Drifting 



fleets. Only by moving over to the extreme east could Tadeusz 

 find a berth for his gear, and even then he had to shoot it due north 

 w^est in order to avoid the possible drift of tw^o other lanes of net- 

 ting that projected from the main bunch of boats. Thus, when 

 the Stanislaw's gear w^as out, Johnny and his shipmates w^ere lying 

 almost three miles due east of the DovetaiVs end bow^l and about 

 four and a half miles south east by east of the Dovetail herself. 

 Some of the Stanislaw's nets ran over a ridge w^here only ten fathoms 

 of w^ater w^ere echoed under the keel of the boat. 



And, apart from the bottom, there w^as nothing on the sounder, 

 not even a crushed midge to mimic a tiny blip. Had it not been 

 for the deep blackness of the water and George's undismayed ad- 

 monitions that 'you never can tell' and 'the solen know best' 

 Tadeusz and Johnny would never have shot in such an unpromising 

 and congested area. The gannets were certainly there, sitting up- 

 right and unfluttering in the rinse of the untidy spray, their great 

 orange cricket bats of beaks nosing under the surface from time 

 to time, as though they were searching for water fleas. Very few- 

 were flying. Most of them, indeed, had probably gone clumsy 

 with surfeit. Their bellies might still be full of undigested herring, 

 the ones Ian had seen them catching at slack water in the morning. 

 There was no sign of either whale or porpoise. 



By nine in the evening Jan was able to look back along the line 

 of bowls that bobbed away, yellow or white, into the distance, 

 m.arking a stretch of lint nearly two miles long and seven fathoms 

 deep. The colours of these floats alternated with every eighth of 

 the net. Eighty-five nets, in all, every one patterned with thou- 

 sands of diamond sauves, every diamond strained tight by the 

 buoys, the foot-rope, its own weight, and the cross push of the 

 tide, each a possible receptacle and trap for the head of a single 

 herring. Two miles of netting, and every inch might be worth a 

 couple of hundred fish. George could boast of his ringing and the 

 Bear Island trawlers could scoop up their triple bags of cod, but 

 there was no way known to man of catching so many fish in a 

 night as might, even tonight, be enmeshed in a fleet of drift nets, 



209 



