Wooden Boats of the South Vietnamese Coast

The South Coast of Vietnam shades gradually from the Central Coast as the country spreads out to embrace the wide delta country south of Ho Chi Minh City. I arbitrarily decided to mark the end of the central coast at the beautiful bay and tiny town of Dai Lanh, whose boats really belong to the Nha Trang tradition, so Nha Trang is the first big boat-building city at the northern end of the South Coast. At the southern end, we will stop with Vung Tau.

You might expect me to carry on describing the boats to the south at least as far as Ca Mau or Nam Can down in the very southern tip of the country, but really, that delta country is just that, home to river boats and a few strays from the open ocean. So for me the South Coast of Vietnam runs from Nha Trang in the northern part, south through Cam Ranh, Phan Rang, Phan Ri, Mui Ne and Phan Thiet and ends at Vung Tau, the ultimate big time beach resort for Vietnam.

Nha Trang

Nha Trang is actually blessed with several harbors, but it is the river mouth in the center of the long stretch of gorgeous sandy beach and city that grabs your attention first. It’s one of the very best places to watch fishing boats coming and going anywhere along the coast. The harbor holds hundreds of boats, large and small, and any that want to go to sea must pass under the new bridge that carries the waterfront avenue across the river’s mouth. It’s a scenic spot: an island just offshore, the bay curving around to the North, the long sweep of sandy beach and a bustling city in all directions inland and, of course, the river mouth harbor clear full of beautiful (mostly bright blue) boats.

There are two sorts of fishing boats here, as in many Vietnamese ports: the modern MFV (motor fishing vessel) type, and a particularly good looking sort of double ended traditional boat, both types in a variety of sizes.

MFV’s

The modern MFV’s are always painted, usually blue, but occasionally green or gray, with bright trim—red, white, sometimes a touch of yellow—and white around the windows and panels in the cabin top. Altogether, they are a very handsome bunch. Their bows are tall and flare very nicely into quite full lines at the rails but still manage to work into fine sharp cutwaters. From the tall bows their sheers sweep in an unbroken line down to the low waist amidships (where their fishing gear will come aboard) and back up in a proud sweep to their raking transom sterns. They are completely decked over, though not necessarily with tight hatches, and their sides form bulwarks to enclose the working deck forward and the short cockpit aft of the house. Their pilot houses are, as with all the MFV’s, located aft over the engine rooms. More about MFV’s. Although never large for their crew size, the cabins at least provide some shelter for the crew in foul weather. Often, particularly in smaller boats, the cabin sides rise directly from the hull, with no walkway from the foredeck to the cockpit aft, so the route between runs through the cabin doors on the forward corners of the house and out the door aft.

While the smaller boats are mostly powered by one or two-cylinder, un-muffled Chinese diesels, the larger boats have four or six cylinder engines, often muffled down to a pleasant rumble on deck, no matter how they might howl in the engine room itself.

MFV Fisheries

They seem to be in two different fisheries, depending, as much as anything else, on their size. The smaller MFV’s, say up to about 40 feet long, mostly fish locally at night. Their cabin tops will carry light boxes on either side, as many as there is room for, each box with four, five or six fluorescent light tubes. Looking out to sea in the dark of night you will see seventy or eighty little pools of cold blue-white light out near the horizon: the fleet at work. There does not seem to be a squid fishery here. Rather, these boats are setting seine nets around their pools of light and bringing back a modest catch of silvery fish each morning. They all carry at least one round basket boat to help with the net. The catches are not usually large considering the size of the crew and boat. I saw many boats unloading only a hundred pounds, or not much more, with crews of five or six men.

