As soon as the doors appear, the winch is slowed. It is stopped at the 

 exact moment the doors reach the gallows-frames, to which. they are imme- 

 diately attached and, at the same time, freed from the trawl cable. Before 

 the trawl itself appears, the cod-end emerges, floated up by the abrupt de- 

 compression of body tissues and air bladders of the captured fish. It even 

 happens that, when the fish are abundant, it bounds out of the water, not with- 

 out risk to the cod-end which sometimes bursts from this shock. 



The mouth of the trawl appearing, alongside the ship, three lines appear 

 on the upper part, all near the sides. One of them is the end of the splitting 

 rope. The two others are the quarter ropes. 



By hauling in the quarter ropes, the mouth of the net is closed and the 

 head and foot ropes brought together with a good quantity of netting. The head 

 and foot ropes are then hooked up by a line passing over a pulley and lifted to 

 the deck. 



By means of a sliding knot running along the net as low as possible, or by 

 a supplementary splitting strap, the greater part of the net is pulled over the 

 rail by hand. 



The lengthening piece now comes alongside being, according to the amount 

 of fish caught, one to three meters in diameter. By means of a special line, 

 fastened to the lengthening piece, the latter is attached and, at the same time, 

 the line to the splitting strap is attached to the niggerhead. 



The lengthening piece and the cod-end are thus hauled in, the first to the 

 side of the ship, the second to the surface of the water. 



When the splitting strap is pulled shut, it cuts off a terminal pocket in the 

 cod- end solidly full of fish and weighing about three tons, two tons of which is 

 fish. 



By means of a steel cable hooked into a thimble on the splitting strap and 

 running to the winch, these fish are raised above the rail and swung over the 

 deck. This terminal pocket thus suspended is snubbed to the rail by two lines 

 to prevent its swinging and it appears as an enormous egg almost two meters 

 in diameter and 2-1/2 meters high, enclosing 4 cubic meters of fish. 



104 



