Drifting 



their efforts, was starved of quality fish and prepared to buy at 

 any price. Four years had accustomed them to seeing this cycle 

 repeated but it had not endeared it to them. They, therefore, ex- 

 ulted in the East Anglian season when they could invade the 

 Englishman's home and where, as often as not, they succeeded in 

 outfishing the English boats — even the dual purpose ones that had 

 filched them of their 'rights' on the concrete of Aberdeen. 



Jan had grown more Scottish than any MacKay or Lindsay; he 

 looked back along the line of bowls which glistened in the white 

 night light with a competitive longing that God might deliver 

 them into his hands. The shooting had been difficult as it always 

 was aboard the Stanislawy for she had worked short-handed since 

 the beginning of the season. He himself had done the job of two 

 men, unwinding the back-rope and bending on the strops that 

 attached it to the deepyne of the lint. The two students, who 

 were working aft of him, had again got into a fankle, as they paid 

 out the net-rope and the back of the net. One of them had almost 

 been knocked over the low rail when he suddenly unbent as George 

 was passing a heavy balloon-shaped bowl across his bowed head. 

 The molgogger, through which Jan led the back rope, had seized 

 up, but Adam had freed it so quickly that they had not needed to 

 stop. It was really remarkable, considering everybody's inexperi- 

 ence, how well they managed to work. 



So now they lay, the eighty-five of them, a long narrow spider's 

 web just below the surface. Each net, with its thousands of fine 

 cotton meshes, surrounded by about nine inches of strengthened 

 hoddy, rode between the corked net-rope to which the floats were 

 attached and the heavier back-rope that he himself had shot from 

 near the fo'c'sle down, the net-line sinking from the buoy strops 

 under the weight of back rope and lint ; but where the bottom rose 

 in a ridge they had been forced to shorten these strops in order to 

 keep their gear off the sea-bed. They were now hoping that the 

 blustery breeze would not begin to carve up the sea. These nets 

 were near the centre of their fleet and, in the event of a storm, 

 they were riding so high that they would have to take a battering. 



21^ 



