THE FISHERMAN'S TOOLS 



the baits most commonly in use being mussels, whelks, 

 hermit-crabs, and squid or cuttle-fish. Long lines, when 

 joined up to form a series, often stretch for more than a 

 mile, and carry as many as four or five thousand hooks. 



Under the head of nets are included trawls, drift-nets, 

 seines, moored nets, and dredges. The trawl (or trail) 

 net, the most important and elaborate of these, is a huge 

 meshed bag which runs down to a point, and the mouth 

 of which is fastened to a pole or " beam," ordinarily about 

 forty feet long. At either end of the beam, and at right 

 angles to it, is a sort of triangular broad hoop of iron, 

 measuring about three feet from base to apex. These 

 hoops "trawl-heads " as they are called serve the three- 

 fold purpose of sinking the net ; of supporting the beam, 

 keeping it well off the bottom ; and of gliding over the 

 sand like the runners of a sledge, as the boat moves. The 

 same net, on a somewhat smaller scale and with finer 

 mesh-work, is used for shrimping. 



A drift-net is a much less pretentious arrangement, being 

 a long wall (" fleet ") of small single nets fastened together 

 in a line. Buoyed above with corks and bladders so that 

 it may hang perpendicularly in the water, the series of 

 nets drifts gently along at the tail of a boat, and a shoal 

 of fish swimming straight at it, or driven towards it by the 

 current, would soon be inextricably fixed in the meshes. 



The seine (the sagene of the old Greek fishermen) is a 

 plain net, corked above and leaded below ; the top level, 

 but the bottom slightly curved; it may be of any size, 

 from the Cornish pilchard-seine, which is twelve hundred 

 feet long and sixty feet deep, to the little net worked by 



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