Wooden Boats of the North Vietnamese Coast

The wooden working boats of the North coast of Vietnam cover a broad spectrum of styles from the elaborate but relatively un-seaworthy tourist boats of Halong Bay to the woven bamboo surf boats and bamboo rafts of Sam Son and the large woven bamboo basket boats of Cua Lo. (The biggest basket boats in Vietnam.)

The Northern coast of Vietnam stretches from the Chinese border at Mong Cai, past limestone mountains that run right out into the ocean in the bay of Bai Tu Long and Halong Bay. Those mountains make a fabulous landscape, with towering limestone mountain tops springing from a wonderfully blue sea and climbing, all but sheer, hundreds of feet into the sky. Farther south, beyond the mouths of the Red River, around Haiphong, the land becomes very low lying and flat—rich farmland right to the edge of the dunes at the sea. Sam Son is the closest beach resort to Hanoi, but more importantly for our purposes, a very interesting place to watch the comings and goings of a vigorous surfboat (and surf-raft!) fishing fleet as well as a densely packed river mouth harbor. The differences between the boats in the Halong Bay region and those farther south are startling. You haven’t come all that far in actual mileage, but you’ve passed from the relatively protected waters among the thousands of islands to an open coastline looking out over the South China Sea with a clear view. I have arbitrarily drawn the line between the Northern Coast and the Central Coast somewhere south of the town of Cua Lo. South of Cua Lo, the country becomes very slender, in places not much more than fifty miles from the salt water up into the mountains of Laos or Cambodia and the boats in the harbors and on the beaches gradually change to the types you’ll find on the Southern coasts.

Halong Bay

Tourist Boats

The peculiar conditions in the Halong Bay region (in which I would include the Bai Tu Long area just to the north) have produced the only fleet of large tourist cruise boats in Indochina, to carry the world’s vacationers into and through the incredibly beautiful scenery. The bay is strewn with literally thousands of rocks and islands rising hundreds of feet straight out of the sea. Those beautiful islands provide a remarkable degree of shelter so that relatively small or unseaworthy boats can safely trade and fish over a wide area. The tourist boats have evolved from their earliest versions, with hulls based on an old Chinese style sailing vessel from the last century, with the addition of adequate diesel engines and nearly full-length cabins. They have an upper deck for promenading, keeping stubby masts with ornamental sail rigs that are never set except for photographs. Today, the largest of them amount to small floating hotels, complete with oriental roofs, balcony gardens, potted palms, dining rooms and staterooms as well as fleets of plastic kayaks, all floating on what is still an old style sailing hull at heart. They are a comfortable and enjoyable way to see the place, just not terribly graceful or traditional.

Woven Bamboo Basket Boats

There are also an enormous number of very distinctively designed motor and oar-powered woven bamboo basket boats in the area. The basic basket portion of the boat has a plump oval shape. Except for the smallest of these boats, (which are all bamboo) on the basic basket hull they build a heavy wooden rectangular structure, perhaps as little as just a frame to carry the oarlocks, but often an extensive deck and internal framing to support a diesel engine. These basket boats effectively fill all the niches of inshore work in the area—fishing, small freight and water taxi—that can be done by boats up to about 18 feet long.

Beyond that size limit, ordinary wooden planked boats do the work. The most common of these, particularly in sizes over 35 feet long, are variations on the universal Modern Motor Fishing Vessel. (We’ll call them MFV’s most of the time hereafter. More info on MFV’s.) Halong Bay, and particularly Cat Ba harbor on Cat Ba Island, is a home port for a large fleet of these boats in lengths up to 100 feet, many engaged in fishing in distant waters offshore, though a great many still fish the nearby coastal region. Although most of these MFV type boats would blend in anywhere in the country, they have some local characteristics worth noting. They often have very plump bows above water, while being very sharp at the waterline, giving them somewhat the appearance of a child with a pointed chin puffing out his cheeks. This must present some serious problems for their builders—making the planks wrap around such an extreme shape. The larger, distant-water boats though are normally big, powerful hulls, with raking stems and tall bulwarks.

