Traditionally these are coastal craft or river craft used for leisure as a utility craft and for fishing and have a one-person or small crew.

Quahog skiff. The handsome and sturdy mill workers cottage that Al Potter was born in on Feb. Revenge of the Quahog. The skiffs 112 bottom is heavy and robust and it feels like a sidewalk underfootespecially in the choppy waters that are often the bane of flat-bottomed boats.

We called them quahog boats. Im looking for any information I can find about a class of flat-bottomed lapstrake quahog skiffs built by Albert or Alfred Correia of New Bedford. The guys working these rakes were jacked.

Boats had once taken hundreds of barrels but in 1929 the Inquirer Mirror noted Quahogs are still being harvested from the beds in the sound not far from Tuckernuck Shoal. As a kid I built one boat with a plywood bottom. The term skiff is used for a number of essentially unrelated styles of small boats.

A small work skiff tied to the dock. The fir plank bottoms would swell up and stay that way. Although the numbers fluctuate an estimated 300 full-timers many of whom learned the work from their fathers head out early in the morning and return in the afternoon throughout the year even in the worst winter conditions.

Quahogs are harvested from the shoreline or from a small single-handed boat. Quahogs a species of hard clam Mercenaria mercenaria are such a Rhode Island staple that they were named the state shell in 1987. Similarly when suddenly cutting the throttle from full speed the skiff has a smooth runout and settles quickly without having the wake climb over the transom.

And for Rhode Island commercial shellfishing is synonymous with quahogs. Preserve that skiff though. A quahog pronounced KO-hog is a large hard-shelled clam.