Rachel looked at the trap once more and nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll send the specs to Alan.”
Mary basked in the morning sun a bit before asking. “Any thought to the kind of boat you want?”
“Yeah, lots of thought. Not a lot of decisions. Not too big. Standard dragger is too heavy, I think. I wonder if we can get one of the utility tens with the pilot console forward so the aft section is open for handling traps.”
“Talk to Jake Samson up at the Inlet. I bet he has that template,” Mary suggested. “Ask for a winch so you don’t break your back hauling line all day.”
“Standard electronics package?”
Mary shook her head. “I’d ask for full satellite nav, a full bottom feeler set, and radar. Remember, the standard utility comes with a binnacle and an instruction manual that says ‘Land is to the North.’”
Rachel giggled. “True. Didn’t think of that.” After a moment, she asked, “What am I forgetting?”
“Bait,” Mary said with an evil grin.
“Why do I think this is going to be nasty?”
“Because it is. Crab bait should be stinky. The stinkier, the better. They’re scavenging bottom feeders and they’ll mob a carcass.”
“Hm. I could ask the draggers to save me a box of trash fish.”
“Run a trot line off the point. Otto can help there. You need to collect about one bait fish for every two traps. Oily is better. Something like small jacks would be ideal, but really anything that’s been dead for a couple of days and steeping in seawater should work.”
Rachel almost retched as she imagined the stench of a bucket of half rotten fish. “Gah.”
Mary chuckled. “It’s not as bad as you think. You’ll get used to it. Just keep your bait pails well away from the house.”
Rachel blinked. “Well away from the village, you mean.”
“That, too. But some of those twenty liter buckets they use for bulk food packaging work well. They have lids that seal up the stink. Mostly.” She pointed to a tall cylinder of pails stacked in the corner of the shop. “Help yourself to some of those. We get them in with supplies for the pub. Covers are in the crate under the shelf there.”
Rachel grinned. “You seem to have this pretty well thought out for somebody that just had it sprung on her a few days ago.”
Mary shrugged one shoulder and grinned back. “You know how it is. Lotsa time standin’ around, polishing glassware. Plenty of time to be thinkin’, and I always thought we should be crabbin’ commercially. Never did understand why we never diversified the fisheries.”
“Ole Man Pirano was a dragger man. He set the pattern.”
“True enough,” Mary said. “True enough, and it’s taken a near disaster to get us out of that pattern.”
“Usually does,” Rachel said, thinking of Richard. “Usually does.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Aram’s Inlet
April 13, 2305
“You’re kidding, right?” Casey asked.
Jimmy just sat there with the map projection on the wall. “What you think, Jake? Can our twenty-five meter designs work out there?” he asked, looking at the yard boss.
Jake shrugged. “Once you get more than ten kilometers out, you may as well be a thousand. The sea conditions don’t change that much. The difficulty is there’s no place to run to when it kicks up.”
Casey started ticking points off on her fingers. “Fuel, water, food. And what do we do about the catch? Three days out, one day fishing, three days back?”
“What is that?” Tony asked. “It looks like a smudge.”
Jimmy zoomed the image in. They were looking at a satellite composite projection of the ocean bottom. Running along, like some submarine serpent, a jagged line ran west to east across the image. With the image zoomed in, it became obvious that it was a submarine ridge. The pattern was un-mistakably tectonic and marked the place where the planetary plate carrying the Western Reaches, butted up against the vast sunken plate that was the main seafloor. That plate extended some nine thousand kilometers south before it bashed into the south polar plate, upon which rested the Southern Reaches. The false color image was largely black and dark blue, except for the graded blue band which shaded to a thin green line.
“That is the North Mid Ocean Ridge,” Jimmy said. “The paler the green, the shallower the water. Yellow would be sea level and red is anything above.”
Casey walked right up to the screen and got close to the ridge, following it along. “There’s not one speck of yellow here, Jimmy. There’s no land out there.”
“Yeah, but where you see the transition between blue and green, that’s the hundred meter mark.” He zoomed in on a likely looking chunk of the serpentine pattern. “That bit right there is two hundred kilometers from top to bottom. That pale green line is wider than the Pumpkin.”
As they sorted out in their brains what they were looking at, comprehension began dawning around the room, Billy first, then Casey and Tony.
“My gods,” Casey said, “that’s huge.”
Where the Pumpkin grounds was about twenty kilometers wide and sixty long, this green band represented twenty kilometers in width and two hundred in length before it slid out of the frame. Jimmy zoomed back until the green band was broken by darker blue on each end. “That bank is a thousand kilometers long and twenty wide.”
“Yeah, but it’s a thousand kilometers out to sea,” Casey said.
“Twelve hundred, actually,” Jimmy said.
The room lapsed into silence as the group eyed the green line.
“Okay, what do we do if a storm comes up?” Casey asked. “We can deal with the rest, but we need some kind of shelter. Here, in three stans, four at the most, we can duck into harbor. Worse case, slip into one of the coves. What do we do out there?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Throw out a sea anchor and ride it out.”
