Painted Brightly 



fish at any single time. It was because they did not try to catch the 

 same huge bags as a trawler that seine-men could make use of such 

 frail cotton nets. Apart from anything else, the small crew would 

 not have been able to handle such masses of fish. So the seiners 

 made short but frequent hauls. That was the essence of seining. 

 Nets down. Nets up. Nets down again, and up, and down . . . 

 till nightfall. Sleep and a new beginning. Then back to market 

 while the catch was still fresh. But Jan had not yet learned that 

 way of life. 



It was still a matter of sending to London, to Grimsby, to Hull 

 for catalogues, of talking to Adam, the engineer, about jockey 

 pulleys and belt drives and other things that he didn't understand, 

 of long hurried additions and subtractions endlessly repeated for 

 ritualistic purposes, each time hoping that a new figure would 

 emerge and the four Poles would find that they really did have 

 some spare money. But they didn't. Jerzy would have to use all 

 his judgement, for it was up to him, as the most proficient seine 

 netter among them and the skipper of their tiny vessel, to make 

 sure that they did not injure any of their gear before they landed 

 some fish. There was not a penny of spare capital. 



Jerzy's first act was to advise them that they could not hope to 

 fish wdth anything more than five a side on the April Morning. And 

 that was bad news, for it meant that they would have to limit their 

 activities to the shallowest of grounds. Jan was so vague about the 

 nature of the seine net that he wasn't quite sure why this was so. 

 He didn't really know what 'five a side' meant but he did know 

 that smaller boats fished the shallows and larger ones the deeper 

 reaches. He had always thought, rather uncertainly, that it had 

 something to do with sea- worthiness. But it didn't. The methods 

 of fishing were the important consideration. That was why the 

 inshore fisheries came more and more under the control of seiners 

 while trawlers grew bigger and bigger and went out now for per- 

 haps two thousand miles. The little ships that were called great 

 liners went equally far though they were little more sea-worthy 

 than the better seine-netters. 



163 



