Living Silver 



money. Every moment of thought they gave to their project took 

 away another pound or tv^o. Diesel oil wsls outrageously expen- 

 sive. Coils of rope cost forty pounds each. Floats and vs^eights 

 stood higher than ever before in the catalogues. Even paint be- 

 came a major investment. And they couldn't risk spending all 

 their capital on the April Morning. They had to think of the 

 Stanislawy as they vs^ere going to call the new boat. 



Then, of course, there were nets. During his last two trawler 

 trips, Jan found himself sympathising, as he had never done before 

 with the ship's owners. Nets were so expensive. They were also 

 so vulnerable, so easily shredded back to their rudiments as they 

 were dragged along a rock floor. And every time a trawl net went 

 something between seventy and a hundred pounds went with it. 

 On a single Faroe trip a trawler could go through £25^0 in nets 

 alone. Luckily the seine net was not so expensive as the trawl. 

 It was a much flimsier structure to begin with, made of cotton and 

 not sisal. Then, too, it was not so big, even though it was slightly 

 broader, from end to end, than the trawl. Most of this width was 



^a^ 3&.^ j'/W-.e.^ ^^o^ 



SEINE NET 



taken up by narrow wings, similar to the wings of a trawl but 

 overgrown, as it were, in comparison to the size of the belly and 

 the cod-end. Seine-netting, in fact, was almost like fishing with 

 the wings of a trawl and nothing else. Even the ropes were like 

 further extensions of the wings, just as the wire sweeps were in 

 trawling. The cod-end was reduced from the status of a prison to 

 that of a cell, a cell in which there were never more than a few 



162 



