Living Silver 



The gear of a seine boat made it the most effective of inshore 

 fishing craft, but it also limited it to the inshore waters. It would 

 never be able to compete with the trawler and the liner over the 

 open sea. And this limitation had merely accentuated its suprem- 

 acy within its natural range, for it had forced the benignant Govern- 

 ment to grant concessions to seiners in the face of much opposi- 

 tion from those interested in trawling. The whole of the Moray 

 Firth, a vast stretch of fertile fisheries, was forbidden to the skip- 

 pers of British trawlers, yet it was open to the seine boats and they 

 made good use of it. Often the better part of the Scottish seine 

 fleet would be concentrated entirely within its reaches. It was 

 near to the home ports of most of the men. It was shallow. It 

 was comparatively free from bad weather, being sheltered from 

 the north, west and south. And it maintained a very numerous 

 and various fish population. Tadeusz's father-in-law habitually 

 worked it and one of the earliest things the four Poles found them- 

 selves agreeing about was that they too would try their luck in the 

 Moray Firth before embarking on any more original projects. 



164 



