Traditionelle Boote in Deutschland. T. 5, Der Fischerschelch am Obermain

"Even today, the fisherman's barge is the type of vessel most commonly used for fishing on the River Main and its tributaries upstream beyond the city of Würzburg. Like the similar fishing barge of the Middle Main (see Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 18/1995) the oaken boat is a flat-bottomed vessel whose ends taper to a narrow width at bow and stern. The sides consists of one plank each. The wooden fisherman's barges of the Upper Main were documented in 1980-81 within the framework of a research project. Present-day vessels were found to have an average length of ca. 8.1 m, while there is clear evidence that they were at least 1 m Ionger in earlier times. Their width is greatest between the forward third and the middle, where it measures 1.5 m on average. With a length-width ratio of 7:1, the present vessels are narrower than their older Counterparts, which exhibited a length-width ratio of 6:1. The two boat ends curve upward by about 0.5 m over a length of ca. 1.9 m. The boat is paddled and poled; in former times it was towed upstream. As a rule the fishermen of the present use outboard motors for propulsion. With regard to the arrangement of the ribs in the middle section between the upwardly curving ends, the fisherman's barge of the Upper Main differs from that of the Middle Main. At regular intervals of 0.9-1.0 m several rib pairs have been installed. The vessel has no built-in fish box but tows a floating box in which to store the fish live during the haul. During the 1980s wooden fisherman's barges were still being built on the Upper Main by a boatbuilder in Knetzgau near Bamberg. At that time he was the last boatbuilder in the entire Rhine basin still producing oaken boats. Since the 1960s he had been practising this trade as a sideline in an open-air boatyard behind his home. A record of orders received provided evidence of the boats supplied by this boatyard as well as their distribution area, which expanded spatially in the course of the years." (author's abstract