This Fishing Life Part IV

 This Fishing Life

1969 -  1980

Part IV

More Company Business.

 I don’t know why (I don’t think I was even a party to the idea. At least I don’t remember it.) we next bought a 60 ft. steel trawler from Holland, called the Greitje von Bouje (or something like that!) and put one of our long-term crew aboard her as Skipper. But about this time we were also approached by a Robert Doe (I believe he had a big agricultural machinery business in East Anglia) and his agents, to go into partnership. He would own the vessels, and we would manage them. (He even “loaned” us the expertise of his business manager, who introduced me to the dark art of budgeting!) So for starters we sold him the GVB. So now we had four vessels of our own and were managing one for Rbt. Doe. But we were obviously getting too big for our boots. Rbt. Doe didn't last long, and Doug wanted to be independent. So he left us and took the Stella as his pay-off.

But then we bought the Vigilance. I think that was Mick’s idea.

We had come to realise that for pelagic fishing we needed a vessel with a large carrying capacity and plenty of pulling power. I don’t remember how it came about, but I found we were now the owners of an insurance write-off against the wall in Aberdeen. How on earth did Mick find that in those days? She was registered (A204) as being just over the 100 ft. waterline, 109 ft. overall, 34 ft. beam., nearly 10ft. draft. Cruiser-stern, timber, with midships deck-house and wheelhouse, rigged for trawling both sides. She carried main and mizzen masts, with a lifeboat stowed on the after deck, beneath the mizzen boom. (She was actually one of a pair of wooden fishing boats which turned out to be the largest wooden fishing boats ever built in Britain!) She had caught fire (apparently in the Engineer's cabin below the bridge), while fishing in the North Sea, and been abandoned by the crew. When the fire burned out/was put out, the engine was found to be still running, and the damage was limited to the forward end of the casing and the wheelhouse. (Why she was considered a write-off I still don’t understand. But it may be due to the fact that in marine insurance, in the case of a total write-off the insurers pay out the sum insured. Not some arbitrary figure based on the proportion of the total value of the insured object compared with the insured figure. If you insure for £10,000 you get £10,000! And she would have had to go through a load of hoops to get a new seaworthiness certificate from the Board of Trade.)

Anyway, we got her for some ridiculously low figure, and Mick and one of our erstwhile crew members, Dick ‘Sport’, went up to Aberdeen, and cleared all the debris and rigged a jury wheelhouse to the satisfaction of the Board of Trade, and sailed her back to Plymouth. (Not without mishaps! By the time they got down as far as Norfolk the visibility declined: they couldn’t see the land so they kept on South before turning right for the Channel. But then they found they had run aground. When the fog cleared a Dutch coastguard informed them that they were in fact on the Dutch coast. So they waited for the tide to lift them off, and they found their way back to the Channel!)

So now, while we kept the fleet at sea, Mick and Ian were rebuilding the Vig. A lot of the materials came from an acquaintance who ran a scrap business at Cattedown and was breaking a frigate in Millbay docks. So the Vig ended up with 11 blast-proof windows in the wheelhouse, and the Skipper's cabin behind the bridge was fitted out with WD lockers, chart table and cupboards, etc. (The Engineer's cabin below the bridge was never re-fitted as a cabin, and later a pump was installed in there for power-steering, and the auto-pilot control.)

But back to the ‘time-line’. I think Doug was the first to leave us. We were on good terms, but he wanted independence. Of course, to leave, we had to ‘pay’ his share of the company to him and the only way we could do that was to let him have the Stella. So he sailed away to Barmouth! And later, or was it before Doug left, Peter left us. He also left on good terms with us, and he took the Braeside to Brixham. Somewhere along the way we had sold the Carmania, and scrapped the Karen Marie, and having parted with Rbt. Doe we were now left with just Mick and me running DAM Trawlers and Mick, me and Ian running DAM Engineers.  

When we had started the Company Mary had kept the books for us. But Doug didn't like the idea of one of the wives poking her nose into our plans, so Mary was “dropped”. And I kept the books. But somewhere along the way I had long given up trying to keep the books, and we employed Mick’s sister-in-law, Heather, to look after all (Trawlers and Engineers) the business side of things, from a small office built into the corner of our store on Guy’s Quay. Anyway, to keep the Vig at sea we needed my ticket!

Skipper’s Tickets.

