Drifting 



at them, they were easy prey for the trawl. A fishery soon devel- 

 oped and, along with it, the gear of the herring trawlers under- 

 went a revolution. 



The otter board of an ordinary trawl sheared away laterally from 

 its opposite number on the other wing and thus held the head-rope 

 taut. But herring were fast-moving fish, able to rise quickly, and 

 it was therefore necessary to find a way of keeping the head-rope 

 riding high above the ground, of shearing it vertically. This was 

 accomplished by the use of wooden boards, or kites, that, at first, 

 were attached directly to the head-rope and bore it upwards by 

 shearing at an angle of forty-five degrees, away from the bottom. 

 It was a vertical extension of the otter board principle and, as the 

 otters dispensed with heavy poles or beams of ash, so the kites cut 

 dovni on the demand for cumbersome metal floats. Legs and 

 sweeps had been added to the ordinary whitefish trawl : they had 

 extended it still further in the horizontal direction and they had 

 had the additional effect of frightening fish into the body of the 

 net. The European herring trawl developed in the same way. It, 

 too, adopted legs and sweeps, but it also added an analogous verti- 

 cal component, the false head-line. Instead of being attached dir- 

 ectly to the top of the net, the kite was now fastened to two four- 

 teen feet wires that, in turn, stretched back to the head-line in the 

 same way as the legs rode between the otters and the wings. Thus 

 the gear lasted - a kite, a false head-line, the head-rope - until a 

 German skipper, Oskar Lang, observing that the false head-line 

 too scared fish, but scared them down towards the ground along 

 which the net was trailing, intensified this effect by adding another 

 kite and another false head-line to his gear. This addition was the 

 vertical complement of the sweeps that connected the butterflies 

 at the end of the legs to the otters. Both kites thus rode above the 

 head-line and in front of it, the uppermost one sailing almost im- 

 mediately between the leading edges of the wings and about two 

 and a half fathoms higher than the centre of the headline. Apart 

 from the false head-lines, that held them to each other and to the 

 head-rope, the kites were fastened to the rest of the gear by wire 



211 



