Net Overboard 



was standing beside the Goldfish on the bridge, and he was the 

 last of the expected arrivals. The funnel was belching its grey 

 mixture of white and russet and black. There was talk of singling 

 off. An engineer, sad-looking channels of sweat swimming down 

 his coaldust face, tripped with an elfish irregularity from the 

 engine-room forward and stationed himself in position to work 

 the winch, facing it and the fo'c'sle. He called the colonel and 

 the pickpocket and, when they were safely beside him, he began 

 to explain the workings of the gears and the brakes. For though 

 there was usually a special man for the job, it was ideally expected 

 that every deckie or deckie trimmer aboard would be able to 

 handle it in an emergency. And this was easily arranged, for the 

 winch of a steam trawler, like much steam machinery, was a very 

 simple construction, except at the theoretical level. What was 

 difficult to fathom was why it worked at all. In the case of the 

 Caroons winch this problem became an esoteric mystery. The 

 two immense drums of rusted wire and the two smaller wide- 

 grooved drums that stuck out from their sides like prolonged 

 hubs from a car wheel, seemed more likely to clatter through the 

 thin decking than to raise a heavy trawl from the sea floor. And 

 they did indeed have to be handled with discretion but the dis- 

 cretion was the trawlerman's, the seaman's, rather than the 

 engineer's. It was a matter of judging the strain on the warps, 

 the pull of the tide, the lurch of the swell, and of knowdng 

 whether the ground that was being fished was rough or smooth, 

 resistant or unresisting. Too much pressure on the brake and it 

 would not give until the trawl had been tattered from ground-rope 

 to cod-end ; or, if the net held unbroken before a large and heavy 

 obstacle, the bollards would be wrenched aside or the warps 

 themselves parted and whipped back in a fury of curling and un- 

 curling wire upon the men at work on the deck. 



While the engineer was giving his lesson, the singling-off 

 finished, the last of the ship's ropes were cast from the quay by 

 a harbour officer, and the Caroon put to sea. They all knew that 

 she was set for the Dog Hole, about twelve miles south of Aber- 



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