Square Heads

Halong Bay is also the home of a traditionally built small motorboat directly descended from a Chinese style of sailing junk. These boats, which I refer to as Halong Bay Square Heads or just square heads, are unique in Viet Nam, but very common here. They range from about 18 feet to perhaps 40 feet long and have a very prominent squared-off bow above a perfectly normal hull otherwise. The squared-off area makes an excellent foredeck for handling anchors or gear and no doubt keeps down spray when butting into a head sea. To produce that foredeck, the uppermost hull plank runs normally from the transom along the hull until past the midships point, then begins to roll out toward horizontal and separates itself from the rest of the hull, finally ending on a headlog, a stout horizontal timber that forms the bow. The space between the upper plank and the rest of the hull is filled in with short tapered planks, and the whole extended bow area is supported on wide flaring ribs.

This widened foredeck is always decked in and provides some really useful working space right forward for handling anchors or gear. No doubt it also provides some additional buoyancy going into a head sea and knocks down a lot of spray. On the other hand, in a large head sea it is easy to imagine it pounding hard. I have not seen them working in really rough conditions though so that’s just surmise. Aft they are also very different from the great majority of traditional Vietnamese boats. They have what amounts to a broad double transom, the upper one somewhat farther aft than the lower one. In sailing days, a big wooden barn-door rudder was hung between the two, so that the upper transom provided some protection for the rudder when running off before a big sea. Nowadays though, the rudder is a small steel blade and is fitted below the lower transom just behind the propeller where it does the most good steering a motorboat.

The Halong Bay square heads are used in essentially all the trades in this part of the coast. As fishermen, the smallest usually work either hand lines or long lines, that is, they fish with hook and line, either one line in hand per person (not that common) or with a heavy long line equipped with a great many baited hooks, strung out for quite a distance on the bottom and marked at each end with buoys. In somewhat larger sizes, say over 32 feet long, you may see one rigged to fish for squid, with the typical long outrigger poles to spread the net far out on all sides of the boat, and the big banks of lights to draw the squid to the trap. Somewhat less common is a rig set up to allow a net to be pushed ahead of the boat in the top few feet of the sea, scooping whatever fish are swimming near the surface. This rig, in the Halong Bay area, usually includes a short mast just in front of the pilot house, with a pair of long booms suspended from the mast. They can be hoisted up to raise the net out of the water and bring it closer to the boat, or they can be lowered so that the net is shoved through the water somewhat like the blade in front of a bulldozer. Other Halong Bay boats tow a net behind themselves, presumably dragging along the bottom, though, rocky as the bottom is, one has to wonder how the skipper keeps his net out of trouble. You are likely to see almost any sort of fishing gear on these boats and some of them no doubt change their gear with the seasons.

Besides fishing directly, many of the smaller boats earn their living hauling the catch ashore from larger boats that want to stay out on the fishing grounds and continue working. The smaller boat takes a full cargo below and on deck and runs home to offload, leaving the catcher making money off shore, so you’ll see these boats, with no fishing gear aboard, tires hung from their sides to cushion them against the larger boats while they’re loading in the offshore swell, running for port in a nearly sinking condition, loaded down with fish.

Others are in the fruit and vegetable trade, an adjunct to the great number of tourist boats and houseboats scattered in anchorages through the islands. The tourist boats put out from Bai Chai (the modern half of Halong City) every day before noon, sometimes short fresh fish or other supplies for the sumptuous meals they’ll serve their guests (the best of them are superb and the ordinary standard is quite good). The small Halong Bay boats will lay alongside and do a brisk business in whatever they have on offer.

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Lower Red River Delta

In much of the Lower Red River Delta, although it seems as though most of the boats are heavy modern steel vessels, hauling sand, gravel, cement and bricks for the most part, there are also some fascinating oval basket boats, very close relatives to the Halong Bay baskets, but without the timber decking. They range from absolutely tiny, hardly enough to float the one man crew and his gossamer net, up to fairly substantial boats, twenty feet long or so, with small arched woven-bamboo shelter cabins. Some are powered with small diesel engines, but many run under oar power alone. I found one couple working such a boat along the banks of a canal, the missus rowing, often with her feet, and the gentleman of the family raising and lowering a push-ahead net as they nosed repeatedly into the shallows, working slowly along the bank. I’ve not yet had a chance to go aboard one or see one hauled out, so cannot describe their framing or interiors.