As soon as we tried to put to sea with the Vigilance we found we had to have a certificated Skipper aboard. One of Mashford's old Skippers had a ticket, and we employed him for a while until he became too sick to carry on and retired. We rather struggled in Plymouth to find certificated skippers, and we felt held to ransom by having to go “outside” the ranks of Plymouth hands to find a skipper. So it was decided that I should ‘go for’ a ticket. Fishing tickets are no different from merchant navy tickets, so one first has to qualify as a Mate (the parlance is different for fishing tickets; Mates are Second Hand, and Masters are Skippers!) before proceeding to Master. So for the first stage one of our crew members and I enrolled at the Plymouth School Of Maritime Studies (where two of our tutors were Craig Rich and Richard Danton, both local BBC weather presenters at the time) and along with about a dozen other merchant navy apprentices we were lectured in buoyage, chart-work, celestial navigation, signalling, etc. We also had to get separate radio and radar licenses. Eventually we had to go up to Southampton to sit for our tickets. Presumably I had to sail as a Second Hand for a period before I enrolled with a retired Merchant Marine Captain at West Charlton, near Kingsbridge, who tutored a couple of us for our Masters tickets. This involved more of the same, but to a higher level, so we had to get up to speed at reading a morse lamp among other things. (It always struck me how anomalous it was to teach us how to calculate tonnages for cargo stowages to “trim” a vessel to a Plimsoll mark, alongside a quay when we were swinging bags of fish aboard while rolling our guts out, with not a Plimsoll line in sight!) Anyway, I was eventually awarded a Master’s Ticket. (For someone who had failed maths at “O” Level I felt quite proud). I still remembered my semaphore from Scouting days, and the morse and a lot of the navigation and buoyage from my army training. But now we had a ticket in the Company. 

The Vigilance (A204)

 She felt massive against all I had experienced before. We’d bought her because we could carry 100 tons below, and she had a 500 hp. at 500 rpm. Ruston engine. She idled at 250 rpm. Compressed air starting. Compressed air tank and one 1,000 gallon fuel tank to port of the engine, and two 1000 gallon tanks to starboard. Astern of these an auxiliary engine for generation and pumping. The winch was powered by a 10” belt from the forward flywheel. Two-drum winch with twin whipping drums on each side. She was rigged with gallows port and starboard, fore and aft. The main mast carried a heavy derrick for landing the bag, and a light derrick for discharging the catch. Below, aft she had a cabin with 12 bunks (although we never filled all these), then the engine room, the fish-room, divided vertically into pounds by metal frames to hold the pound boards, and forward, in the peak, a gear store. She was partially decked forward, the foc'sle. One 4 x 4 ft. raised fish hatch, and we later inserted flush, 10” hatches in the deck over the forward end of the fish room port and starboard, down through which we could discharge fish from the pounds on deck.

Obviously, with a bigger boat, spending longer at sea, we carried a bigger crew. Until the Vig we generally carried a skipper and two hands. With the Vig Mick (or in his absence Chris Deacon) became engineers, and we had a succession of hands, mainly long-time DAM Trawlers crew, principle among them, Mike Walker (from almost the begining), Colin Diamond and Colin Baker. So 2 or 3 deck-hands and a cook; initially a Plymouth hand-line fisherman, Pio, but then to the end a friend from Stoke Climsland, where I lived,  Henry Penhorwood.  Initially he came for the ride, but he became so useful that the crew adopted him as one of thier own!

A series of "shots" of the Vig taken by the commissioning photographers for the BBC episode of Warship". Taken before we started changing her rig.

Pelagic fishing, apart from Sprats, is a night-time occupation, and starts about October. So for a while we did some bottom trawling with the Vig. I don’t remember any great success at this, but all the while we were making modifications. (A diversion; we featured in an episode of a popular – at the time- series on TV called “Warship”. This particular episode featured the ‘warship’ on fishery patrol duties, and in this episode she had to sort out a mutiny on board a fishing boat. Vig was a good, old-fashioned looking North Sea trawler that the public would recognise. So we had to sail to the naval port at Portland to rendezvous with a frigate to film, first a poor catch, and then a much better one, and be boarded by a naval patrol, all part of the plot.)
 

