Is this the end for Exeter's boat that wouldn't die?

The Marie Claire was once a record-breaker

These days she’s just a sad wooden hulk - rusting, listing and unloved - tied up alongside a run-down quay beside the Exeter Ship Canal.

There’s nothing at all left of her wheelhouse and superstructure, and her timber bones have been picked clean of anything else worth taking.

But there was a time when the Marie Claire was a record-breaker, and the pride of one of the westcountry’s most prestigious fishing fleets.

By the time the huge Water Lane redevelopment is completed, providing Exeter with hundreds of new homes, the Marie Claire will be long gone. But before she heads off on her final voyage to be broken up - 80 years after she was built - it’s worth taking a longer look at the fishing boat that refused to die.

The vessel was built in 1945 on the banks of the River Colne near Colchester in Essex, and unceremoniously named Motor Fishing Vessel 1546.

She is 97 feet long and 22 feet across her beam, built of oak planks on an oak frame. Had she seen wartime service, she would have been used as a tender by the Royal Navy and would have been fitted with a single large machine gun.

As it was, she was not needed for action and was laid up at the end of the war a little further down the Colne at Brightlingsea. Her first reprieve came when she was sold in May 1946 to a Paignton company called Fleetwood Drifters.

In 1950 she became the property of Torbay Trawlers of Brixham and was renamed the Elijah Perrett with the identifier BM 15 on her hull. According to a copy of the 1914 Kelly’s Directory held by the University of Leicester, Mr Perrett had been a fishing boat owner living in Bay View.

The letters and numerals are more often used now to identify Brixham’s successful rugby club, the XV based at Astley Park.

According to an article which appeared in Fishing News in 2016, she joined a number of other boats from the same company, side-trawling out of Brixham. She became a ‘mainstay’ of the fleet for the next 12 years.

Then, in 1962, she was sold to the long-established local firm of W Stevenson and Sons in Newlyn in Cornwall. Today the company has one of the largest privately-owned fleets of trawlers in the country, and is the exclusive auctioneer at Newlyn Fish Market.

The Elijah Perrett was renamed the Marie Claire after the daughter of one of the company’s owners, Billy Stevenson, and given the number PZ 295. She worked as a side-trawler from Newlyn until the late 1970s, when she suffered engine failure.

Laid up in the Cornish port, her fishing days appeared to be numbered as she was stripped of her equipment and tied up as a hulk in the middle of the harbour.

But just when it looked as she was done for, again, her most successful days were just around the corner.

Stevenson’s began a rebuild on her in 1986, with the work being done at the nearby Joseph Peake yard and by specialist engineers in Holland.

By the end of 1988 the Marie Claire was, according to the Fishing News, a powerful modern-specification beam-trawler with a new wheelhouse and winch.

The boat worked successfully from Newlyn and held the port’s own record for catches. However, by the late 2000s she was beginning to show her age and was no longer up to the latest specifications. She was laid up yet again.

In 2012 the decision was taken to move the boat to Exeter to be broken up at Gabriel’s Wharf, and the long tow up the coast began.

However, during an overnight stop in Brixham, she sank alongside the fish market and settled on the harbour floor. It was two weeks before she was re-floated, and the job of taking her to Exeter began again.

Even then she grounded on a sand bank in the estuary before she could be pulled free to complete her journey.

As recently as 2020 she was described as a ‘restoration project’, with an owner who wanted to see her defy the breakers yet again.

However, it now looks as if she will leave Exeter once and for all when the Water Lane development gets under way.