Pilot Cutters ?

[jon]

Please Classic Boat try to avoid calling most large Gaff Cutters 'Pilot Cutters'
The small coverage of the launch of the beautiful looking Pegasus in this months Mag is an example. From the web site of Ed Burnett, the designer of Pegasus: ' The Pilot Cutter label is stuck on many boats by many people. As far as we are concerned, if an individual boat has put a pilot onto a ship, it is a Pilot Cutter. If it hasn't, it isn't.'
Next months issue I see is a Pilot Cutter Special, which I look forward to, but please call them 'Pilot Cutter types' or 'reproductions' as appropriate.

 

[johnchampion]

I agree with your sentiments. It seems that the yachting journos feel that describing something as a pilot cutter gains it a bit of kudos. I don't necessarily feel that to call a boat a pilot cutter it has to have carried pilots but it should be true to the genre and not just labelled pilot cutter because it has a bow sprit.
I have walked alongside to look at Pegasus a couple of times and indeed she is a very beautiful craft, however is she a Bristol pilot cutter?
At 56 feet she may be too big to be handled by "a man and a boy" - most of the originals seem to have been in the low to middle 40's. Also she has a transom stern, presumably to give extra payload space inside, and to my eye a pilot cutter would have a counter stern. Perhaps a description of "based on" may be more accurate.
Having said that I have walked past and watched her being built over the last 18 months and she does look a fantastic, especially so when remembering the piles of sliced tree trunks that were delivered to the site originally. I don't think any expense was spared in her building and the builders have done a great job.
Pilot cutter or not if someone would like to give me one then yes please!

 

[Carlotta]

Anyone going to attend this weekends Pilot Cutter Championships in St Mawes?
Able to snap some photos ?
Wish I was there. someday....
Stephen