by Nick Fisher
Matty still doesn’t have an answer. And has no idea how to counter the question. Definitely he knows he doesn’t want to get into explanations about crab pots and baseball bats. So instead he just stares back. Saying nothing. Desperately trying to find the right words.
“He came to me, see…” says Kelvin. “‘Cause he knows I’d know the right man to go and–”
“Go away,” Max says to Kelvin, quietly. Kelvin doesn’t move. “He wanted to find just the right…”
“Am I talking to you?” Max asks Kelvin.
“No,” says Kelvin.
“Then go away. And don’t say another word.”
Kelvin pauses, but not for long. Then he walks to the edge of the pavement, beside the undertakers and watches Matty and Max from a safe distance. Kelvin crossing his arms and leaning against the wall like he’s in a huff.
Max now leaning close towards Matty, and saying, “I don’t know you. I don’t know where you’re from. You come into my shop. You pull out a piece of hashish in front of my CCTV camera and you talk about me buying your gear. What kind of crap is that?”
“CCTV?” says Matty. Unable to keep the wobble out of his voice.
“Camera behind the counter. Not exactly hidden,” says Max the Sikh. “Round thing with a little red light on top.”
“We were… on CCTV?”
“I’m a registered pawn broker. Says so on the window in big gold letters. Is a legal requirement that I have constant surveillance of all transactions.”
“Shit,” says Matty. Couldn’t help himself.
“Where you from?”
“Weymouth,” says Matty, the word out of his mouth before his brain even knew it was coming. Just like that. One question. One word. Already he’s shooting himself in the foot.
“You don’t have CCTV in Weymouth yet?” says Max.
“Yeah, ‘course. All over the…” Matty’s ragged brain realising too late this wasn’t a question that needed an answer.
“You don’t walk into a shop… A man’s place of business. Licensed place of business. And start talking about this stuff. It’s basic common sense.”
“I just thought… you know, Kelvin said you…”
“That Kelvin,” Max points over his shoulder to where Kelvin is leaning against the undertaker’s wall, “Is a crack-head. I don’t do business with anyone smokes the pipe. I’ll buy stuff off them, if there’s profit in it. But I don’t do business.” He looked at Matty, with piercing eye. “You smoke the pipe?”
Matty shakes his head. Which of course is a lie. Matty’d smoked a fair few rocks in his time, but, to be fair, it wasn’t his drug of choice. Plenty of other highs he’d choose instead.
“Good,” says Max. “Because if you’ve got some more of this, and we can agree on some prices, we just might be able to do some business.” Max takes a set of car keys out of his pocket and presses the button in the centre of the black fob. A black BMW Seven Series parked three spaces away from the hearse beeps, as its four indicator lights flash simultaneously.
“We can talk in my car,” says Max, walking towards the Bimmer. Matty follows, already feeling much better just at the sight of the sleek black leather upholstery.
It wasn’t until much later, when he’s sitting on the train heading back to Weymouth, looking out at dusk to green fields dotted with black and white cows, that it dawned on him. The thought creeping up. Chilling. Unsettling. Crawling like a damp slug down his spine. The thought messing up his deep warm vodka buzz.
The thought that he’d just arranged the biggest drug deal of his entire life – in a car park.
If you want to catch a crab in a pot, you have a choice between two basic types of trap: inkwell or parlour. Inkwell pots, also known as ‘creels’ are an old fashioned, traditional style of pot. And not surprisingly, they look like an inkwell: a stubby cylinder with a hole in the top. Couple of generations back, potters would make all their own pots. Constructing them and repairing them, when weather was too harsh to go to sea and work their gear. Back then, they’d use bent willow to make the staves, and tar-greased rope to hold them together. After the war, when steel was cheap again, creels were made with steel ribs and staves, usually fashioned from concrete reinforcing rods bent, hammered and welded into shape.
When rubber got cheap and every breaker’s yard in the land was filled with piles of part-worn tyres, crab fishermen would use the tyres, by slicing them apart with short-bladed gutting knives. They’d slice the tyres into inch-wide strips, to weave around the bottom edge of creels, to bind the arc-welded structure together and create a thick rubber foot for them to sit on. The tyre rubber also reducing the rate the steel would rust away, and making the whole thing about as bio-degradable and eco-friendly as a Russian nuclear sub.
