Polar Voyages

by Gray, Gordon

  I sleep well that first night and awake just after seven. It is a fine, clear and sunny morning and the sun is glinting off the sea and shining through the porthole. Lord Lovat is rolling gently as she steams north. The crew is already out on deck setting up the trawl gear in readiness for fishing. First, they set up the fish washer. This is a large metal tank that is open at one end. It is mounted on tall legs amidships above the fish room hatch so that the open end faces aft and is a few feet forward of the fish room hatch. A hose is rigged up so that, when we are fishing, water continually flows into the tank. Then they assemble the nets. The nets are made up of a number of component parts: bellies, wings, side panels, cod end, foot ropes, head ropes, etc., and have to be built up to form the complete net. The headline with its floats and the ground rope with its big rollers or bobbins to roll over the seabed are all secured in place. These preparations carry on all morning in a happy atmosphere with the BBC Light Programme playing over the deck. Although the deck is open on all sides when we are under way it is fairly well sheltered from the wind by the high bows and whale back.

  At about noon, after passing Rattray Head off the north-east tip of Aberdeenshire, not far from the fishing ports of Peterhead and Fraserburgh, we run into fog. George, the Sparks, tells me that the trawlers at Greenland are reporting that they are catching lots of fish. The Lord Lovat does not have the fuel capacity to get there and back and allow enough time there for a decent trip and so she is restricted to fishing at Iceland. It is a five-day steam to get to the Grand Banks and longer if they go up to Greenland and the Labrador Straits. As it is also a five-day steam home again, the skippers have to be confident of making good catches when they get there as they only have about ten days on the grounds to make a successful trip.

  The skipper calls me to go and join him and George for lunch down in the officers’ mess. This is a small, cosy mess, which has wood panelling on the bulkheads, very similar to the Cape Otranto’s and with the table taking up the whole room apart from the red leather-covered bench seats all round the side of it. Lunch is good, vegetable soup, roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and cabbage. Then, there is steamed duff and custard for pudding. I had not realised that I was so hungry. My dockside nerves seem to have gone and I am feeling more confident about my time here. I haven’t even felt seasick!

  We are now entering the dangerous Pentland Firth; the narrow passage between Scotland and the Orkneys Islands through which the tides race; particularly at the time of the spring tides. Shipping from Europe heading for the Atlantic converges on this narrow channel with the rocky islands and skerries all around. The fog is now thicker than ever. It envelops the ship, covering everything in a heavy, wet dew, and locks us into our own tiny world, a world bounded by the wall of grey wetness about fifty yards from the ship. All sound is deadened so it feels as if we are in wet cottonwool. Entering the narrows of the Firth, an eerie feeling descends on the wheelhouse as the lookout peers out, seeing nothing but the wall of fog and the swirling waters as the tide races through the Firth. We know that we are now close to the rocky, wreck-strewn coast but we cannot see it. We can only hear a lone fog horn booming out somewhere in the fog and the plaintive hoot of our ship’s fog horn warning any other ships of our presence. However, with the aid of Duncansby Head Lighthouse fog horn making fog signals of five blasts every two minutes, as well as the ship’s radar, we are soon safely through. George tells me that on one of the Pentland Skerries (one of the clusters of small rocky islands in the Firth) there are the remains of an Aberdeen trawler, which was washed up in a ferocious storm in about 1965. She was not even holed and was just sitting up on the skerry.

  At about seven that evening, the fog lifts and we finally see the cliffs of the Isle of Hoy to starboard and there on a parallel course and dwarfed by the cliffs is the trawler Kingston Andalusite, which had left the dock just behind us. As the fog goes so the wind picks up and the sea begins to sluice in through the freeing ports as she rolls along northwards.