I’ve already mentioned the powered steering which DAM Engineers fitted. But we’d bought the Vig. with mackerel in mind, so for that we needed maximum pulling power. So while I was away (holiday or ticket?) she was laid against the inside wall of Sutton harbour on a big tide, and Mick and Ian fitted a Kort Nozzle to the prop. And for good measure, while they were at it, they also fitted a sonar tube in the fore-peak, (No mean feat. But all part of Mick’s skill and ingenuity as a boat-builder by trade. A sonar needs to be as near the centre-line of the boat, and as near mid-ships as possible. But we couldn’t go down through the fish-room with the tube, so it was fitted close up to the fish-room bulkhead in the forepeak. Mick fitted brackets to the bulkhead to hold a 10” (?) steel tube which would be long enough to reach the bottom of the hull, but remain well above water-level when the hull floated. He cut saw-teeth into the bottom of this, and some holes at the top to take a tommy-bar, and then lowered this through the brackets until the timber near the keel took its weight. Then he started turning it with the tommy-bar. Eventually it cut its own path through to the bottom of the hull. Then the teeth were cut off and a metal flange fitted over the pipe to secure it to the hull. The sonar transmitter/receiver was raised and lowered in this tube manually.

Fitting the Kort nozzle, on the beach inside the eastern peir-heads of Sutton Harbour. I think that is me standing inside it.

 Having fitted the Kort nozzle we were anxious to know what pulling power we had. (Though it was purely academic, because we never thought to find out before we fitted it.) So we hired a dynamometer from Phillips and Son of Dartmouth (like a giant spring balance) and moored up to one of the Admiralty mooring buoys in the Sound, by the stern, with the dyno. attached to the strop from the after gallows, and tried to pull the buoy under. We registered just over 8 tons static pull, whatever that meant.

At about the same time an auxiliary derrick was fitted near the starboard gallows aft to take the weight of the stocking when it was full of fish, and to assist bagging-off when we were unloading the net. And additional heavy-duty cleats were fitted to the casing along the starboard side to hold bights of stocking.

I think we must have used Sprat trawls for our early forays into pelagic fishing, and I don’t remember how many of our vessels tried it. I think Doug must have already left us, but I remember the Carmania coming in with a very good catch of Pilchards on one occasion, which even hit the local press. It was the biggest catch for many years landed at Plymouth. But that was Pilchards. In the early years of our mid-water trawling it was Pilchard we were after at night. In those days it seemed there were massive shoals of fish all over the place. But it was a long time since there had been much Pilchard. But now they were back again, and we wanted to catch them. (Traditionally, in the days of Shippham’s Fish Paste – remember that? - all the Pilchard was caught in drift nets at night.) But they often appeared to be mixed up with Mackerel shoals, and there was very little market for Mackerel in those days apart from hand-line caught fish. And with the quantities of fish that might be caught in a trawl, to try to sort tons of mixed Mackerel and Pilchard was not feasible. So the difficulty for a couple of seasons was of finding “clean” shoals of fish. And our grey-scale sounders were not a lot of help, compared with modern sounders. Pilchard have a swim-bladder which shows up well on a sounder, compared with Mackerel. So we talked of “pepper and salt”. We were looking at marks on the sounder which reminded us of pepper and salt on a cream coloured plate. If one got it wrong you ended up with a mixture of fish, and hours of fishing time wasted. (Not to mention the waste of “by-catch”.) I remember steaming over fish continuously for nearly half an hour looking for something that looked “clean” Pilchard. (It must have represented hundreds of tons of fish, and that was just off the back of the ‘Stone.)

But all this fish had attracted some of the Brixham skippers, and if they caught Mackerel their agents (Brixham and Torbay Fish) seemed to be able to give them a reasonable price for it. I think BTF were already dealing with Continental buyers directly, whereas anything excess to the Plymouth buyers went up to Billingsgate by rail. So with time it was the Mackerel which became the favoured fish, and all of it was going to the Continent. Not only France, but a very large proportion to Spain.

The Pilchard didn't last long, and Mackerel won the day (or night!). We could catch Mackerel in huge quantities (on a couple of occasions we landed over 100 tons from a night’s fishing) whereas Pilchard were always going to be in much smaller quantities, even though they might be worth almost twice what we got for the Mackerel. (If my memory serves me right, we were getting about £75/ton for Mackerel, so it would have been about £150/ton for Pilchard. On one occasion we caught 20 ton of Herring and we got £200/ton for them.) But by the time the Mackerel fishery really took off we were fishing just the Vigilance, and it was only Mick and me left of DAM Trawlers, with Ian still running DAM Engineers.

About mid-September we put the bottom trawling gear (or later the scalloping gear) ashore and rigged for mid-water fishing. We probably used the change-over time to do some maintenance while we were at it. Someone once described a boat to me as “a hole in the water into which you pour money”. Certainly the combination of timber, metal and salt water leads to a lot of “maintenance” to put it mildly. And we were constantly up-dating the rig as well. So at some stage fairly early on we got rid of the port side gallows forward, the rusted up lump of anchor windlass on the fore deck, and eventually the starboard side gallows forward. And that’s before we even rigged for scalloping! More on that later. And then one year we laid up and had the whole ship sand-blasted back to bare metal.

