This Fishing Life: Part III

 This Fishing Life.

1969 - 1980

Part III

PROGRESS?

I don’t remember whether Peter Bartlett came next or the Stella Marie, but our success with the Karen Marie was responsible for both.

Peter was farming a National Trust farm on the coast near Polruan, but he also had a fishing boat, the Carmania. She was a 50 ft. Fifer, a cruiser-sterned, flush decker, rigged with gallows fore and aft. Peter wanted to join forces with us, so he was accepted as a fourth Director, although we jibbed at adding his initial to DAM Trawlers Ltd. So now we had a ‘fleet’, if two vessels can be called that. Ashore we were working out of a ground-floor store of one of the terrace of buildings along Quay Road on the Barbican at Plymouth. This, as the name suggests, was immediately across the cobbled road from the quay at which we normally moored, just around the corner from the fish market quay. This was suitable for storing gear, for maintaining the vessels, and fishing gear, but not really suitable for any sort of steel fabrication. So we rented an additional 4-storey property from Sutton Harbour Authority, and used the ground floor of this for steel fabrication. (We subsequently bought this from SHA. But after it was damaged by fire we sold it to a developer, but by that time we had already moved to Guy’s Quay across the other side of Sutton Harbour.) So we were already doing running repairs and improvements to the rigs of the vessels. And in this we were initially helped by a friend of Peter’s from the dockyard, called Ian Heard, who seemed to spend all his spare time welding for us.

The Carmania. (KY66)

 

 But Doug was ambitious, so we borrowed money from the bank and ordered a steel hull and deckhouse from a yard at Eel Pie Island on the Thames which was delivered to Sutton Harbour by road. She was another 50 ft. stern trawler, very similar in rig to the Karen Marie. So now we had a sister to her, Stella Marie.

Stella Marie fitting out alongside at Quay Road.

 

Stella Marie now fishing under Doug's command. On the Fish Market, The Barbican.

Financially we were aided by a government grant of 50%. But this only applied to capital expenditure. It did not apply to any work done by the owners. So DAM Engineers Ltd. was formed, and subsequently Ian also became a Director of that, when he left the dockyard and started working full time at Quay Road. His skills and output were prodigious and all things seemed possible to him and Mick. So now, besides fishing we were also fitting out a vessel alongside at the Barbican. That was largely done by Ian, but brother Mick, a boatbuilder by trade, was also spending a lot of time in the workshop and on the Stella.

All this had to be financed by just the Karen and the Carmania. So we decided to buy the Braeside. (It goes to show how poor our photo coverage was. We don't have a single photo of the Braeside worth recording. Our photos were generally taken by friends and family; not by us!) She was a “Sputnik” trawler, about 80 ft., transom-sterned steel trawler from Aberdeen, rigged for starboard side fishing only. 

Peter took her over and I took the Karen, Doug had the Stella Marie, and we were now reliant on a hired hand to skipper the Carmania.About 1974 we moved premises from Quay Road to Guy’s Quay (the old coal wharf, although it was still operational when we moved) on the opposite side of Sutton Harbour from the Fish Market, and approached from the Cattedown Road on the land-side. The new premises was a large, single-storey, steel-framed, corrugated roofed building. 

Before this time we had also rented one of the offices along the Fish Market, and I was spending more time ashore, doing office work in the morning and making up gear (spare panels for the box trawls, etc.) and repairs to keep the boats at sea, rather than spending time against the wall repairing their own gear. By now we had also changed agents to Brixham and Torbay Fish Producers Association, and they had set up an office at Plymouth. (Some time later they also set up a premises in one of the old coal yards just down the quay from us. By then there was a considerable pelagic fishery – principally mackerel – out of Plymouth and this was mainly landed on Guy’s Quay. Now the coal facilities were abandoned, and in recent years the new fish market has been built on the site.) 

 So with me ashore we were hiring a skipper for the Karen Marie as well. But we were having more trouble with the upkeep of the Karen Marie, and with the Vigilance in the offing it was decided to sell her. She was bought by a father and son from Bridlington after they had seen her on the beach at Sutton Harbour. 

 NAVIGATION.

How things change! Nowadays every Tom, Dick , and Harry knows exactly where they are on the face of the earth with a couple of taps on a screen .

At the Plymouth School of Maritime Studies (of which more later) we were taught to read charts and fix our positions on them, even to the extent of celestial navigation to fix latitude and longitude. But can you imagine towing a set of chain harrows (it’s the nearest land-based analogy that I can think of) through a felled woodland, trying not to get the harrows, which are 10 times wider than your tractor, and perhaps 10 feet behind you, caught on the stumps. Now imagine a trawl, with the doors (otter boards) some 600 ft. behind you, and spread perhaps 100 ft. wide, and you are trying to dodge round known hitches on the seabed. And you can’t even see the gear, like you can the harrows. So you need some pretty accurate navigation.