Sam Son

South of Halong Bay, Sam Son (pronounced Sum Sun) at the mouth of the Ha River, is one of the first major fishing harbors south of the Halong Bay area and the big port city of Haiphong. The river mouth harbor is north of the town and beach area a mile or so, and with on-going redevelopment of some of the waterfront, some military installations and generally confusing roads, it’s not a particularly easy spot to find. There are, however, a great many of the local version of the ubiquitous Modern Motor Fishing Vessel (some of which have remarkably round bows) and a few somewhat smaller but really graceful old style traditional boats.

The MFV type boats, by and large, are very similar to the boats you’ll find almost anywhere on the Vietnamese coast: heavy, deep bellied boats, nearly rectangular, with straight sides and square transom sterns, and more or less flaring rounded bows. There were three hauled out in a small boat yard and they were remarkable among Vietnamese MFV’s in having almost completely flat bottoms and hard, nearly square chines, though their bows were nicely flared.

Sam Son Traditional Boats

The local version of traditional boats that I’ve seen, range from about 30 feet to boats of 45 feet or thereabouts, though there may be more. They are very graceful, with an unbroken sheerline springing far out over the water forward and ending well above the water aft in a small transom or a widened deck over a double-ended hull. The boats I found hauled out or dried out on the beach where they could be examined closely had nearly vertical (slightly flaring) sides and arced or multi-chined bottoms, so although their proportions were very similar and they gave the impression of being all of one type, there were actually some substantial differences.

The largest of these boats (about 45 feet long) I found beached one morning on the hotel-front beach of the town, with a stern anchor out offshore and a headline tied to a pole driven into the beach sand. Her registration numbers indicated she was a local boat. The tide had almost completely left her and it was possible to examine her lines quite well. She was well maintained and in excellent condition, obviously in daily service at sea as a fisherman. Her sides stood nearly plumb and she had two chines each side above her flat bottom which rested on the sand. Her bottom was arched fore and aft such that her propeller appeared to be clear (or nearly clear) of the sand where she sat, and her wooden rudder, which was mounted in a well just forward of the transom, was hauled well up where it could come to no harm while she lay on the beach.

The other smaller examples were found hauled out in a nearby boat yard at the mouth of the Ma River and showed the same nearly plumb sides but an arced bottom with only the one chine where the arced bottom met the plumb sides. Further, the larger boat was sharp sterned, but built with three beams projecting beyond her sides and decked aft, giving her a good working deck over a very fine run. The smaller boats in the boatyard had actual transom sterns, with their bottom planking running all the way to the transom. They too had wooden barn door type rudders operating in trunks (keyhole shaped slots really) just forward of their transoms, or, if you prefer, right behind the propeller where they will do the most good in a motorboat. Thus, although there was a very strong family resemblance, they are not identical boats. The fact that they are being well maintained indicates they are economically successful at their trades, since nobody wastes money and effort here.

Bamboo Rafts

If it’s a bit difficult to find the mouth of the river and the large boat moorage at Sam Son, you cannot avoid finding the fascinating fleet of beach boats, some of which are woven baskets and some actually bamboo rafts with sail rigs and big diesel engines. A fleet of about eighty tar-coated woven basket boats, is based on the beach right in front of the older part of the Beach Hotel zone and a kilometer or so to the North, actually on the beach in front of the newer, larger hotels, there is a fleet of about forty Ghe Be or bamboo sailing rafts.

These rafts were once fairly common along this whole stretch of coast according to M. Pietri’s Voiliers d’Indochine, but this fleet at Sam Son is the only large group I’m aware of now. Not withstanding the obvious possible disadvantages involved in a sea-going, powered sailing raft, if you consider it as a vessel for routinely passing through surf to get to and from the fishing grounds, it makes a good deal of sense. Supremely flexible, unsinkable, (indeed, not even swamp-able) extremely stable, it seems they can hardly come to grief on the wide sandy beaches of the Vietnamese coast. The historical boats were all bamboo, stepped one to three masts and had dagger boards (up to three) as well as a rudder to balance their helms on various points of sailing and help them work to weather. The modern rafts are actually styrofoam floats encased in split bamboo to protect the styrofoam scrap and blocks and keep it all together, with whole bamboos used for structural strength. They step one or two masts, each carrying a single standing lug sail that stows, all wrapped around the boom and yard, up the mast in a bundle, just as such sails have been furled in these waters for a hundred years. They also carry good sized diesel engines built up on a typical long-tail outboard frame, but nowadays they have no daggerboards and only rarely a rudder. They all have a large T-handled sculling and steering sweep permanently mounted on a stanchion on the port quarter that serves for both steering in general and propulsion in water too shallow to run the engines. There was very little breeze while I watched them working and only one set sail to make a long tow to the South a quarter mile offshore. At the end of the tow, nearly dusk, they furled the sail and ran under diesel power back to the beach.