The larger boats, some over sixty five feet long and very nicely proportioned, are almost all in distant waters fisheries, loading ice to last for probably five-day trips. Unlike most fleets fishing from Vietnamese ports, they load their ice aboard in full blocks, putting it belowdecks whole. Elsewhere it is typical to have the ice chipped up as it is loaded aboard, either by a plant ashore that chips it and blows it directly into the ice hold, or carrying block ice out to the fishing boat in special insulated ice boats, each of which carries an ice chipper on top of its insulated cabin top. The Nha Trang boats, almost without exception, have their own ice chipping machines on deck, just forward of the cabin (within easy reach of a hydraulic line from an engine below). They will leave the blocks in the hold until they have fish to put below, then chip the ice they need. The blocks will last far longer than the pre-chipped stuff and anyway, the chipped ice tends to re-freeze together after a while in the hold and has to be broken up by hand—hard labor—by the third or fourth day at sea. The block ice seems a good solution until you think about wrestling with a slippery block of rock-hard ice weighing over a hundred pounds, slithering around on the deck of a small boat in a seaway. Smashed fingers and broken ankles seem like reasonable outcomes.

The distant-waters boats from Nha Trang seem mostly to be fishing with longline gear, set by hand (no baiting machines or ground line reels), but in many cases, hauled back using a hydraulic power block. The power block is a simple device, popular all over the world for lifting long-line gear or crab or lobster pots. It is basically nothing but a hydraulically powered, spinning, rubber-clad metal spool a foot or two in diameter. If you put a loop of groundline or potwarp over the top of the spinning spool, it will pull the line up over the spool and bring fish or crabs with it. It’s vastly less work than hauling the same line up by hand, but has the potential for nipping off careless fingers or worse.

The ground lines are monofilament of heroic proportions, nearly 3/16 inch thick and enormously strong. Short leaders with baited hooks are spaced out along the ground line, twenty feet or more apart and the whole string, which may be nearly half a mile long, is laid out between buoys. In the harbor the buoy poles, each with its own bright flag bundled together along the aft bulkhead of the cabin, make a pretty sight. Many of these boats carry great numbers of flimsy plastic “milk jug” floats, so they presumably are fishing with their gear on the surface, probably looking for tuna or large billfish. I’ve seen tuna bigger than a man being off-loaded by hand from harbor boats onto a small dock at the upstream end of the harbor.

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Traditional Boats

The traditional design of Vietnamese fishing boats from Nha Trang are among the most graceful and attractive anywhere. Smaller than the MFV types in general (though there is some overlap between the smallest MFV’s and largest traditional boats) they range in length from about twenty feet to forty. They are double enders, with bold sheer lines, high raking bows and lower sterns overhanging the sea, usually with a gracefully curved rudder hung on the sternpost, though also sometimes on a pair of extended iron gudgeons that serve to give the rudder’s pivot axis a better angle while at the same time creating an odd sense that the rudder has been left behind by the boat! The largest of them—perhaps thirty five or forty feet long—will have pilot houses very like those you see on the modern MFV’s, but the majority of the traditional boats have only a motor house perhaps big enough for the two-man crew to huddle under cover by the engine while the net is soaking, and often nothing more than a weather cover for the engine.

Trim Detail

The workmanship on these traditional boats (indeed, on all the Nha Trang boats) is quite good, if sometimes the lining out of planks is a bit startling to Western eyes. Especially when newly painted and oiled they’re very beautiful boats. They’re never painted overall, but rather, will have an oiled or varnished hull (sadly, never bright golden for very long each season) and a brightly painted gunnel, red or sometimes blue, with blue paint to pick out the house or motor box sides and white, red and yellow trim to brighten the frames around doors or panels in the topsides. They always have long graceful oval eyes painted on their bows, and sometimes tail feathers as well, and they all have artistically carved and painted nga.

Nga

Once found on essentially every Vietnamese boat, nga are now mostly only found on traditional style boats descended from older sailing types. Nga are rather like a painted wooden moustache or pair of wings on the bow of a boat, useful for hanging the anchor on, or fairleading the bow line or anchor warp. In some traditions they’re nothing but functional, unfinished plain wood, but in other areas they seem to be an important ornament or, in times past at least, the site of the on-board altar and incense burning spot.