Fishermen, like farmers, used to be multi-skilled. They could weld and cut, do basic carpentry and boat building. They were competent motor mechanics, could sew sails, rig ropes, splice cables, even mend and make nets. Not anymore. Like the farmer is now reduced to sitting in his multifunction tractor, or programming his computerised milking parlour, so most big scale commercial fishermen are reduced to sitting in a fully-automated wheelhouse checking satellite and computer-generated data, pressing the odd button to activate some motorised winch.
When Matty’s dad started fishing, most men worked off wooden boats, with little single cylinder diesel engines and a sheet of square-rigged sail to help the old boats lie broadsides to the tide when hauling pots. The boats were wooden. So they would rot. So they needed to be maintained, or else they would sink.
And these vessels were fragile; just a careful selection of cut, shaped wooden planks held together with glue and nails. They needed to be treated with respect. They had limitations. You couldn’t take them out and pound them day-long against violent rib-cracking storm-induced seas, or they would quickly fall apart, and send their careless owners spiralling down to their watery graves.
Because the boats were basic and the engines were so slow, no one could go fishing when the weather was shitty. Consequently the fishing days were fewer, so fishing pressure on the fish stocks was much lower, catch rates were smaller and therefore the amount of fish and crabs left in the sea was far greater.
Fibreglass fucked up the fish. Fibreglass and cheap diesel.
The 1960s witnessed an orgy of fibreglass manufacture. Everything that could once only be made in wood or steel could now be made in fibreglass. All around the coast, small entrepreneurial boat builders would make a detailed mould of their most popular and successful clinker-built wooden fishing boat, and set about layering sheets of fabulous new age fibreglass into their mould. Few layers later and out would pop a shiny new fibreglass hull. It was like shucking warm mince pies from a greased baking tin.
Wood became the boat-building equivalent of vinyl records, exclusively the territory of fanatics and freaks.
An unbreakable, nigh-on unsinkable fibreglass hull, shackled to a huge many-cylindered fuck-off motor, satiated with an endless supply of government-subsidised cheap red diesel, seriously shrunk the size of the seas. Boats and fishermen who had never previously strayed outside a six-mile radius of their home port, were unleashed upon the seas, churning twin prop wakes behind them as they harnessed the full force of post-war technology to help them empty the oceans of fish.
Nobody makes their own inkwell pots anymore. Not out of steel rods and sliced up tyres, and definitely not out of willow and tarred string. In fact, no one really uses inkwells anymore. Not seriously. A few old boys might have a shed full of inkwells that they’ve kept going for the last 20-odd years and are determined to work with until they die or until they sell their valuable crabbing-licence and catch quota to a broker – whichever comes first.
Mostly inkwells are a thing of the past. Parlour pots are what most serious crabbers use. Flat-bottomed dome-roofed cylinders with an entrance lobby leading to a ‘parlour’. A place of no return. A room with no escape route where bait-engorged crabs and lobste
rs go to await their fate at the calloused hands of the pot-hauling crabber.
Inshore commercial potters used to make their own parlour pots too; constructing frames out of scrap steel, plumbing pipes and some lashings made of sliced-up tyres and inner tubes, all joined together with panels of nylon netting. Not anymore. No fisherman has time to make pots now, because every day he’s a runner in the race to grab the lion’s share of what little life is left scuttling nervously across the seabed.
Nobody makes pots anymore, parlours or inkwells, because the Chinese do. The Chinese make pots. Not great pots. Not lifetime-of-loyal-service pots. Actually not even very good pots. But they do make cheap pots. Cheap enough to spray liberally across the seabed in the hope that they’ll earn their keep, before they quickly rust and rot away.
From Dover to Devonport, all along the floor of the English Channel, thousands of little rusty-staved boxes of Chinese low-grade steel are crumbling and corroding to a pile of wet dust. The nasty cheap steel is melting away to leave behind screeds of nylon and rubber fixings that will tangle and roll around the seabed for the next thousand years or more.