The Ghe Be fish in the nearby offshore area, usually within an hour’s run from home, though I’m fairly certain I understood one man to tell me that they do sometimes spend up to two days fishing off shore at a stretch—with no shelter and only a small platform raised slightly above the presumably often wet deck. When I saw them working, they were dragging a very fine mesh net and catching tiny pink shrimp, with a small by-catch of sardines. The ox and pony carts back right down alongside to pick up heavier things. More about the rafts.

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Sam Son Basket Boats

The Sam Son basket boats are a distinct species, of a completely different sort from baskets further north, where all the basket boats that aren’t completely round are very symmetrically oval, and likewise completely different from the basket boats further south, which are long, narrow and sharp ended. (More about woven bamboo basket boats.) These Sam Son boats (all apparently now made in one shop in town) are basically in two sizes and very consistent in form. The smaller size is about twelve feet long and five feet in beam, two feet in least depth (amidships) with a somewhat bulbous “Turkish slipper” profile. That is, the bow is quite high and comes to a sharp point, while the stern could almost be called a full transom, within the limits of what can be accomplished by weaving stiff bamboo. These smaller baskets are all rowed from a standing position aft and show a remarkable turn of speed for such rough skinned chubby boats. They are, of course, very cheerful about landing or leaving through at least a small surf.

The larger boats are not that much larger, only about sixteen feet long and six feet wide, a little deeper and bulkier overall than the twelve-footers and are all powered by small inboard diesel engines. The twelve foot boats have no need for rudders, steering with their oars, but the larger boats have very traditional wooden barn door type rudders working in a slotted hole bored in a massive single chunk of wood bolted and lashed to the stern of the boat. When beaching they hoist the rudder clear of the sand and jam it up by simply pulling the top of the rudder stock forward, jamming the rudder in its slot. On leaving the beach outbound all it takes is a bump from an elbow and the rudder will drop into working position and they’re off and in control

I have not seen these boats working in a real surf at all. In calm conditions they simply motor up onto the very gradually shelving soft sand beach until they ground. If they are ready to move up the beach above high tide for the night they will coax the boats onto a launching trolley consisting of two automobile wheels welded to a very low slung axle with a single plank bolted on. This trolley is handled with a pair of short ropes, one for each side. One man (or woman) can easily tow it down the beach to the water unless he (or she) drops one rope, in which case the two wheels will run off out of control with occasionally interesting consequences. At the water’s edge the axle is shoved under the bow of the boat and a gang of people lift the bows and shove the stern and quickly get the boat on the axle and neatly balanced. Eight or Ten people can then trundle it up the beach safely out of reach of the night time high tide.

The fleet seemed to all be working within a few miles of town, not very far offshore, fishing with anchored drift nets marked by flag buoys. They left the beach early in the morning setting out their nets and then, mostly, returned to the beach and to meet for tea and breakfast while the gear soaked for an hour or two. During this time they casually left the boats at the water’s edge, perhaps lightly bumping, sometimes with a small grapple anchor run up the beach, but not always. The tide was slowly ebbing so boats left aground were soon dried out. After a while ashore the crews returned, one or two at a time, to their nets and by early afternoon were beginning to land their catch, which seemed to consist mostly of large opalescent jelly fish of some sort, though some also landed baskets of small fish.

The strong sense of cooperative community that was apparent among both the raft and basket boat people was interesting to see. Managing the heavy basket boats up that long beach and the successful beaching and turning around of the rafts would be entirely beyond any two or three-man crew, so crews from nearby boats or rafts and any number of wives and fishmongers (perhaps also wives, of course) cheerfully turned to, to help any incoming boat or raft, though never interrupting the constant vigorous discussions.

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Cua Lo

Cua Lo (pronounced Koo-a-LAW), the town at the mouth of the river Lo, is about 60 miles south of Sam Son, near the major town of Vinh on the highway. It is the next major river mouth port along the coast South of Sam Son. The river mouth is a deep water port with a small but modern wharf where large fishing vessels or small ships tie up. There is, however, a small tidal creek entering from the south bank of the river, and in that small harbor is a fascinating fleet of mixed woven basket boats (of considerable size) and traditional wooden boats.