The smaller boats are all powered by single cylinder Chinese diesels, usually discharging their exhausts directly overboard, or worse, straight into the air in front of the skipper at the tiller. The racket is dreadful and the vibration on board would shake the nails out of a boat in time, if nails had been used at all!

These traditional boats from Nha Trang are mostly in the night fishing trades. The larger boats are usually equipped with the same sort of flat light boxes of fluorescent tubes mounted on their cabin tops as the MFV’s. Interestingly, the smaller boats rarely have any lights aboard but still fish at night. Again, they almost all carry a round basket to help with their gear, though you will also see them towing very small canoes, sometimes two at a time.

The smallest of the traditional boats that go offshore fishing at night (20 to 22 feet long) all carry a large curved T-handle sculling oar on their port quarter, arranged so the fisherman standing in the working area forward of the engine box can readily work the oar. I’ve never seen one in use inside the harbor, but it is easy to imagine wanting to have an oar to use at sea for working close to the net, instead of using the net-gobbling propeller.

Nha Trang Harbor Boats

The harbor boats in Nha Trang are quite interesting. Besides hundreds of round basket boats in a variety of sizes, there are still a good number of long double-ended basket boats working as harbor taxis and fish buyers. Fifteen to eighteen feet long, they are mostly rowed by men seated right aft and paddling (or is it pedaling) with their feet on long T-handled oars. These are not pretty boats, black, flat sheer, spindle shaped, but very effective. Rowed by leg power they move very quickly and carry a heavy load in protected water.

Side by side with the woven basket boats are identical boats made in the composite wood-and-aluminum tradition like the "armadillo" boats in Hue. The smaller of these boats are sometimes paddled with canoe paddles instead of being rowed, particularly if the boat is being used as a floating sandwich shop (of which there are several in the harbor, operated by young women). Now and then you see a very similar little boat, double ended, wood and aluminum composite, but canoe sized, and a good deal more graceful, with a pleasant bounce to the sheer. They are always paddled like a canoe of course.

The most startling boats in Nha Trang are also unique to the harbor. Or at least I’ve never seen them elsewhere. They are a wood and aluminum composite, about twenty-two feet long on average, obviously evolved to be heavy carriers using engine power. They have broad transom sterns with very little rise in their run aft but quite a bit of sheer forward. The reason becomes obvious when you see them working. Besides fish from the fleet, they haul sand or ice from the cold storage house out to fishing boats ready to leave for sea. Whichever cargo they are hauling, it’s usually every ounce they will carry without sinking. If they didn’t have the raised sheerline forward, their bow wave would come aboard in a moment and sink them. As it is, they are a marvel of load carrying, if not of safety. They are completely open, though the engine box is bulkheaded off from the cargo areas fore and aft. Their crews routinely ride on top of the cargo when they’re loaded, lying down for better stability. On tons of ice that must be an interesting sensation.

Nha Trang Boat Yards

There are several boat yards in downtown Nha Trang, upstream of the second (older) bridge and behind the Cham Towers. (The well-preserved towers are a prominent landmark in the inner harbor.) Finding them by water was easy, but it was a major struggle to get there by street. One large yard has major construction and repair work going on as well as lots of cleaning, painting and dry storage.

I also found two small shops building the composite wood and aluminum boats in the same neighborhood behind the Cham towers. Beautiful, red hardwood upper planks were being cut to shape and planed down for thickness. They also had finished, or nearly finished, boats ready to go. Even at this size range the same rule applied, the traditional boat is not painted and the square sterned modern motorboat is blue with red trim.