Apart from inkwells and parlours, there is one more pot in common use amongst crabbers. The keeper pot. It isn’t a hunting pot. It’s not a pot shot out on rough ground to trap wild creatures of the deep. It is a prison pot. A pot of emasculating incarceration, designed to hold the already captured crabs in a state of rendition, awaiting the next phase of their certain death.
The keeper pot is a necessary evil. A tool of imprisonment that ensures the inmates can be kept alive until just the right time for them to die.
Keeper pots are a busy crabber’s saving grace. His thinking space. His buffer to cushion the spine-jarring price hikes and jolts of the rollercoaster commercial crab market. Keeper pots are a sanctuary, a time-out from the daily grind of the catch and sell, where a clever crabber can park his haul, in a strategic bid to second guess the vagaries of consumer demand versus weather patterns, versus the good or bad fortunes of other crab men.
The scheming two-faced bitch that is the Lady Luck of crab men can be very cruel, very often. You might have had the best day’s hauling of your adult life, pulling up big beautiful cock crabs, with virgin white flesh and claws the size of a baby’s arm, since the tide first swung to the ebb and the sun first poked its baldy head above the flat horizon. You might have emptied hundreds of pots filled with crabs as big as badgers. Stashing them below deck, in your seawater-fed live well. Indeed, your on board vivarium may be rammed to the rim with top grade crustaceans. And yet, if every other fucker with a crab pot and a hauling jib has had a Blue Ribbon bonanza day too, then today’s unit price of your hard-earned edible brown crab is going to be shite.
So, what are you going to do? Sell your prime load for peanuts, just because today the crab market’s swamped? You can’t hold it in your live well for more than a night, because you’ve got to be out hauling more gear again before dawn, and of course you’ll need the space for more crabs.
You can’t stash your haul of crabs on land, because they’ll die without fresh seawater, and then they’ll be worth less than the blood sucking fish merchant’s offering you today. If they’re dead, they’re worth nothing. Therefore, you are basically bum-fucked over a fish barrel.
Unless… unless you are one of those well-organised crab potters who has already bought, built, borrowed or stolen himself a little armoury of keeper pots.
A keeper pot is a cage. Anything from the size of a dog kennel to a small caravan, depending on the grunt of your hauling winch. A cage into which you load your catch and then drop back down to the seabed, where it can sit, in naturally-oxygenated water with the crabs safely locked inside. Waiting until the hopefully not-too-distant day when the market is once again crying out for good quality crab, and yet none of the rest of the crab fleet is landing diddly.
No one else is landing, either because the weather’s turned so bad no boat is able to get out of the bay. Or else because the fishing’s just switched right off and the crab aren’t feeding. If that happens, the crabs won’t give a monkey’s nut what sort of bait you’ve loaded your pots with, because they’re just not interested. They’re not climbing into any lobby, any entrance, any parlour, inkwell or creel, they’re simply not playing. When these days do occur, a crab fishermen with a keeper pot, already rammed full of big brown edibles, is a wise and happy man.
By and large crabs are pretty basic, hungry, sex-obsessed mechanical creatures, who go from day to day, and season to season, and year to year, fucking, fighting and eating. Not too much interrupts the flow of their primal needs and wants, but when it does, they can go weird for weeks.
Sex and shell-moulting can throw them off the hunger for food for long periods at a stretch, which makes them impossible to catch in baited pots.
Storms don’t bother crabs. If the seabed gets too rough in shallow waters, they’ll go deeper. They’ll just walk to where it’s calm. Apart from sex and the business of changing their shell at least once a year, the thing that really does jam a spanner in their mandible, is algae.
An algal bloom is a period when the algae that naturally floats around within seawater is triggered to massively and outrageously reproduce. It can happen in the summer when sea temperatures are high, and it also happens nearly every spring, when the ‘May water’ arrives. May water is a milky-green opaque colouring to the normally clear or blue sea, which is caused by the exponential and dramatic reproduction of algae in inshore waters. This is caused by a sudden increase of sunshine, day length and the arrival of warm currents flowing in from the Atlantic.