Jake made a strangling noise. “Uh, Jimmy? Ride it out?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“I’m thinking ‘the boat sinks and everybody dies’ would be pretty much the worst,” Casey said.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Why would the boat sink?”
“High winds bring high waves. High waves splash into boats. Boats fill with water?” Tony asked.
Casey’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not what sinks boats.”
Jimmy started to smile.
Jake frowned.
“Once in a very, very great while, something will happen to break a boat up,” Casey said, “but it’s very seldom the wind or waves.”
Tony looked totally baffled, but Jake’s expression turned more and more thoughtful.
“It’s something in the water that breaks the hull, like a log, or the boat gets blown onto a rock, or tries to turn across the wind and gets rolled over,” Casey said.
Jake nodded. “She’s right. The danger is when the wind blows you backwards faster than the engines can drive you forward. If you run out of ocean before you run out of wind, you’re sunk. Literally.”
They all looked back at the chart on the wall.
Jimmy said, “It wouldn’t be a fun ride and certainly not something you’d wanna do with a full hold, but the biggest danger out there would be the ridge itself. Any really big seas would have their energy focused by the shallow waters of the ridge, and that might get really ugly. Anything up to a hundred kilometers an hour, maybe a hundred and fifty?” he shrugged. “It’d scare the crap out of me to try to do that near shore, but out there? What am I gonna get blown into? Throw out a sea anchor to keep the bows into the wind and ride up one side and down the other. You could get blown off three hundred kilometers by a big storm, but unless you hit another boat, there’s not a lot out there to break up on.”
Casey nodded. “You’d have to be really careful about watertight doors and hatches.”
“Keep the bilge pumps up to spec,” Jake said.
“It would take a big storm over a long p
eriod of time to do a great deal of damage to the boats,” Jimmy said. “Anything that big we’d see coming. Hell, we could probably dodge it. Run half a day north or south and let it blow by.”
“Showers,” Casey said. “We’re gonna stink.”
Jimmy chuckled. “Yeah, that’s the one thing we can’t have without overhauling the fleet and we don’t have time to overhaul the fleet, not in the short run. We need to know whether it’s worth doing first.”
“It’ll be worth it,” Billy spoke. “That’s got to be the richest fishing ground on the planet. Deep water upwelling on either side of that ridge would make the Nanking Upwelling look like a spa tub. And it’s untouched. Nobody’s ever fished it. It’s the only shallow water for thousands of kilometers. It’ll be worth it.”
“I agree,” Jimmy said. “So we need to mount an expedition out there. I want a fish census, and some up close and personal bottom maps. We got logistical problems that need solving, as Casey pointed out in the beginning. We need to be able to supply the boats with fuel, water, and food. We need to be able to get the fish off them so they can keep fishing. We can’t spend three days out, three days back, and only fish one day. As rich as those grounds are, it’s likely that one set is all we’d get before we’d need to unload.”
“How do we do that, Jimmy?” Tony asked.
Jimmy sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know. I wanted to hear some of your suggestions first.”
Jake spoke first. “We could set up a supply chain. Send out ships with the supplies you’d need.”
Casey winced as she considered the potential for disaster in ship to boat replenishment. “Can we build a floating platform?” she asked.
“Like a big floating dock?” Tony asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Barges,” Jake said. “We’ve got a few for moving bulk goods along the coast. We use ’em all the time for heavy dredging platforms. Takes two weeks to make one, but they’re forty meters log, twenty meters wide, and rated at about a megaton and a half.”
“What’s the catch?” Jimmy asked.
“It’d take a week to get out there with a barge,” Jake said.
“Billy, how much could a single thirty meter dragger grab in a hundred days?” Jimmy asked.
“Something over eight megatons.”
“How short are we gonna be on the quota at the end of the season?” he asked.
“Five percent. Just around forty-five megatons at the current rates of slippage,” Billy said.
“So ten more draggers for a hundred days would give us eighty megatons more.”
“If you can fish them full every day, yes.”.
“Okay, work up the consumables for ten draggers working around the clock,” Jimmy said.
They all sat up and looked at him like he’d just lost his mind.
“Around the clock?” Casey asked.
“Any reason not to drag in the dark?” Jimmy asked.
“You mean other than the crew needs to sleep some time?”
“Yeah, other than that.”
That stopped her and she actually took a tick to think about it. “No, not really. We’ve got deck lights for sorting fish by. If you can keep from keeling over from lack of sleep, then yeah, no problem.”
Jimmy nodded. “Okay, Jake. Here’s what I need. Support for ten draggers. Fuel, food, freshwater, and dormitory space for a hundred and twenty people. I want you to spec out a portable processing plant that can freeze whatever comes in up to a two metric megatons a day.”
“Never happen on a barge, Jimmy,” Jake said. “The barge can only handle one and a half. Add the processing equipment and you’re down to half a ton. What are you going to do with it after that? If the processing time is more than six hours, you got a flow problem with more fish going in than coming out.”
“Two barges?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Jake said, “but you still need to get that product out of there fast and frozen.”
Jimmy sighed. “So close.” He looked at the wall for another tick. “Okay, work up the logistics. How much fuel, food, water, and bunk space do we need for a hundred and twenty people per day.”
