Yawl
Most of these types are now extinct, but they include the Norfolk and Sussex Beach Yawls (called "yols" by the men who crewed them), which were probably the fastest-sailing open boats ever built.
An example of this is the Whitstable yawl, a decked gaff-cutter-rigged fishing smack that dredged for oysters.
This is because the mainsail is not quite so big to handle and the mizzen (before the days of modern self steering gear) could allow the sails to be trimmed to keep a boat on the same course.
Also, handing (taking down) the mizzen is a quick and easy way of reducing sail, often thought of as the equivalent of the first reef in a cutter or sloop.
Less well known are the advantages of setting a mizzen staysail when reaching, which can give a considerable amount of extra drive not available to a single-masted rig.
[9] With the mizzen sheeted to an outrigger or boomkin and a jib set on a bowsprit, the rig extends a lot horizontally.
This allows the sail area to have a lower centre of pressure than, for example, a Bermudan sloop.
Generally, a yawl is a double-ended, clinker built open boat, which can be worked under sail or oar.
The Shetland boats include foureens and sixareens; the names denote the number of oars they were designed to use.
It appears that the Norwegian boatbuilders built specific types of craft to meet the needs of the Shetland market, as these boats differed somewhat from the ones used in Norway.
The Royal Navy often had warships anchored in Yarmouth roads, so providing a lot of work additional to that from the many merchant ships that passed along the East Anglian coast.
Clinker-built and double-ended, the hulls were typically 50 feet (15 metres) long with a beam of 8 to 10 ft (2.4 to 3.0 m).
The slightly shorter and beamier "bullock boats" carried supplies out to ships moored in the roads and would land catches of herrings from luggers.
The boats were run down the shingle beach on greased wooden skids laid at right angles to their route.
Men ran alongside to hold the boat upright as it started to move, crew members scrambled aboard and others passed bags of ballast on board.
On tacking, the foresail would be dipped behind the mast to set on the other side, and the halyard (which was made fast at the gunwale to help support the mast) and burton (a moveable stay) would be shifted to windward and hauled taught again, whilst others would be heaving bags of shingle ballast to the new windward side of the bilge.
The most important man aboard tended the foresheet, which was never cleated, but held in hand after taking a couple of turns around the main sampson post.
[15][16][17] The yawl as a type of Royal Navy ship's boat appeared early in the second half of the 17th century.