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Mui Ne and Phan Thiet

The influence of Nha Trang extends a long ways north and south along the coast, but by the time you reach Mui Ne and Phan Thiet you have moved into a different boat building and fishing tradition. Phan Thiet is actually the big city of the area, the largest in Binh Thuan Province. Mui Ne, twenty odd kilometers to the north, is just a small village by comparison, but it stands on the high ground back of a prominent cape and looks out onto a well sheltered natural bay to the south and, on the other side of the cape, another bay, almost as sheltered facing the North. Whenever I’ve been there, the fleet (upwards of three hundred boats) has been anchored out in the southern bay. But when the wind turns and comes from the South, the fleet will pick up and move to the northern bay! The main harbor in Phan Thiet, by contrast, is an improved river mouth with artificial breakwaters extending out into the bay, a dredged channel, and the harbor banks built up with masonry bulkheads. The space along the shoreline is completely full of fine looking fishing boats, mostly variants on the modern MFV style, though (with the exception of a few strays that are obviously from Nha Trang) a very different style than you’ll see further north.

MFV’s in Phan Thiet and Mui Ne

The typical local MFV in Phan Thiet and Mui Ne has a two-step “wedding cake” pilothouse arrangement, with the engine house below and a pilothouse—or at least a head and shoulders shelter for the skipper—above and behind. The sheerline is particularly bold, and, very uncommonly for Southeast Asia, the stem is actually curved like a clipper ship’s. Further, their hulls are only rarely painted, but rather are finished with an oil of some sort that gives them a beautifully brown, varnished look for a while, but soon fades to a sunburned brownish gray, almost as though they’d never been finished at all. The pilothouses are usually painted green or blue and there is normally quite a lot of bright red and yellow trim on the gunnels and rub rails and white outlining around the windows.

There are two prominent styles of transom on the MFV type boats, both raked heavily. One type is planked straight across, but has a pronounced curve when seen from the side. The other is planked with vertical "barrel staves" so that it flares widely to the side and aft, but presents a straight line when viewed from the side. In another change from the Nha Trang boats, these, modern though they are, almost all have nga—the anchor chock/bow fairlead-ornament—just as if they were traditional boats.

Altogether, these boats, even in larger sizes, give a leaner, lower impression than the husky boats from Nha Trang, and somehow perhaps a more oriental look. It’s tempting to think they derive from Japanese designs imported during the 1960’s to go with the Japanese engines that were being imported then, but I have no documentation of that.

Draggers & Seiners

The country behind Mui Ne and Phan Thiet away from the streams is sandy desert and stony hills. The shoreline is a series of beautiful beaches backed by tall partially vegetated dunes. The sand ashore gives you a clue as to the sea bottom offshore: more sand, with here and there a rocky outcrop, no doubt. In consequence a great many of the boats are rigged for dragging, pulling a sock-shaped net along the bottom, using otter boards (or doors or paravanes—all the same sort of underwater kite designed to pull the mouth of the net down and out). The otter boards are prominently hung outboard on the quarters of the boats. A dragger is subject to hanging up and wrecking his gear on any sort of a rock or a wreck on the bottom, so a generally sandy bottom is just what they want.

Many other local boats set enormous seine nets on the surface and spend hours with a big crew pursing up and hauling back. I have no data to prove the point, but the draggers and seiners both look a little too sea-weary, wanting more paint more often, and other repairs as well. Perhaps there is too much pressure on the fishery now.

Squidders

The squidders seem to be doing a little better, fresher paint and fewer obvious problems. Mostly they are larger boats and often of the Nha Trang MFV style, or a variant, with somewhat lower freeboard all around and less dramatic sheerlines. Needing their long booms spread out over the sea to set their nets at night, they often leave them spread during the day in good weather, but then they have to stay away from other boats or risk a major tangle of rigging. Perhaps because they have to anchor out so far, they often have bigger cabins than typical Nha Trang boats, enough to give pretty comfortable shelter for a modest sized crew. The largest squidders are the best kept by and large and have massive arrays of expensive lighting and intriguing rigging setups to handle their long net booms.

