Santo André

This Portuguese side-net trawler, built in the Netherlands in 1946 and de-comissioned in 1997, is now open to the public as part of the Maritime Museum of the municipality of Ílhavo, to the west of Aveiro in Portugal.

A beautiful sunny day and we had the ship entirely to ourselves to wander around. Unfortunately I thought that my camera's battery was dead so I had to resort to my phone's camera and missed lots of photo opportunities. As it turned out the camera's dial was in between settings and it was displaying a message to that effect on its screen, but I didn't see the message because of the bright sunlight and thought the camera was dead.

The Santo André fished for cod in the north atlantic, with accomodation for a crew of 40 plus officers. It had separate holds for frozen and salted cod, the latter being enormous.

It was interesting to see into the engine room. My grandfather spent his life at sea as a marine engineer as did many of his Scottish compatriots I believe, including his brother and his father-in-law. I heard recently that this association between scots and marine engineers gave rise to the choice of "Scotty" as the chief engineer character on the Starship Enterprise.

This ship was powered by a Werkspoor diesel engine. This video gives an impression of what the noise must have been like. According to a barman here in Gijón, an ex-merchant seaman, they used to call ships' engineers 'cottons', presumably for the cotton wool they put in their ears.

I suppose that on a north atlantic trawler one compensation was that they must have been among the few crew members who kept warm at work.