An algal bloom is like a gas cloud. It robs the sea of oxygen. It affects visibility and so makes hunting harder. But most of all it creates a miasma of gloomy oxygen-starved suffocation, which puts most sea life off their food, sometimes for a month or more.
When the fish and crabs are off the feed and boats steam home with near-empty live well tanks, that is the perfect time to have a battery of keeper pots, ready to unleash your carefully stored crabs on a crustacean-starved fish market.
Keeper pots are cruel, sad places, where inmate crabs need to be neutralised in order that they can be safely kept incarcerated together, imprisoned in one big communal cell. And so, to minimise fatalities, big crabs will have a tendon in their crushing claws cut through with a gutting knife, rendering the once-fearsome crushing mechanism useless. Their vice-like death grip now reduced to a spastic hug. They can’t rip or tear or crush or crunch, so they can’t really feed themselves. They can’t even do battle with their natural crab enemies, other than by hugging each other with embarrassing impotent embraces.
Keeper pots are a great idea if you’re a canny crabber, but they’re a rare type of godless purgatory if you’re a crab.
For all their market-playing savvy, keeper pots do have one big weakness, and one real nemesis: the recreational weekend diver.
Commercial crabbers hate divers. And most of all they hate dive clubs. Those cluster-like organisations of hobby divers come from far off landlocked towns, like Coventry and Stroud, Birmingham and Stoke. Towns where men and women who have invested heavily in neoprene wet suits and nitrox tanks, all club together to organise diving trips to famous dive sites around the coast.
The best of these sites are found amongst the wrecks and reefs and sandbanks of Weymouth Bay.
Commercial crabbers hate hobby divers and their well-organised beer-drinking, high-fiving, YouTube-posting, car bumper sticker club mentality. But most of all, commercial crabbers hate the local dive boats and their treacherous back-stabbing skippers.
Dive boats are local boats, licensed to a harbour, and run specifically for the purpose of taking groups of divers, normally bound together in individual clubs, out to dive on specific local sites of varying degrees of difficulty and interest.
These boats were once commercial fishing boats. These skippers were once commercial fishing skippers, or else the sons of commercial skippers; me
n who once made their honourable and traditional livelihood, hunting for fish and crabs and lobsters, to catch and sell.
And yet these men betrayed their heritage, gave up the work of hunting and killing fish, sold their commercial fish-catching licences and used the money to buy big fast new diving boats. So now these men no longer sully their once-noble calloused hands with the real work of fishing; catching and killing. Instead, they take groups of portly office workers lined with sporty neoprene out to sea, to play beneath the waves.
They have given up the real job of fishing to toy with out-of-towners and their air-filled tanks.
And, of course, now it transpires all these local dive skippers have much bigger and better and faster boats than the commercial fishing boys. They have bigger and better trucks. More holidays. More friends. More money. More free time. More freedom from the castrating grip of fish merchants. More confidence. More people skills. They have websites and chat rooms. They have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. They have online videos of their bright yellow dive boats christened with such fucking annoying names as Skin Deep or Pressure Seeker.
And so, for very good reason, commercial crabbers now hate dive boats and dive skippers. They hate them because they feel a mixture of jealousy and betrayal, but above and beyond these reasons, commercial crabbers hate the divers that these boats and skippers ferry around with them. They hate the divers, because it is these divers that have been known to commit the most heinous of all sea-based crimes: they fuck with keeper pots.
Recreational divers, who have no understanding of the real work of commercial fishermen, regard keeper pots as cruel inhuman inventions. And, if they happen upon one during their nature-loving recreational dive, they’ll often open and pin back the door of the offensive keeper pot, to let what might be a ton or more of incarcerated crab run free.
So, commercial crabbers hate hobby divers. And hobby divers in turn hate all commercial fishermen. Divers want to come and play in the very same places where commercial fishermen go to work. The reefs and rocks and wrecks and sandbanks that are the fish-holding places where netsmen and crabbers ply their gear are exactly the same underwater features where hobby divers want to pursue their hobby.
