Seining 



offset by the increased cost of transport from the seine ports which 

 were further north than the trawler ports and therefore more 

 inaccessible to mechanised transport. 



Though the fly-dragging gear was different in many respects 

 from the original Danish model, it used the same fundamental 

 principle - and the principle was a queer one. It depended upon 

 the behaviour of the fish ; and Jan spent long hours trying to work 

 out how Vaevar had come to understand this behaviour as early as 

 1 848 ; the reasons for it were still unknown a hundred years later. 

 The seine net did not catch fish. Even less than most modern types 

 of trawl did it catch fish. It depended for its efficacy on the fish 

 catching themselves. They literally swam into the net in their 

 attempts to swim away from the ropes. 



It went like this. The ship arrived on the fishing ground and 

 threw the dahn and buffs over the side with a few fathoms of rope 

 wrapped round the latter. This rope was the beginning of a coil 

 I 20 fathoms long and the beginning was on the inside of the cyl- 

 inder of the coil. This part of the gear once shot, the vessel then 

 made full speed ahead paying out the remainder of the coil as it 

 went. The rope disappeared into the water behind it, settling 

 towards the sea-bed. And when the whole coil had gone another 

 one, that had been spliced into it, would begin to rumble on the 

 deck as it too wriggled and rolled over the side and out into the 

 water behind the vessel, and the boat turned through an angle of 

 ninety degrees. As the end of that coil approached, the third coil 

 then, and the fourth gone, it would again turn so that it was sailing 

 in precisely the opposite direction to that in which it had begun, 

 and, slowly gradually, the fifth coil went overboard. But it was 

 not attached to another rope. It was shackled to the frail Dan 

 Leno of wood and iron that edged the wing of the net. And the 

 net went over aft, unrolling easily from the neat bundle in which 

 it had been carefully stacked, wing, cod-end, and the other wing, 

 the other Dan Leno, and so on to the other side of five ropes. One 

 coil and turn, three coils and turn, and the last coil paid out as the 

 ship sailed back to the dahn that bobbed a net length more than 



167 



