The Mosquito Fleet was the fleet of small ketches and schooners operating in the shallow coastal and gulf waters of South Australia, from the colony's establishment in 1836 until 1982.
A ketch is a two-masted sailboat whose mainmast is taller than the mizzen mast, generally 40-foot or bigger. The name ketch is derived from catch. The ketch's main mast is usually stepped in the same position as a sloop.
A schooner is a type of sailing ship, as defined by its rig configuration. Typically it has two or more masts, the foremast being slightly shorter than the mainmast.
South Australia is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of 983,482 square kilometres (379,725 sq mi), it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories by area, and fifth largest by population. It has a total of 1.7 million people, and its population is the second most highly centralised in Australia, after Western Australia, with more than 77 percent of South Australians living in the capital, Adelaide, or its environs. Other population centres in the state are relatively small; Mount Gambier, the second largest centre, has a population of 28,684.
From the State's main port of Port Adelaide they supplied goods to many isolated regional settlements, returning with cargoes of agricultural products (particularly wheat and wool) and minerals. They also played a role in lightering grain to load larger vessels offshore in deeper waters, the most famous example being to windjammers off Port Victoria, Spencer Gulf, which until 1949 marked the start of the Great Grain Race.
Port Adelaide is a port-side region of Adelaide, approximately 14 kilometres (8.7 mi) northwest of the Adelaide CBD. It is also the namesake of the City of Port Adelaide Enfield council, a suburb, a federal and state electoral division and is the main port for the city of Adelaide. Port Adelaide played an important role in the formative decades of Adelaide and South Australia, with the port being early Adelaide's main supply and information link to the rest of the world.
Lightering is the process of transferring cargo between vessels of different sizes, usually between a barge and a bulker or oil tanker. Lightering is undertaken to reduce a vessel's draft in order to enter port facilities which cannot accept very large ocean-going vessels. Lightering can also refer to the use of a lighter barge for any form of short-distance transport, such as to bring railroad cars across a river. In addition, lightering can refer to the process of removing oil or other hazardous chemicals from a compromised vessel to another vessel to prevent oil from spilling into the surrounding waters.
A windjammer is a commercial sailing ship with multiple masts that may be either square rigged or fore-and-aft rigged or a combination of the two. The informal term arose during the transition from the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam.
Among the last surviving ketches are the 1883 Nelcebee (owned by the South Australian Maritime Museum) and the 1919-built Falie . [1]
The South Australian Maritime Museum is a state government museum, part of the History Trust of South Australia. The Museum opened in 1986 in a collection of historic buildings in the heart of Port Adelaide, South Australia's first heritage precinct.
Falie is a 33.4-metre (110 ft) ketch that traded for many years in Australian waters. Originally built in 1919/1920 as a speculation by her builder, rigged as a schooner and named Hollands Trouw after the shipyard where she was built, she was purchased by the Spencer's Gulf Transport Company, renamed, and used for coastal trading in South Australia. The vessel was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) as HMAS Falie during World War II, serving first as an examination vessel primarily patrolling the Port of Sydney, Australia, then as an armed stores ship.