Cua Lo Woven Bamboo Basket Boats

The basket boats in Cua Lo are very similar in design to the sixteen foot boats at Sam Son, but are substantially larger, twenty-four or twenty-six feet long, and fully decked with timber, presumably also with substantial timber framing inside, like the smaller Sam Son boats. Their rudders are similarly mounted in a single heavy block of wood bolted to framing aft, but lashed to other structure on deck, and so do not appear to hang as far outboard as the ones on the boats at Sam Son. Likewise, it does not appear that these large baskets are routinely beached, but rather they tie up rafted side by side with the other boats in the shallow creek. In any event, it is obvious that the basket boats from these two harbors come from the same tradition. I did not find the builder of these boats or see his shop. There are not very many of them, ten or fifteen were visible in the moorage when I was there, so it is unlikely that building them amounts to a full time employment. They are built to a high degree of fit and finish (for what they are) though, so they are not a casual amateur product either.

Besides the boat-like large baskets anchored in the harbor (which are probably the biggest woven basket boats anywhere), Cua Lo has the largest round baskets of any town on the coast. Veritable Titanics nearly eight feet in diameter, they actually have a raised half deck taking up one half of their hold, built in bilge pumps and an elaborate system of bamboo ribs. They all seem to go to sea on deck of the larger traditional wooden boats fishing from the town. I didn’t see any of them working off the beach independently.

Traditional Wooden Boats of Cua Lo

The traditional wooden boats in the harbor are almost all the same though they use a variety of different fishing gear so that superficially they look somewhat different. They are transom sterned, carrying their beam well aft, but they have the traditional style of rising sheer forward, albeit perhaps not to the extreme of gracefulness of the boats at Sam Son. They give the appearance of a slightly chunky, very seaworthy boat, about 40 feet long on average.

The harbor has imposed two constraints on the boat designs. There is a low bridge over the creek below the harbor area, so none of the boats have high pilot houses. Rather, they have low engine room covers and the skipper sits on top of the engine room to steer, presumably ducking when passing under the bridge at high tide. Besides that, most of the creek dries at low water, or at least is too shoal to float the boats, so they are all accustomed to sit in the mud if they’re in harbor over low tide. To that end they have kept the old style sailing rudder that can be readily hoisted up to avoid damage when they ground out. Further, they are essentially flat bottomed so they sit comfortably upright over the tide. There are two boatyards in the village, one is just a marine railway for hauling out to do bottom work and does not look like it does new construction. The other, nearer the mouth of the harbor, is more substantial and clearly has the capability to build new boats of the size in use. I have not seen new construction ongoing however, so can’t be sure the boats are actually built locally. They are a little broader in proportion to their length than the comparable sized boats at Sam Son, and a little deeper in the hold, enough difference to argue for a separate source. Certainly, they are all very much alike, so are very likely built in one yard.

There are about a hundred boats in the harbor normally, divided among several different sorts of gear: There is a substantial fleet, a dozen or more boats that fish by carrying several round basket boats on deck out to sea and leaving them to fish independently for day trips. There are a number of “push-aheads,” rigged with a pair of long poles forward that can be cantilevered out over the bow and raised and lowered as needed. Since they have to pass under the low bridge over the creek, they don’t have a mast to simplify handling the heavy gear, but do it all by hand. A sock-shaped net is rigged to the outboard ends of the poles and shoved through the water, scooping up whatever is swimming in the upper ten or fifteen feet of the sea to a width of 30 feet or more. The boat hauls back by slowing, hoisting the poles so that the net mouth is out of the water, then bringing the bunt of the net aboard over one side or the other of the boat to empty it. These boats all carry a round basket boat on board, presumably to help with rigging the net once they get to sea, since they always enter and leave port with their poles hauled inboard, projecting only a relatively short distance in front of the boat, and without the net in place.

There are also a number of the same style of boat, but equipped with a sort of rectangular platform that can be lowered to work off of on one side of the boat, or heaved up and lashed against the side of the engine house. The platform has a rectangular hole that would allow, for example, easy lowering or raising of lobster pots, but I’ve not seen the boats with gear aboard or fishing so can’t be sure how they work.

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