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Every vessel over a certain size has to renew it’s Seaworthiness Certificate with the Board of Trade annually. Usually that entails small matters like Log Book, Life Rafts, Fire Extinguishers. But periodically radical matters are inspected. So the time came for the Vig to have a keel-bolt withdrawn, and the prop. shaft inspected for wear. And that meant dry-docking. Most trawlers could be slipped, but the Vigilance was too big and heavy for that. After ringing round everywhere I  could think of up and down the Channel, we ended up steaming round to Sharpness, up the Bristol Channel from Avonmouth. It’s at the end of the navigable channel up the Severn as far as seagoing vessels are concerned. But what is more significant is that the tide sluices up and down the Severn Estuary extremely rapidly, and it has the second biggest tidal range in the world.

So with a skeleton crew we steamed round to Avonmouth and picked up a pilot at an appointed date and time, and on the flood we raced up to Sharpness. About a half mile short of the dock entrance I was told to come round hard to starboard. By the time we were stemming the tide, and going backwards, we had ended up opposite the entrance, and on half ahead we nudged up to the long, curved, timber-piled training pier. I was told to lean on the pier and nudge her up into the dock. Which was all I could do anyway, being pushed hard against the pier by the current. And so we had arrived. We locked through with two barges which had sailed up from Avonmouth. They were going on up the Stroud-Gloucester Canal to pick up grain. We spent the night in the basin and next morning dry-docked. I suppose we were there for about a fortnight while the necessary work was done. The wear on the shaft was minimal, and the keel-bolt passed muster.

(Sharpness is a story in it’s own right. What a fascinating place. Still, in 2022, it is handling enormous quantities of fertiliser, grain, and scrap metal. But there is no longer any commercial traffic through to Gloucester. But that has been replaced by a thriving leisure boat industry. Mary has just recently posted a Blog about a few days we spent there this summer.)

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Another “downtime”. For some reason we had to have the gear box serviced. I can’t think how Mick and Ian managed to get it it out of the engine room. It must have weighed nearly a ton. And it’s a bulky thing. I principally remember it for a very strange coincidence. Our family had been off on holiday somewhere, Wales or even Scotland maybe, in our camper-van conversion. We were returning home, down the M5, near the Clevedon turn-off south of Bristol and I saw Chris Deacon, one of our long-time crew, walking towards me on the hard shoulder. What on earth! So I pulled off and called him back. Turns out he was bringing the gear box back from Birmingham or somewhere in a hired truck and had broken down. Can’t remember what the trouble was but we got him sorted out. This was in the days before mobile phones, so he was walking back up the M5 to look for a phone.

SCALLOPING

A fishery which developed about this time, at least in the Channel, was scalloping.

I’ve already mentioned Queen Scallops, which most people have never heard of. But proper Scallops are bigger, over 4” to be marketable, but anything up to about 7 or 8” across. And they are flat on one side and convex on the other. I’d mainly come across them being landed by the diving fraternity. But we found quite a lot in the trawls on some grounds, particularly in deeper water and to the west, and they were always kept for “stocker”. And with John Dory, they were a favourite to take home at the weekend.

But obviously, on the Continent, there had been for a long time, a considerable fishery for CoquillesSt. Jacques. And up the Kentish end of the Channel there may have been a minor fishery for them as an offshoot of the mussel dredging fishery. And of course there has long been a fishery for oysters using dredges. So dredging wasn’t new and when some of the western trawlers started using standard British dredges for scallops, the technique was already known. Our British dredges are only about 1m. wide; small enough to be emptied by hand, so depending on the size of the vessel, 2, 3 or 4 would be towed either side. But individually they were felt to be a bit light. The heavier, French dredges are about 2m. wide and have longer “teeth”. They are too heavy to be man-handled, so the “bag” opens at the bottom end when they are swung inboard. And the "net" is like a chain-mail of 4" metal rings instead of cord netting.

An illustration of a dredge similar to the "French" dredges we used. Ours had a longer bag, with bars on both bottom edges to open the bottom of the bag. They were roughly 2m wide, and we towed three each side on a tow-bar. Two tooth-bars were bolted to each leading edge, and these were changed (for wear and damage) every so often as needed, while were were fiahing.