Where squidders farther north seem content just to have rows of big light bulbs in racks on their cabin tops to light up the sea around in a general way, these Mui Ne/Phan Thiet squid boats have booms rigged just forward of their cabins with enormous reflectorized lights in constellations of six to ten bulbs. The booms swing inboard during the day or when they are traveling, but swing out over the port side and aim straight down into the water, turning the night into day to quite a depth. Charcoaled squid was a popular and cheap treat in Viet Nam (rather like salty chewing gum or fishy beef jerky) when I was a young man. Forty years later, the same treat in Hanoi costs more than a good dinner, though it’s still scorched on the same sort of charcoal burner on the sidewalk. No doubt that has something to do with the good condition and expensive rigging of the squid boats.

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Traditional Boats

The most common of the traditional boats in Mui Ne and Phan Thiet are open boats, ranging from sixteen feet to about twenty feet long, and very beamy for their length. They are double enders, and unusually symmetrical, with pronounced overhangs fore and aft. Although they are round bottomed boats—all curves without chines—they are nearly flat bottomed. Like essentially all Vietnamese boats in this size range, they’re powered nowadays with single cylinder Chinese diesel engines, usually running their exhaust straight in the air, though sometimes out through the topsides of the hull. The cooling water supply is the typical pipe bent around to look straight into the prop wash. More about the cooling water supply. Besides the engine, they all carry an enormous sculling oar on a pair of crutches along one gunnel. They are framed with sawn timber frames on about one foot centers and fastened with trunnels. Most of them have the bow bulkheaded off and decked over and a tight midships bulkhead as well to keep the fish from sliding end to end. A majority also have bilge keels or “flopper stoppers” bolted on just aft of amidships and right close to the waterline.

They are all finished with the same oil as the MFV types, so they look brownish grey almost all the time, only being beautifully brown for a short while when the oil is fresh. They are often painted blue inside, and commonly have blue or yellow gunnels and a bright red half stripe forward, with a graceful, if somewhat small, eye painted on the red background. They all have ornate nga, usually painted red with yellow accents. The nga have practical notches to hold the anchor stock or fairlead the mooring or anchor lines, but they are prettier than mere necessity dictates, with a jaunty upward bounce to their “wingtips.”

They are very burdensome little boats, easily carrying a three man crew and their catch and gear. Their rudders are shipped through a slot in their sternposts. With wooden stocks and blades the rudders are readily raised out of harm’s way for beaching and in fact, these boats are usually moored on the water’s edge, whether on the beach at Mui Ne or on the muddy banks of the river mouth in Phan Thiet. A very few of them have arranged a primitive sun shade sort of shelter for the helmsman, but mostly they are entirely open. They carry a T-handle sculling oar about 7/8ths as long as the boat, unshipped and carried in a pair of crutches let into the gunnel when not working. Typically a heavy rope grommet is seized on the loom of the oar ready to drop over a short stout wooden stanchion set in the gunnel on the port quarter.

Viewed from the wrong perspective they seem to be about as graceful as half of a watermelon, but that is carrying it too far. They are short, round, beamy and deep bodied, but they move very easily over the water, drawing very little and making almost no fuss as they move, at least lightly loaded.

The harbor at Phan Thiet holds three other very unusual wooden boats: a water taxi, an ancient style of double-ended sailing vessel adapted to power, and a small, ocean-going freighter.

Water Taxis

The most visible of these peculiarly Phan Thiet type boats is a small fleet—a dozen or so—of heavy, double-ended water taxis. They make a living by sculling a short distance from boats anchored out in the harbor to the beach and back, landing crews and fish and fetching out groceries. They are odd boats, about twenty feet long, flat sheered, ugly, propelled by a single enormous sculling oar at least as long as the boat itself, and apparently all of them in the control of a guild of old women. The monstrous oars are obviously a handful for the old women, who stand amidships on a thwart well above the bilges to manage to handle the oar at all and painfully, slowly row their fares back and forth.

On the other hand, it’s obviously a very sociable job, visiting with their customers, or in quiet times rafting up with two or three others and spinning stories in the shade of their conical hats. I’ve seen nothing else like them anywhere on the coast, neither the ugly boats nor the ancient boatwomen.

