Its funny how one makes assumptions and ignores all evidence. I thought a song about fish being shipped to Japan, its by Stan Rogers so it must be Canada, nearest Japan is BC so must be BC coast.

How wrong could I be, and all the evidence is in the song. After reading the thread I went off looking for turtlebacks on the internet without success. The Steve Briggs page mentioned above is no longer up, eventually went on the web archive to find the page.

Old Steve Briggs Website

Discovered the boats are called fishing tugs and here are a load of pictures, admittedly south of the border.

Fishing Tugs

The Canadian onse look similar from a hazy aerial photo of Port Dover -- home of the song. They still have some, are they actively fishing or just museum pieces?

Port Dover Harbour

I wonder why there is so little information on Great Lakes fishing on the internet.

More importantly to this forum why is there relatively little Stan Rogers information out on the web. There must be many thousands of us who sing his songs and we would love to know more about the background to them. This year is the 25th anniversary of his death; I hope someone out their is collecting memories of him before they completely fade.