encounter on the Tasmanian coast. She was named after Dodger’s wife Pearl and first daughter Margaret, who now lives in Western Australia. Both Dodger and Pearl are deceased, but the memories and the ‘anchor’ of the Margaret Pearl live on for the many family members and relatives who either lived or spent time around the Margaret Pearl in Stanley.
Whenever the Long family gathers, there’s talk of the Margaret Pearl. Some sixty-five years on, she’s still central to the wider fabric of the Long family. She still causes the warm and fuzzies and no doubt does to the families of the men from the township who crewed on her at the time. From the perspective of any member of the Long family, those were great times. And the fishing boat is the ‘anchor’.
As is the case with many of the timber fishing boats of the time, the Margaret Pearl went through various ownerships and was flogged hard around the Tasmanian or Victorian coasts, still fishing for ‘crays’ or school shark. She was badly maintained and was essentially a wreck when Melbourne man Jim Woods and his wife Sam bought her – for a dollar – and set about the challenging task of rebuilding her, which he did. The Margaret Pearl, much to the astonishment an applause of the Long family is now resplendent in Port Phillip Bay. Once a utilitarian workhorse – but beautiful nonetheless – she’s now more a private pleasure or charter vessel and can be more rightly described as a magnificent example of the shipwright’s art.
And this is where the metaphorical ‘anchor’ comes in. In September of this year, Jim kindly offered the Margaret Pearl for a Long family reunion on the Yarra and Port Phillip Bay. There were Longs from Melbourne, Hobart and Stanley, as well as Margaret herself from WA. It was a magical trip for the wider Long family. Memories shared, acquaintances renewed, younger relatives introduced and talk of the Margaret Pearl and Dodger and his family and home ‘back in the day. And the ‘warm and fuzzies’ were there too, as people recalled their time on the deck of the original Margaret Pearl, either fishing or charging about the bay in the annual fishing boat races at the Stanley regatta.
And as the older members of the Long family go back through the timeline to the Margaret Pearl and her owner and his family, you realise we were lucky people. The boat, the lifestyle, the township, the relatives and friends, from a simpler time when a boy visiting his uncle’s family at Stanley could be in paradise on the boat, at the beach, or being short-sheeted by his Aunty Pearl at the family home overlooking the ‘top beach’ at Stanley.”