To fish dredges both sides a heavy derrick needs to be rigged both sides, and not only are the dredges lifted aboard with these; but they are towed on the derricks as well, to spread them well away from each other when they are fishing. So Ian and Mick fitted goal-posts forward of the winch and mounted derricks on these. And for good measure they added another couple of drums to the winch for topping the derricks. (These are the massive “beams” one sees on either side of beam trawlers when they are fishing. It is the beam that holds the net open that gives the fishery its name; not the derricks stuck out the side on which they are towed!)

I think this is the only photo that was ever taken which shows the "goal-post" gantry for the scalloping derricks. We are obviously towing here because the derricks are lowered right down to the water. And you can just about make out the extra pair of drums on the winch. The coned net in the foreground is an obligatory signal flown by fishing vessels when they are fishing. (But many never bother to take it down when they stop fishing.) It gives a fishing boat right of way over other vessels.                                   Note the extended bag-rope, from foc'sle to after gallows. This has to catch the bag of all three dredges as the derricks are topped inboard. If the winchman gets it wrong there are several tons of dredges swinging in the breeze. I only remember the starboard side hitting the wheelhouse once, but it was a hairy moment. Which was why we always turned down the sea when hauling, to reduce the roll.

 

So a different pattern to the day. We picked up some ice (but not much) before we sailed on a Monday morning (to store any fish by-catch), and a supply of woven plastic sacks. And we would sail off to where we thought other boats were doing well. We ranged up the Channel as far as Portland and west to the Scilly Isles, but eventually we found good fishing off the back of the Wolf Lighthouse, which is about 20 miles south of Penzance. The only problem with this ground was that it was crossed by several old transatlantic telephone cables. These are about three inches in diameter of many strands of heavy armouring wire wrapped round the core cable. They were in various stages of decay, but when we caught them we were unable to swing the dredges aboard. So we leaned over the side with an oxyacetylene torch strapped to a broom handle to cut them! The spot was marked on the chart, and we would start again.

Whereas one hauls a bottom trawl about every three hours, dredges are normally towed for about two hours so the crew gets much shorter sleep breaks. The towing time is determined by how much “rubbish” is picked up with the scallops. Obviously, if the bag is filling with stones, etc. it leaves less room for scallops. At times, although the scallops were plentiful, so were the stones (mainly flint nodules), and for a while on one piece of ground we were reduced to hauling every hour. So I split the crew (6 of us) into two watches, and we worked alternate watches. (It is the man on the wheel who doesn’t get any sleep when the decks are cleared, like the deck crew does.) But also, depending on how well we were fishing, we sometimes landed mid-week. So we would make a quick run to the nearest harbour (Brixham, Plymouth or Penzance/Newlyn) to put ashore our bags of scallops, and any “stocker”. But often we would be stopped by weather before the week was out. Otherwise we stayed at sea until the early hours of Saturday morning when we would return to Plymouth (or Brixham or Newlyn to catch the market. Then home until Monday morning. But these heavy derricks hanging out more or less horizontally over the side gave the vessels a lot more stability and reduced the roll of a heavy sea. (But it meant more water inboard over the rails at times.) So we were able to stay at sea longer. But it is also why you see vessels steaming with the derricks out rather than topped. A much more comfortable ride.

The scallops were packed into woven plastic sacks; was it 10 dozen to a sack? Then wire-tied around the neck. I think a decent weekss work would grosse us about £7,000. And because we were fishing so far west or east of Plymouth we would leave the Vig in Brixham or Penzance over the week-end and travel home by car or train.

(It might be worth mentioning here that I never got over my seasickness. And nor did Mick. We were perfectly OK on deck and if we were sitting up. But anything head down – eating, reading – made us feel queasy. I don’t think I was ever “sick”, but the feeling can be just as bad. I was OK lying down, but with my bunk behind the wheelhouse, about 15 feet above the waterline, I got a lot of movement, so I stuck a couple of rolls of carpet down either side of my sleeping bag on my bunk to keep me from rolling. It was always worse when we started the week, especially if it was dirty weather from the start, but if we started out fine then I could get through a week without feeling bad. But I felt sorry for Mick, although it never seemed to effect his work, having to work below in poor weather. I remember in the early days, coming ashore after a trip, and finding a phone box to let Mary know we were in, feeling that the phone box was rolling me off my balance. On watch I was perfectly OK.)

(In relation to scallop dredging it’s also pertinent that DAM Engineers was doing very good business in Ian’s hands servicing the constant need for repairs to dredges, and especially the renewal of the tooth bars. We were buying in hardened steel teeth by the ton to replace the worn out ones coming off the dredges. So we were keeping a lot of the Plymouth boats fishing.)

 

Next time: Part V. Mackerel. The end of the line.