Living Silver 



circular folk things that we used to be able to do in Scotland. It's 

 at this stage that the crews change over and the whole blooming 

 lot of them get into the one ship. All except one. Somebody 

 stays on the other boat to regulate the engine and to steer it. His 

 job is to keep dragging the boat with the rest of the crew aboard 

 her away from the nets. If he didn't then the tide and a bit of 

 wind, perhaps, would ride the lot of them over their own gear 

 and, when they started heaving, it would be as though they were 

 trying to give themselves a lift with their own bootlaces. ' 



This, again, could be translated into terms of drifting; for, 

 though the two miles of drift net were shot athwart the tide, the 

 boat had to sail down wind as it was shooting. Otherwise the 

 same difficulty would have arisen and the crew would soon have 

 been entangled with their gear. The relative effect of tide, be- 

 tween boats and nets, being nil, the wind would have pushed the 

 boat towards the nets if they had been shot against it. As it was, 

 however, the wet cotton meshes, especially if they were heavy 

 with fish, acted as a kind of sea anchor, straining the boat against 

 the push of even a heavy gale. So long as the air and the water 

 were moving at something like right angles to one another, this 

 arrangement was easily brought about; but, when the tide and 

 wind both driving in similar directions, Jan would often have been 

 glad of an auxiliary boat that would have allowed him to shoot 

 directly athwart the movement of the water without running the 

 Stanislaw on to its gear. But he was interested in this strange busi- 

 ness of ring fishing, so he dismissed these conjectures from his 

 mind. 



'You've got both ends of the spring-rope aboard that boat with 

 the crew, so you pass them over the winch and let it grumble 

 them up. Now, you'll remember that the spring-rope is bound to 

 the ground-rope by strops and a couple of rings. Well, all the time 

 it's coming up to the surface, it's pulling on those strops. The 

 more spring-rope you've got on deck, the less there'll be under 

 water. That means that the ring made by the foot of the net will 

 be getting smaller and smaller. As the spring-rope comes up, 



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