  Later that night, the wind gets up and I am woken by the change in the ship’s movement. By morning the wind is up to Force 7 or 8 and the spray is being sent high over the whaleback and lashes onto the bridge windows. I do not feel good at all. I have to make a dash for the bathroom before I have properly woken up. I go back to bed and hope that this awful feeling will go away after being ill. It does not. I struggle up as I decide that I should try and keep going. Perhaps if I get up into the wheelhouse I will feel better. I lean against the bridge windows and hang on. The mate is there and looks relaxed and content with the world. He smiles at me with a knowing look. As I look out, hoping to see sunny calm seas ahead, I am hypnotised by the movement of the ship. The seas are coming from the north-east and the ship is rolling along and pitching into them with the bows swinging through 20 to 25 degrees. One moment the bow is poised high above the troughs and we were looking down on the seas, then the bow drops and sinks into the trough and the horizon is above us. Spray lashes across the windows. The skipper assures me that it will be far rougher when we are clear of the shelter of the Faeroes. I now feel even worse than I had done in my bunk and as I watch the bows once more, my stomach heaves and I make a dash below to the heads. I am experiencing my first, but by no means last, bout of seasickness.

  As the day progresses and the pitching continues I feel more dreadful and think that death must be better than this. I seem to spend all day sitting on the bathroom floor. I try to keep going but whatever I do the bulkheads seem to close in on me and then a lurch of the bow as it drops into a wave sets my stomach off again. I only want one thing – to get off this thing! Nothing can convince me that I will be OK; I am definitely going to die. By nightfall I have lost a lot of strength and feel weak and terrible. I go to bed and praise the Lord that I am not expected to keep any sort of watch and so can lie and suffer my last hours in peace. I drift off into a deep sleep. The next morning, although still feeling bad I realise that I am still alive. How can that be? Perhaps the weather is improving? By the afternoon, the weather has abated and the ship is steaming along nicely. The sun is now shining again after the fog and the rough weather. By evening I am beginning to feel a little better. Somehow I have survived.

  That night we arrive on the fishing grounds off south-east Iceland. After two days and eighteen hours of steaming we begin fishing. The big wooden and steel otter boards or ‘Doors’ are winched outboard. The doors are massive. Each is about 10 feet by 5 feet and about 3 or 4 inches thick. Made of solid baulks of timber and edged with heavy steel shoes to protect them from rocks on the seabed. A door hangs from each of the two big steel arches, or gallows, on the starboard side, one forward by the whaleback, one aft by the cod liver boiler house. The net is connected between them so that one is attached at each end of the net mouth and when the net is set the doors act like kites and ‘fly’ outwards in the sea keeping the net spread wide open. The net is connected to the trawl warps and the first trawl of the trip is underway. We are on Working Man’s Bank, about half way between Iceland and the Faeroes. After towing the trawl net for about four hours at 4 knots the first catch is hauled and we have caught about eighty baskets of cod, a good catch to start with. A fishing vessel is losing money every minute that the nets are not on the seabed and set for catching fish. My seasickness has now begun to ease, I feel better and even manage to start thinking about food again.

  We spend two days fishing in this area and catching good hauls of fish. The weather settles into a warm, sunny pattern, which cheers everyone up. When it is dull or rough the crew spends most of their time in their bunks but when it is sunny they spend any spare time on deck with a mug of tea and a cigarette and are altogether happier. By the third day the catches are not so good and the skipper makes the decision to move grounds. This is a big risk as no one knows whether better catches will be had or not. The time taken to change grounds and the cost of the fuel used will all work against the skipper if when he gets there the catches are poor. The Boss
es in the office judge him only by how much he catches. We sail up nearer to Iceland and now I can see Iceland’s mountains stretching along the horizon. In the days before Iceland’s new fishery limits British trawlers could fish up to three miles of the coast, now we are not allowed within twelve miles of the coast. This is my first sight of the far north. Although we are still south of the Arctic Circle the sight of these snow-capped mountains is exciting. It is brilliantly clear and sunny and the mountains are sharp with every detail clear in dazzling white against the blue sky.

