Sam Llewellyn is editor of The Marine Quarterly, http://www.marinequarterly.com,
and author of nautical thrillers. Three years ago he bought a Corribee on eBaySam Llewellyn
Flotsam and jetsam
Y
ou are sitting on
the boat in a
lonely anchorage.
The sun is going
down, and you
are speaking of
this and that, when someone
says, ‘So what’s for dinner?’
You take a look at the ship’s
stores. These amount to three
tins of borlotti beans, half a
loaf of mouldy brown bread,
two-and-a-half chocolate
digestive biscuits, and a tin of
sardines. The same someone
makes a face, and says, ‘Hasn’t
anyone been fi shing?’
Once, boats carried many
contrivances designed for the
slaughter of marine life. There
was the drag, an awful bit of
iron with huge hooks welded
to it in line abreast, which was
supposed to be
towed along
the seabed in
Norfolk, hooking
up fl atfi sh by the stone, though
actually all it ever hooked up
was weed by the ton. Then
there was Mike, who had an
actual trawl designed for a
small boat, its usefulness
roughly the same as the drag
(see above). There were also
seine nets, fyke nets, butt
pricks, which is Norfolk for
fl atfi sh spears, and a variety
of other horrors. But in an age
where much of the seabed has
been trawled into a biodiversity
reminiscent of a front drive
in Epping, none of the above
seemed right, plus they hardly
ever caught anything. So the
more elaborate devices got left
in the garage.
Lobster pots are better,
because there still seem to be
some lobsters around. The
collapsible model is a bit feeble;
the professional kind, inkwell
or parlour, is more effi cient.
The disadvantage here is that a)
they leave no room on a small
boat for people, and b) on a
large yacht they shed rust on
the ice-white topsides, so
keen potters spend two days
scrubbing, fi rst with Jif and
then with toothpaste, and end
up donating the pots to the
fi rst person they meet on the
quay at Mallaig.
The bare minimum seems to
be a set of mackerel feathersand the odd rubber eel for
trolling round the rocks after
pollack, an excellent vehicle
for tomato ketchup when
disguised in egg and fl our. But
seals love pollack, and there
are plenty of seals around –
friendly creatures which will
follow you round a pollack
mark, scaring off every fi sh in
the greater Kintyre region andreinforcing the normal state
of fi shing, which is not to
catch anything.
Though the pendulum can
swing too far in the other
direction. A keen fi sherman
invited himself aboard a
friend’s boat last year. He fi lled
the beer box with worms, and
every time
the friend put
the anchor
down the
fi sherman’s bait followed it.
Nothing bit. Then one evening
his line started to go out, and
his rod to bend, and he struck
mightily, and after a long dour
battle he pulled in a conger the
size of his leg. Memory (said
the friend) is mercifully dim,
but (he said) he had a strong
recollection of the creature
lashing around in the cockpitlike a slime-crusted demon
from a nether hell, and
someone picking it up with
socks on their hands and
fl inging it back into the sea.
The socks were never quite the
same again, but the sacrifi ce
seemed worth it. The fi sherman
went ashore, unlamented.
Dragging lures for mackerel
causes less trouble – though if
your skipper is a racing person
he is likely to tell you you are
slowing the boat down and
would you please get that
ruddy thing in because it is
knocking a nanoknot off the
speed and no mackerel can
swim this fast anyway. This
is almost certainly nonsense,
but it is folly to argue.
Raceoholics notwithstanding,
in the sunlit months when the
mackerel are in, it is insanity
not to take advantage of the
situation. A new generation of
cognoscenti have equipped
Surprise’s galley with soy sauce,
wasabe and ginger, and hack
the mackerel they catch into
instant sushi. My own
preference is for mackerel fried
and washed down with fi ne
craft ales, or actually anything
else short of cleaning products.
But it is not just about food.
You clamber into the dinghy,
and row out into the shoal,
and with luck you get two
each, fried in oatmeal, and half
a chocolate digestive for afters.
And you are no longer hungry.
Better still, you are warmed
by the sense that you are no
longer a member of a sort of
seagoing Caravan Club, but
a hunter-gatherer like your
little tattooed ancestors.
Congratulations!Nearer my Cod to Thee
How we used to catch fi sh by deploying butt pricks,
rubber eels and seine nets – plus some other trawl tales
Seals will follow you round a pollack mark,
scaring off every fi sh in the Kintyre region
‘The bare minimum
seems to be a set of
mackerel feathers...’See page 42 for Sam’s article
about cruising on the River Clyde