An Rún and Hanora off Sherkin.

Nigel Towse is a man with a passion for traditional boats. He settled on Sherkin in 1989, having spent some years working on the sail training vessel Excelsior, a Lowestoft smack.

In West Cork he fell in with a traditonal boat-builder, Liam Hegarty, heir to a proud tradition of building wooden vessels in the area around Baltimore. Together with Liam, he built replicas of two famous local types of fishing boat.

The 32ft 6in An Rún (The Secret) took her design from the Shamrock, a locally famous mackerel fishing yawl such as those that fished the teeming shoals of mackerel hereabouts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to supply an industry that sent the cured fish as far as America.

The smaller Hanora (25ft) was a lobster boat, of a kind that hardy islanders from neighbouring Heir Island spent whole summers in, fishing their creels along 100 miles of Cork coastline.

Thanks to Nigel, these beautiful boats once more grace the waters round Sherkin, where you can sail with him to simply enjoy a leisurely spin in them, or search the fabulous sea-life of these waters, viewing dolphins, whales, seals and many sea-birds, and catch a supper of mackerel to barbecue back at Horseshoe to boot. You may even do better and help catch a lobster or crab in one of Nigel’s traditional wicker creels....

Contact Nigel direct at 086 3777634