  The skipper’s knowledge of these waters is astounding. His charts have all sorts of hand-drawn alterations on them with ridges, banks, holes and fastenings all marked. He checks his chart with a big notebook that he keeps of all his trips indicating what he caught where and when and what the tides and weather conditions were. The tow is carefully plotted with the aid of electronic navigation systems such as Loran and Decca Navigator by which the skippers can calculate their position very accurately and so trawl along the edges of undersea cliffs and ridges. As the fish tend to lie in clumps feeding on the seabed, one good haul can often indicate plenty of fish in that area. When this occurs you can see the trawlers following each other round in circles as they try and fish out the area.

  The VHF (a shortrange voice radio) speaker in the wheelhouse is constantly crackling away and snatches of conversations between skippers are heard all the time: ‘Lord Lovat, Lord Lovat, this is Kingston Onyx, Kingston Onyx, are you there Ken?’ The skipper of another Hull trawler, the Kingston Onyx, which had sailed a week earlier than us and which we had seen in the distance earlier in the day is calling up our Skipper for a chat. The two skippers know each other well. They chat away talking about the weather. ‘When did you get up to the grounds?’ ‘How are things at home?’ All this is spoken in a slow Yorkshire way with lots of pauses in the conversation and ‘Ayes’ followed by more pauses. Then the other skipper starts to probe Ken about catches. ‘Any good where you are, Ken?’ The response is cagey, ‘Oh, so, so, not much to be excited over.’ ‘Aye … Aye … same here.’ Ken asks if they are heading for a market yet. ‘Not sure, depends on the weather’ (that is interpreted as the fishing is good so they would stay unless bad weather stopped them fishing. ‘Where are you abouts now?’ asks Ken. ‘Just having a look at Hari Kari’ is the reply, i.e. trying to indicate they have just arrived on that bank. They chatted on like this for about ten or fifteen minutes with no real facts or hard information being exchanged but lots of guesswork and innuendo sent and received. The skippers are always trying to kid each other into believing there are no fish where they are when in fact there are fish; it all seems a waste of time but does keep them happy chatting. However, if one skipper can con the other skipper to move away from good catches to poorer grounds and then move onto the better grounds themselves then they will. This goes on between ships in the same company as every skipper fishes for himself. Vessels from the same company do not fish as a fleet, pooling information or calling others to good grounds; they all look after themselves but keep chatting to the others from the company and in the hope of picking up a nugget of information that the others might let slip in an unguarded moment. Every skipper is only as good as his last trip. One bad one and he can find himself out of a job as the whole industry is run on a casual labour basis.

  Later in the day we steam to ‘Hari Kari Bank’. It is a fine day and, as we steam north, the sun lights up the dazzling white bow wave against the deep blue of the sea. The ship rolls along free at last of the restraining net, like a hiker walking after putting down a heavy rucksack. Hari Kari Bank is so named by British trawler men because it was regarded as the last resort ground on the way home to try and save a poor trip. Kingston Onyx is still there and as we approach we see that she is hauling her nets. The skipper keeps Lord Lovat upwind of the Onyx so he can see her starboard side. He watches through his binoculars as they haul their net aboard; they do not seem to be getting exceptional catches after all. Maybe their skipper was telling the truth? We do not find any good catches here either so after three hauls we steam back to Working Man’s Bank where our first haul is sixty baskets, not bad. The day ends with a tea of hamburgers, peas and fresh baked bread rolls and jam.

  The fishing continues round the clock and the weather also continues to hold. A calm high-pressure system is giving the north Atlantic a pleasant summer and we are enjoying it. We also continue to have reasonably good catches.