Tony, Jake, and Billy all looked at each other, nodded, and headed off to their assigned tasks.
Casey asked, “So, you wanna take the Sea Horse out for a look around?” After all her objections, she sounded almost eager.
He grinned. “Not exactly. Wanna go for a walk?”
A quarter stan later, Jimmy and Casey stood in the flitter park. Casey looked at it, but she didn’t really recognize it. “It’s a flitter, right?” she asked.
Jimmy grinned. “Yeah. It’s on loan from Allied.”
The normal flitter was a bit like an aerodynamic brick, roughly oblong, longer than it was wide, with a cockpit near the front and antigrav nacelles bulging smoothly around the edges. This thing looked like a frog with wings and about twice the size of a normal flitter. Behind the bulbous cockpit that was sitting much further forward, the “back” arched up about a meter higher than the cockpit’s roof and tapered down to far end giving the overall impression of a bullfrog crouched. There were stubby wings protruding from the sides that were studded with various pods and spikes. None of them made any sense to Casey’s eye.
“Okay,” she said, after a few ticks of dubious examination. “What is it?”
“It’s a survey flitter,” said a female voice behind them.
They turned to see a slender woman in a jumpsuit smiling at them.
“Hello, Sonya,” Jimmy said.
“Hi, Jimmy.”
“Sonya is going to help us make a survey of the ridge,” he said.
“Us?” Casey said, her voice rising a couple of octaves.
“Yeah. I want you to come out with us tomorrow and take a look.”
“Tomorrow? Jimmy, that’s twelve hundred kilometers out there,” Casey said.
Sonya said, “At our cruising speed, that’s about three hours. It gives us about two hours on station before we have to come back. Should be a nice little jaunt.”
“Don’t bother to pack a lunch,” Jimmy said. “Barney’s catering.”
“What?”
“Just be here at six. Dress casual,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Callum’s Cove
April 14, 2305
Rachel grinned at Otto over the toast and oatmeal. “You think you can help me?”
Otto looked back and forth between his father and mother. Richard was smiling, too.
“You want me to help you fish?” he asked as if to confirm what he’d heard.
“Yes, hon.” She glanced at Richard. “If your father can spare you from your lessons.”
Richard made a big show of careful. “I think we can spare him for a bit.”
Otto grinned. “So what is it you want me to do?”
“Crab bait. We need some bait to put in the crab pots. Mary gave me a couple of plastic buckets and I need somebody to fill them with dead fish.”
Understanding blinked onto Otto’s face. “Of course. Bait’s going to be a big part of this.”
“Yes, it is. I didn’t think of that. I wonder how many crabbers the Cove can support.” Rachel spread a bit of jam on her toast and nodded as she sunk her teeth into it.
“There’s plenty of room in the harbor. We can always put in another pier,” Richard said.
Rachel smiled. “Well, I was thinking more in terms of how many crabs there are. We don’t want to make the same mistakes with crab that we have with the banks.”
Richard grinned. “I think we’ll know soon enough.”
“Something you’re not telling me?” she asked.
“No,” Richard said, “just seems like after this, Pirano’s gonna want to know what else they’ve missed. Jimmy Pirano didn’t strike me as the kinda guy that would let that mistake happen again.”
As they cleared away breakfast, Otto asked, “Now that we’re done eating, how much bait do you want and when
do you want it?”
“Well, if you could fill one of Mary’s buckets for me, that would be a big help,” Rachel said.
“Just one?” Richard asked with a wise-guy smirk.
“It’ll probably be like one a day when we get rolling, but I just want to get some bait set aside. I need to do some survey work myself around the harbor.”
“Survey work?” Otto asked.
“Yeah, I need to know where the crabs are. Mary says there are three kinds of crab in the area. The small rock crabs we probably won’t be taking, but there’s a harbor crab with some commercial potential and a larger cousin out around the point, and presumably along the outer shore.”
Richard looked askance. “You think you can get a commercially viable product out of just Callum’s Cove?”
Rachel laughed. “No, but it may come as a shock to you, land lubber, that the whole South Coast is riddled with coves, bays, and inlets. The harbor crabs would be in every one of them.”
“I bet you can take a ton of harbor crabs,” Otto said.
“Well, that would be about a thousand crabs,” Rachel said. “I don’t think I’m going to catch that many by myself.”
“I’ll help,” Otto said.
“Me, too.”
Rachel looked at her husband with an expression that ran between amused and concerned. “You sure?”
His lips curved up in a warm smile. “Yeah.”
“But you’ve always said fishing isn’t something a shaman should do. Too dangerous. After the box fish...” her voice trailed off.
“Yeah, well.” Richard glanced at his son. “There’s danger and there’s danger. And I’m seeing things differently these days.”
“Well, I’m grateful for the help, if you’re sure.”
Richard’s gaze turned inward. “Sometimes you have to be really quiet to listen to the world.”
“Can we go get the buckets now?” Otto asked.
They all slipped on their jackets and headed out the back door. “So, tell me, Otto. How are we going to catch a bucket of fish?” his father asked.
South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Page 24
