CHAPTER ELEVEN 



SEINING 



AND what of this gear that was so strangely superior to the trawl ? 

 Was it so very dififerent ? When Jan first saw it at Peterhead he 

 could make nothing of it. There were lots of ropes, not just the 

 head-ropes and foot-ropes and so on of a trawler, but a deckload 

 of thick white 2 J -inch hard laid manilla. There were so many 

 ropes that the net became a mere appendage to them rather than 

 the other way about. The net itself was a scrawny length of lint 

 with a smaJl bag, or catching part, disposed centrally. It seemed 

 unlikely that it could hold many fish. 



The seine net as he found it, was not the same thing as Vaveur 

 had invented a century previously. That had been a much more 

 specialised instrument designed to sweep up the millions of small 

 plaice that are found off the Danish coast. But Scottish fishermen 

 did not live by plaice alone. Had they tried to they would have 

 starved. So they had adapted the techniques of the Dane to their 

 own purposes and converted his gear into a reliable method of 

 hunting for roundfish. 



Originally the Danes had used anchor gear and many of them 

 still did employ variants of it. But the Scots found it too cumber- 

 some and complicated : and it was too specialised. An anchor was 

 attached to chain and that to a thick soft coir rope: from this, 

 which was still lying near the bed of the sea, wire led first to the 

 mooring buoy, with its attendant chains and shackles, then to a 

 pair of canvas buffs and so to the flagged dahn buoy. The ropes 

 were attached, by heavy jointed steel swivels to the buffs, and the 



i6s 