  I spend some time chatting in the wheelhouse to the bosun, John. He is a cheery, friendly guy in his early twenties, clearly ambitious and takes his job seriously. He always has his greased hair flicked back in a classic ‘DA’ style like the Rock & Roll singers of the day. He has been at sea since leaving school. Like most of the crew he rolls his own cigarettes and takes great pride in being able to roll a ‘ciggy’ with one hand. On first joining the fishing industry he started off as a ‘Deckie Learner’, which is the bottom rung of the promotion ladder. He was a deckie learner for a year and then became a ‘Spare Hand’. Some deckie learners take much longer to get to spare hand. After that he gradually climbed up the ladder. He became a third hand and then after more sea time and shore exams he became a bosun. The next step for him is to become a mate before reaching the final height of skipper. There is no short cut to the rank of skipper. No college diploma, officer entry or envelope of money to the owners can make you a skipper. The only way is to start at the bottom as a deckie learner and work your way from there. As a bosun his seamanship was expected to be as good as the mate’s but he needed time to understudy the mate in fishing and managing the crew. However, he is qualified to take over from the mate if needed. He would take responsibility for some of the trawls to gain experience of fishing. A good worker with determination and hard work can become a skipper in six years, although this is unusual. Normally it takes about ten years. That is a lot of time at sea. To take a mate’s ticket you have to have been at sea for four years. A lot of skippers will work for about ten to fifteen years as a skipper and then retire. They earn good money if they are successful; about £8,000 to £10,000 a year at 1966 rates. However, I could not find anyone on board who actually liked the job. They all said it was too hard, boring, and too long away from home; but they could not think what else they could do or even wanted to do instead. On the grounds they are either working on deck in all weathers and seasons, or sleeping as they can often be on deck for twelve to eighteen hours at a stretch. For most this is the only working life they have ever known about. Often they are the sons of trawlermen, with cousins and uncles also in the industry. From childhood they will have seen them disappear to sea for three weeks at a time and return with good pay packets. Some of the school chums will also have gone off to sea. For those that do not have the opportunity to go on from school to university then this is the natural progression from school for those on Hessle Road. At the age of fifteen or sixteen they want to be seen as equals among their peers and to have the money to flash about that a trawlerman can have when he comes back from a trip.

  There are no recreational facilities on board other than playing cards or reading their western paperbacks and old newspapers. They all buy their tobacco from the bonded store on board. They all roll their own ciggies and have their own baccy pouches and matches. Most seem to stick at the job for the money but one of the spare hands, Colin, had given it up and had gone farming with an uncle for over a year. However, he found that working out in the fields on his own did not suit him and he missed his pals and the camaraderie of mess deck life on the trawlers and he soon found that the sea was dragging him back. Also, the money was better at sea than as a farm labourer. Once someone gets so far up the promotion ladder to, say, a bosun or a mate, then they feel they are past the point of no return and are too old to start again on the shore. Also they are now earning better money than they could ashore and so they tend to carry on to the end.

  The noises and calls of trawling fills the days and nights. The first call is
to ‘Knock out the warps.’ This action releases the two towing warps from a block on the starboard side aft near the after gallows which holds the two warps together while towing and they must be freed from that to allow the net to be hauled in. The steam winch hisses as it begins heaving in another haul, the trawl warp creaking and cracking under the strain as it winds itself onto the winch drum and remorselessly pulls the big trawl net back to the surface. The ship is brought round so the wind blows onto her starboard side and she drifts away from the net and does not drift over the top of it. The yells of the men as the trawl doors, which weigh over a ton each, come up from the deep and crash and bang hard against the side of the ship, then as they clear the side they shudder as they reach the top of the gallows. They then swing and bang until the seamen get chains round them to secure them. Then the foot rope, with its spherical bobbins and rollers, clatters over the side and onto the deck. The head rope, with its floats, follows and then the rest of the trawl is hauled up and heaved over the side. The cod end floats to the surface with the air in the fish and bobs about in the sea as the gulls scream and descend onto it fighting and shrieking to tear bits of fish from the net. The mate calls for the cod end to be lifted by the derrick and swung over the deck. He ducks beneath the bulging net as the water rushes out of it and he releases the cod end knot at the end of the net which stops the fish going straight through the whole net. Fish are sticking out of every mesh. The mate grapples with the cod end knot, then with a ‘whoosh’, the catch empties in a slithering, silvery rush into the wooden pounds accompanied perhaps by a cheer from the men if it is a good haul.