The Home Run 



kind of experiential vacuum. Then, surely, he was nearest to the 

 true rhythm of the sea. But he was forgetting the time spent in 

 fishing itself, the hoursofdeadness when the brain noticed nothing, 

 the hours of work. 



He thought back on the last day of trawling. The weather had 

 worsened from morning until it had become so bad that they had 

 been forced to pack up. Or maybe they would have packed up 

 anyhow. And after all, they had lost a couple of days at the begin- 

 ning of the trip, so coal might be running short. As far as he 

 could judge, the catches hadn't been bad. There had nevertheless 

 been a bitter nip in the air. They had stopped fishing and stowed 

 away the whole complicated burden of the gear. Jan smiled back 

 at the picture of himself, being sick over the side of the Caroon 

 and imagining that he really knew what a trawl was and how to 

 fish with it. The dear old school, ridiculous Alma Mater y it had 

 taught him to fish with a diagram of the trawl. The equipment 

 carried by the Leslie James was much more complex and efficient. 



The first mistake of the Goldfish and his assistants had been to 

 teach them that fish were caught with a net. It was true that, even 

 today, a net was used for scooping them aboard the trawler but 

 that was not the same thing at all. In the modern fishing gear, 

 nets had been reduced to mere necessary auxiliaries of the various 

 wires and bobbins and blocks of steel that were really responsible 

 for tracking fish down and herding them into a trap. The net was 

 that trap. Fish were caught in it rather than by it. A criminal is 

 caught as soon as he falls into the hands of the police : he doesn't 

 need to wait until he finds himself behind prison bars. Fish were 

 caught as soon as they felt the rustle of the wires that were chasing 

 them. Twenty fathom of spreading wire, sweeps sometimes ten 

 times that length, these were the police force of the trawl gear : 

 the net was only its prison. A halibut edged up from the bottom 

 by one of the heavy fat Dan Lenos was almost as safe as a halibut 

 already on ice in the hold. It did indeed have a chance of escaping, 

 but so too did a criminal in handcuffs. 



Warps still weighed down to the trawl boards, as they had done 



147 



