The Home Run 



on the nets themselves. And the catches were legendary. Jan 

 heard of one ship that had gone to the Greenland grounds. The 

 skipper had never fished such water before. When the trawl had 

 been down for no more than half an hour it was already dragging 

 so hard that steering became impossible. So they knocked out and 

 began to haul. The wings came up, a flood of fish, while the cod- 

 end bobbed about well to starboard. The skipper presumed that 

 the fish in the wings would fall back into the deeper parts of the 

 net when the wings were lifted clear. So he set the winches going. 

 But the wings did not rise clear of the water. Instead it Wcis the 

 ship that moved. It tilted over and sank. The weight of fish and 

 the power of the winches had been too much for her. They pulled 

 her under. 



Whether such stories were true or not there was no telling. 

 There were no witnesses, no survivors, only rumours. The one 

 certainty was that ships did disappear in these Arctic waters with 

 an appalling regularity. Usually their loss was attributed to 'black 

 frost', the nightmare god of the long-distance fisherman. Jan saw 

 it often enough, a deep fog coming at him through the freezing 

 air, beginning as a black horizon then gradually encroaching, smudg- 

 ing the contours of the ship, smothering it in a wet coldness that 

 seemed to crunch the bones of his chest. It was, as he later dis- 

 covered, vitrified water, water that had been supercooled below 

 freezing point so quickly that it had not had time to form crystals, 

 like snow and ice, but remained an amorphous black glass. To 

 work on deck with a gale blowing and the black frost descending 

 was the worst of a fisherman's ordeals. Even the boiling stew of 

 tea-leaves was turned to cold water as it came forward from the 

 galley. And all the time men had to be chipping ice from the 

 shrouds and showering hot water into the freezing scuppers. It 

 was not, however, the black frost that sank ships, though the fact 

 that black frost was present meant that they were already in dan- 

 ger of sinking. The temperature had to be well below freezing 

 and there Wcis usually a wind of hurricane force. The sea ran high. 

 Every new wave climbed aboard and slushed back over, green as it 



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