Nowadays a wealth of satellites gives you this. In those days it was DECCA. Don’t know what it stands for. But it was a world-wide (I believe) system of radio masts on coastal locations sending out signals at three different wavelengths each. For any position within range of three masts on different wavelengths a receiver could pick up the signals and determine the distance from each mast. Charts were marked up with the green, red and purple wavelengths marked in a series of gradations (the radial distance,, was it 0 – 30 red; 40-70 green; 80 – 110 purple? Something like that.) Whichever, for any position one chose those colours which most nearly gave right angle intersections, to form a grid on the chart. So one could plot on the chart where one had been, or where there were hitches (or wrecks). Each vessel rented this equipment. We could also rent a “track plotter”, on which we could mark up a roll of paper with all our known hitches, put it in the machine, and a stylus would follow (or even trace, pen or pencil) our path. ( I made up a plot to get me into Sutton Harbour if it was foggy. In our early days we had no radar. The plot was accurate enough to tell me if I was moored a vessel’s width off the quay!)

For the most part, although we had full scale coastal charts covering all the nearby Channel marked up with the DECCA grid, we worked daily off our plot rolls. If the DECCA wasn’t working we didn’t go to sea! We each had a drawer of rolls for different areas, and a lot of time was spent marking these rolls up, from our own recently found hitches, or from other people’s information. It was valuable information and quite jealously guarded.

What surprises me now, looking back at some of my rolls (why have I still got them?) is how heavily we worked some pieces of ground. We hear so much now of the destructiveness of trawling. So how was it that we could go back to the same piece of ground time and time again and find good catches there. We were constantly searching for the best catch, but we repeatedly went back to where we had come from. Were we like gulls on a piece of ploughing; was the disturbance attracting the fish we were seeking? But we went back there over years; not just next week.

But why, also, did we have this ground to ourselves. I think perhaps we were prepared to work harder; it wasn’t a particularly easy ground to work – a lot of hitches – and we had to steam quite a way to it. A piece of ground much favoured by Plymouth skippers, to the east of the ‘Stone, but inside it, was known to us as ‘sleepy valley’. One could shut your eyes and tow for three hours knowing you wouldn’t come fast! It was an easy option. Our principle competition on the Hatt ground was from some of the Looe and Polperro day-boats.

 SPRATTING

We started pelagic fishing for sprat up the eastern side of Start Point, and were landing this into Brixham, which prompted the change of agent. Although Mashfords had served us well, they didn’t have the international markets that Brixham and Torbay Fish had. 

Pelagic fishing was a different ball game; instead of dragging relatively heavy gear along the bottom, with the doors, bridles and foot-rope all scraping the bottom, pelagic trawls (colloquially known as mid-water trawls) were towed off the bottom to catch fish that shoaled “mid-water”. (Pelagic fish are those which, generally, swim in more-or-less tight shoals and feed on plankton which is swimming anywhere in the water column. At night, plankton tends to migrate towards the surface, but by day it tends to sink. And the fish feeding on it therefore follow it. They generally feed at night, in more open shoals. By day they tend to hug the bottom and shoal very tightly. Unusually I believe, Sprat shoals become too open at night to catch, so they are fished by day as they stand off the bottom, more or less inactive in tight spikes as seen on an echo-sounder. So spratting involves skimming the bottom with a fast, light trawl. (Pelagic trawls are made of nylon which sinks, and they don’t have to have all the heavy courlene mesh that demersal (bottom) trawls have, to stand up to all the wear and tear of being dragged along the sea-floor. Also, because the doors aren’t sitting on the sea-bed they don’t need to be so heavy, and are generally more paravaned in profile.) So one takes a lot more interest in the echo-sounder when one switches to mid-water trawling. But one isn’t only looking for possible hitches; now one is actually looking at fish. (Nowadays the resolution on the screen of an echo-sounder is considerably enhanced by the addition of colour. Back in the ‘70’s we were still on grey-scale, so we were looking at various intensities of grey!) For sprats we were looking for pencil columns of fish standing off the bottom. We couldn’t “aim” for them – that’s the strength of sonar, which was yet to come for us– we could only hope we would pass over them. But we had probably sussed the likelihood of their presence from other boats, and a quick run over the ground beforehand. But we were following the Brixham fleet. It was a new venture for any Plymouth boats.

Colin Diamond in a pound of Spratts aboard the Vigilance.

 

We were never entirely successful with the spratting; the Brixham boats always seemed to be able to out-fish us, but it made a change from bottom trawling. (It seems a feature of commercial fishing that one follows a fishery seasonally. The intent is not only to get a change of occupation, but to give the fishery/ground a rest. Bottom fishing isn’t seasonal, but we tried in some small way to make it so.) 

I think we bought our first sprat trawl rather than make our own. These of course have very fine mesh in the stocking and cod end, and the gear was much lighter than we had become used to with bottom trawls. Just heavy weights on the lower wing-ends and a large buoy on the upper. And no chafing gear, but a coarser mesh net to cover the cod end to take the weight of any catch No heavy foot-rope was needed.

Spratting. Shooting the Engel trawl from the Vigilance. Colin Diamond (L) and Chris Deacon (R) from the net drum.

 

I think all our Sprat catches were landed to Brixham, which precipitated the change from Mashford’s to Brixham and Torbay Fish as our “agents”.

 Next time:  Part IV more about the company, and the arrival of Vigilance.