Seining 



ever spent. There was no weather, just the neurotic chopping of 

 small irregular wavelets. And the catch was wonderful. At the 

 end of the day, however, they had made seven hauls and had gut- 

 ted twenty kits of smallish fish. By the time they docked, though, 

 there were still several kits of ungutted whiting. But it did not 

 matter. Seine boats often landed ungutted fish. They could afford 

 to do so because they landed them fresh and they were sometimes 

 forced into it by the sheer weight of their catch, the weight of 

 numbers. Twenty kit of large cod would have been no difficult 

 problem but, with these tiny fish, there were ten times as many of 

 them to the kit as there would have been of Faroe cod. Yet it 

 took just as much care and, perhaps even more time to gut a small 

 fish as a large one. 



Still, it was not the weight of physical work that strained Jan 

 most when he took to seining. He was used to hard work. This 

 was perhaps a little harder but not enough to complain about. 

 What really hurt was the mental exhaustion that came from con- 

 stant concentration. Aboard a trawler there had been a job to do 

 and he had done it - patiently, precisely, industriously. And his 

 duty had ended. Usually the job had been a repetitive boring one, 

 like gutting fish or hauling a net, things he could do while his 

 mind wandered soporifically among hopes for the future and re- 

 membrances of the past. He had hardly noticed where he was. If 

 he had been uncomfortable it had been a discomfort so deep in 

 his animal being as to be almost inaccessible to his waking senses, 

 a deeply buried deposit of painful consciousness. There had just 

 been the continual effort to keep enough contact with the physical 

 world to be able to go on doing his job. He did not need to plan 

 for the next job. He just shifted his hand and there, in the shape 

 of the next fish, was the job. This was all very different from the 

 heightened concentration needed for seining. 



Concentration, yes, but it was not even the easily studious con- 

 centration of a man reading a book or a poem, trying to work out 

 one complex problem, concentrating all his experience on it as 

 the weight of a solid body is concentrated at its centre of gravity. 



171 