Double-Ender

Though I have only spotted one example, there was, as of 2009, still an ancient style, double-ended wooden sailing vessel about forty-five feet long, fishing with a fleet of round basket boats offshore. Her rig is gone and she is powered now, but is otherwise as she (or her ancestors) went to sea generations ago. She’s long and lean at both ends, low amidships, overhanging the water a long ways forward and a little less so aft, running at hull speed with almost no wake whatever. She is finished in dark oil, nearly black, with no trim except for a small patch of red at the top of her stem head, the normal long slender white eye on the gunnel and a long tapered yellow scowl of a mouth just above the water line. You cannot see her without thinking “There goes Rudolph the Red Nosed Fish Boat. . .and she’s pissed about something!” Disregarding the delightful facial expression, the boat looks to be a rare example of a surviving large pre-engine hull, still making a living, and would repay careful documentation sometime soon.

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Phan Thiet Freighters

The other Phan Thiet oddity, standing out for sheer size and for being painted in the traditional Nha Trang colors (bright blue, with red, black and white trim), is a small fleet—three in harbor at once for example—of identical small ocean-going freighters. They have a full width “cargo cabin” covering about two thirds of their length, with small windows high up for light and a series of sliding doors along the length of the cabin sides opening directly overboard, for loading or discharging cargo when lying alongside a dock. This lower cabin is clearly really a cargo hold. Wide open, it doesn’t even have a bench along the sides. A second level cabin above, set in from the deck edge a foot or two behind low bulwarks provides accommodation for a number of people above the cargo cabin.

These boats do not seem to be in a coastwise trade, running north and south. I’ve never seen them anywhere but Phan Thiet, except once I spotted one leaving the harbor at Vung Tau, running light. In any event, the whole mainland is well served by the road network these days as well as the rail line. Rather, there is an island, Phu Quy, about 100 km offshore in the South China Sea, with a vigorous agricultural and fishing economy and about 20,000 residents. These boats must be their link with the mainland.

As recently as the 1940’s, M. Pietri described a variety of sailing freighters working out of Phan Thiet, hauling nuoc mam (fish sauce) to market and returning with rice from the Mekong region, as well, presumably, as trading to the offshore island. Some of them still lingered in the 1960’s when the US Navy produced the Blue Book of Junks. None of them looked at all like this modern vessel, which clearly has evolved over the past fifty years along with the very similar (though somewhat smaller) modern MFV (motor fishing vessel) type boats built all up and down the coast.

Woven Bamboo Basket Boats

Many of the medium or smaller sized boats from Phan Thiet, of whatever build (modern or traditional), go to sea with a fleet of six or more round woven bamboo basket boats on deck. They are put overboard to fish independently during the work day. You can spot the baskets that normally work that way by the four or five split bamboo “ribs” that are bent around their outside, to protect the basic basket weave and tar from rubbing as they are pushed overboard or hauled back in.

Besides the omnipresent round basket boats, there are a few motor driven baskets moored in the harbor, somewhat different from those I’ve seen elsewhere. They are about eighteen or twenty feet long, sharp bowed and round sterned, with a full midships section but easy lines. They all carry bamboo sponsons along their gunnels, but rather than being made from styrofoam covered with split laths of bamboo, like the similar sponsons on the boats around Thuan An Beach near Hue, they appear to be true bundles of small bamboo stems. That may be an illusion, they may have styrofoam filling covered with small whole stems rather than the split lath.

All of the ones that I have seen were anchored out in the harbor and I could not photograph their inner structure, though it was apparent from a distance that they have a full set of wooden ribs at least and probably a wooden stem post or cutwater. Some of them had rudimentary shelters over the helmsman’s area, to provide some shade at least.

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Vung Tau

Vung Tau is the closest beach resort to Ho Chi Minh City and has grown enormously in the past forty years. When I first visited on a short weekend in 1971, there were still moldering old piles of French hotels to choose from, all clustered around the “front beach.” There were a great many little restaurants, most with their menus in French and English as well as Vietnamese, and all serving really fresh seafood prepared both French and Vietnamese style. Tiny horses clip-clopped up and down the shady streets pulling little two-wheeled cabs or waited quietly for a fare outside a rowdy GI bar.

