Living Silver 



brightly by spherical aluminium floats, contrasted favourably, 

 even at the aesthetic level, w^ith the rigid lumber of its precursor. 



After he had learned to thread together the separate panels by 

 series of lace-hoods, taking up the slack at even intervals w^hen- 

 ever necessary, and fitting mesh to mesh w^ith a precision that few 

 women could equal in their knitting, Jan turned his attention to 

 the ropes. The head-rope was simple enough, a stout strand of 

 manilla, but the ground-rope that had to trail unbroken over the 

 roughest and hardest of bottoms was a much more complex 

 structure. To call it a 'rope' was yet another example of the 

 over-simplification always present in ordinary language. The 

 parts adjacent to the wings were rope all right, though stronger 

 than the head-rope, but the central part, where the ground-rope 

 joined the bosom, began with wire, a length of old trawl warp, 

 itself strong enough to take the strain of the whole operation of 

 fishing at a depth of a hundred fathoms. Around this core Jan 

 matted three thicknesses of fine cotton netting ripped off from an 

 old drift net and this useful shock absorber was held in place by 

 continuous whorls of the same manilla as had been used for the 

 head-rope. The weight of the finished ground-rope was almost 

 as great as that of the rest of the net put together. It was a third 

 as long again as the head-rope. And there remained the problem 

 of attaching it to the lower wings and the belly of the trawl. 



The central part of it was over twelve inches in circumference 

 and could never have been forced through the meshes of any of 

 the panels. Its weight was such that attachment by the single 

 mesh would have meant that, sooner or later, a mesh here and a 

 mesh there would have snapped until finally the ground-rope 

 simply fell off. So Buchan showed him how, first, to rove a 

 narrow rope through the selvedges of the wing and bosom. This 

 wing-line was then caught up by a thicker rope, or bolsh, which 

 was, in its turn looped, at regular intervals, to the massive 

 ground-rope. The strain of that weight was thus spread over two 

 lines, and even the narrower of these could spread its owti strain 

 over three or four meshes of sisal. 



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