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KETCH UP!

Are you a ketch fancier?  Is your boat a ketch?  Tell us all about it!

If you are a ketch sailor, we'd love to hear all about you. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the ketch?  Tell us how you came to be interested in sailing a ketch and all about yourself and your boat.
We'd love to hear all about ketches you have owned, worked on or just enjoyed a sail aboard.

For those who are wondering what a ketch is, it's a yacht with two masts of which the foremost is the main mast and the one nearest the rear, called the mizzen mast, is stepped before the rudder head. 
In England, the original name was Catch but, although this suggests that they were used primarily for fishing they were, in fact, mainly used as small coastal trading vessels.
Suggestions have been made that the name derived from the use of this type of vessel to chase, or pursue, other vessels in time of war though this appears to be refuted by a description given by Glanville in 1625 that "Catches, being short and round-built, be very apt to turn up and down and useful to go to and fro and to carry messages between ship and shore, almost with any wind".

They were small vessels, originally of fifty tons or less, but they roughly doubled in size during the reign of King Charles II of England, who used the ketch design for his royal yachts. They were square rigged on both masts to the full ship rig and were often described as 'a ship without a foremast', the reference being to the sailing rig and not to the vessel as a type.

Large numbers of small ketches were built by the Dutch, English and French navies during the wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to act as tenders to the fleets. 
The design was also adopted by the English to serve as bomb vessels, the large open space forward of the main mast being ideal for the accommodation of a large mortar by means of which the bombs were fired. For this particular use, the size of the average ketch was increased by adding to the length. As a result, ketches became fast and weatherly and a new use was developed for them as 'packet' vessels.

From the ketch rig was also developed the 'Hooker' and the 'Dogger'. With the wide naval use of bomb vessels dying out in the mid-nineteenth century, the naval value of the ketch diminished and it largely resumed its original status as a coastal trading vessel until, with the growing popularity of 'yachting', during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the advantage of the rig again became apparent.
The substitution of  the 'fore and aft' rig for the old square rig, during that period, enhanced their weatherliness and greatly increased the popularity of the ketch amongst yachtsmen.

Are you one of those with whom the ketch is popular? Tell us all about your experiences with ketches. What you like about them and what you don't. Anything and everything is interesting. Don't worry about your writing skills, we can edit if needs be, just tell us as if you were talking to an acquaintance about it, if you find it hard to believe you can write! You'll soon find you've told us without any difficulty at all. If you've any pictures you'd like to show, we'll be glad to receive those too.

We're looking forwards to hearing all about it...and you! In the meantime, if you enjoy reading about times gone by, you may enjoy our In-Quiz-ition No.1 in the Quizzicles pages: 10 questions with links to the answers, dotted around MarineZine.