Things have changed. The place has spread out in all directions, a long ways to the North, covering the hillsides and waterfront with world class hotels and restaurants. There is hardly a blade of grass out of place anywhere and no candy wrapper would dare blow down the street. Even the freeway coming into town has been planted as a fine flower garden for twenty kilometers. Platoons of gardeners keep it trimmed and watered.

And, instead of a good sized fleet of fishing boats anchored in front of the town along the “back beach,” now there are just a few boats, lending a little maritime color to the scene. But not to worry. The large fleet of bright blue boats I remember from those days has multiplied several times over and now fills a fishing boat harbor around the cape to the South. There is a large upland boatyard where several different builders are doing maintenance and a lot of new construction, and an amazing volume of fishing boats anchored off. The harbor has one long, narrow, dredged and buoyed channel leading in from the open sea and is otherwise no more than extensive mud flats. The boats, in their hundreds, sit over much of the tide nearly up to their waterlines in soft mud.

Vung Tau Modern Motor Fishing Vessels

The US Navy’s Blue Book of Junks, published in the mid 1960’s reported a fleet of over forty Chinese-rigged “refugee” boats fishing under sail from Vung Tau, but also stated that the motorization of the entire fleet at Vung Tau and at Rach Gia was proceeding much more rapidly than elsewhere in South Viet Nam. More to the point, the Japanese and Western style motorboats that have become the modern MFV (motor fishing vessel) style boats were adopted here very early on, and by the early 1970’s when I visited, there were either no boats visible fishing under sail, or I missed them. Rather, even then, the broad sterned motorboat, with a good sized pilot house aft, painted bright blue with red and white trim was the normal larger fishing boat. Now the harbor is full of such boats, very similar to the boats you will see in Nha Trang, as well as strays from farther South and the Gulf of Thailand.

The differences between the Gulf of Thailand boats and the Nha Trang/Vung Tau designs are subtle but the net effect, on seeing them, is that they seem to be very different boats. The Nha Trang/Vung Tau style boats have relatively low, single-level pilot houses that stop, even if they have an overhang over part of the aft deck, well before the transom. The Gulf boats have taller houses, with, in some cases at least, accommodation for crew in the uppermost layer, which will overhang the entire back deck. Even more, the roof of the pilot house will have wooden handrail all around to contain a potpourri of buoys, baskets, tubs and buckets or other light gear.

The hulls are different too. The Nha Trang/Vung Tau boats have raking transom sterns, often planked up with vertical staving to give them a pleasant rounded shape. Their sheer lines run in a long S curve from the bow—a powderhorn sheer—sweeping back up from the low point amidships to a higher transom. The Gulf boats profile, by contrast, usually sweeps in a pronounced curve down from their high bows, then the line flattens out amidships and continues at the same height above the water to their wide, flat, vertical transom sterns.

Fishing Gear

You will see every sort of fishing gear imaginable among this large fleet: pots, longlines, seines, gillnets, draggers, night-fishing gear for squid and other fish, basically, anything at all to catch a fish. There is such a huge fleet here that one wonders if they operate on a schedule or quota basis. For that matter, if all the fishing boats in Viet Nam put to sea at once you would have to believe they could sweep the sea clean. On any given day there will be large fleets at anchor and tied up in any Vietnamese port, even if there are a good many boats at sea.

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Traditional Style Boats of Vung Tau

There are two remnants of Traditional Style boats in Vung Tau. Both are much smaller than the MFV’s. The larger sort, twenty four to thirty feet long, have evolved a long ways from the traditional, double-ended style of boat to become quite nice small motor boats, with the typical Vietnamese sort of sweeping, overhanging bow but a very broad somewhat raking transom stern.

