Living Silver 



room to move about in. But the herring were just as thick. Up 

 to that point there had been the faintest of ghmmers, half a basket 

 to the net, but at first scudding the second net on the ridge gave 

 them forty baskets, seven cran, near ten thousand fish. And it 

 went on like that, hour after hour, straining the hard meshed nets 

 over the side in the presence of the most energetic lazy deckie 

 that Jan had ever met. The movement of the sea did not help, 

 however, as much as it would have done with a trawl. There was 

 the dead weight of ten thousand fish at a time to be manhandled 

 aboard, whereas, on a trawler, the fish themselves, wrapped up in 

 the cod-end, were lifted by the gilson and the winch. Luckily 

 these herring were meshed under the lint. They must have been 

 moving south in a solid rush. And they were all well up in the top 

 half of the nets. So when the boat was turned into the sea it was 

 just possible to shake them into the hold, losing a few^ down the 

 scuppers, but without too great a risk of battening down a couple 

 of tons of brine along with them. 



It was a clean catch. Herring, herring and only herring. The 

 right size too, none of them struggling almost to their bellies in 

 the meshes. Each head had sunk nicely through a diamond. Then 

 the arch of its back had impeded further progress. It had tried to 

 retreat. But the operculum of the gills, that had been so smooth 

 and streamlined when the animal was going forward, was seized 

 up by a strand of cotton as a button is sometimes seized by a loose 

 thread in a shirt buttonhole. The herring dragged back, but the 

 harder it pulled the deeper the cotton twine sank into its gill slits. 

 It tried to push forwards again but the arch of its back had grown 

 no smaller. It retreated and felt the thin thread grinding into its 

 gills. It was caught. And so they had all been caught. 



The secret of the success of the drift net undoubtedly lay in this 

 method of capture. Biologically, it was perfect because it was 

 impossible to catch the very young fish or even the adolescents. 

 They were small enough to be able to swim or wriggle through 

 the diamond suaves. There was no chance of them being sturuied 

 as they might be by the impact of some part of a fast-moving trawl : 



2i8 