They are essentially open boats, although the larger ones will have a full deck, but neither pilot house nor separate engine cover. They essentially all have small sun-shade-and-spray sorts of shelters more or less tacked on aft, often no more than four upright posts and a flat bit of roof, perhaps no more than canvas or poly tarp. Their sides flare out far more than is common elsewhere on the coast so that, even though their bows are unmistakably Eastern, their aft sections have a decidedly Western motorboat look.

Anchored out off the town or moored stern-to near the beach, there are also a few of the old dory-style open boats that I remember from the 1970’s, sixteen to twenty feet long. Then, they had neither rudders nor motors, but fished for lobster close to the rocks of the cape under oars, with the oarsman standing aft of amidships and facing forward to row. Now, they seem to be all a bit larger, and all have welded-up iron rudders hung through their transom sterns and small Chinese diesel engines inboard. They are, in almost every regard, comparable to New England, Canadian or Breton style dories: flat bottoms, flaring flat sides, overhanging bows and raking, narrow transom sterns. They are easy to beach or moor in shallow water, economical to build and operate and carry a heavy load well through rough water.

Vung Tau Boatyard

The boatyard at Vung Tau is particularly interesting. There is one saw mill on site, capable of slicing up quite large, long logs and producing planks or timbers of almost any dimension from the hardwood logs of the country (or from nearby Cambodia). The saw is the typical sort of Vietnamese band saw, electric powered in this case, with enormous wheels carrying the blade, all held at the correct height by a carriage on four posts that run on steel wheels on rails. The height of the blade is adjusted with a crank handle and three men push the screaming blade through the log while a barrel of water drips coolant on the kerf.

There are at least two different builders working on the uplands, building much the same sort of vessel, but, when I was last there, in two very different traditions. One group of vessels, roughly 65 foot class Motor Fishing Vessels, were being built essentially as they would be anywhere in the Western world. They had their heavy timber keels and stemposts set up on blocking, then each individual frame laid out, full sized and fabricated, on a separate lofting-building floor (open to the sky) nearby. Each frame, when bolted together and painted, was set up on the correct station on the keel, bolted and braced to the ground and to the adjacent frames with light timber battens. Eventually, the entire skeleton true and fair, the builder would plank the boat up.

On the same building site, shoulder to shoulder, essentially identical-looking hull forms (at least from the outside) were being produced by the Eastern technique of planking first and adding frames later. No doubt the two systems will both produce serviceable hulls, but the similarity will stop with the shape. The structures are radically different.

Besides the boatyard itself, the area has a full array of maritime businesses. Anything a fisherman or boatwright could want will be available somewhere nearby, whether a monster rough-cast propeller waiting for finishing at the machine shop or a hand welded anchor or parts and pieces for engines or boats or fishing gear. And ice and fish buyers, of course.

Water Taxi

Coming and going through all of this is yet another unique harbor water taxi design. There must be a hundred of them, maybe more, all nearly identical. They are very simple boats, with transom bows and sterns, flat bottoms and moderately flaring topsides. Originally, they were probably built of three planks and two transoms and little else. They are all rowed by foot, with big blocky T-handles on the oars for the feet to work with. The oarsmen row leaning hard against backrests right in the stern. Here there does not seem to be any discrimination. The boats are rowed by men and women alike, of all ages. They’re not noticeably good little sea boats, and when I asked to be rowed out the harbor mouth we only went a short ways before it became obvious that the small chop outside was more than the little square nosed boat wanted and we gave it up as a bad idea. They are all painted the same dark blue as the great majority of the fishing boats, with perhaps just a bit of red or black trim.

Harbor Freight Boat

There’s another class of harbor service boat: a heavy, square-sterned, round-bottomed, open motor boat. Eighteen to twenty feet long, they are equipped with cut up tires for fendering, carrying heavy loads from the wharf out to the anchored fleet. They are simple, sturdy boats, very burdensome and no doubt very capable, just not particularly pretty. They typically have a low deck just forward of the transom for the operator to stand on, and a bulkhead forward of that to cut off the engine space from whatever is riding in the open hold forward.

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