Seven-Tenths (25 page)

Modern commercial fishing is a strange, hybrid profession. It affects to be part of the hunting tradition while thinking like a form of agribusiness. It really resembles neither. There is no element of true hunting left in it since the prey is detected by electronic fish-finders. At most there is a certain amount of searching to be done in areas where experience suggests it may be worthwhile looking. Nor is it like agriculture, since no farmer ever reaped a harvest without sowing so much as a grain. Only gatherers do that.

There is nothing suggestive of nomadism about the crew of the
Garefowl
which musters at the wharf in Fraserburgh harbour, Scotland, early one morning. It is 2 am in April with a northeasterly wind shivering the lights in the black harbour water. There are six of us. Two have arrived in cars while the rest, like the skipper and myself, have walked out of the warmth of solid stone houses trailing plumes of breath. The town is still. Yet there is a certain alertness about the closed doors and windows, as if they were quite used to opening and shutting behind the menfolk at all hours of day and night, ready to show anxious faces or disgorge rescuers at the firing of a rocket. Donald and I have walked past a huge stack of empty fish boxes, blue plastic crates designed to hold ten or more stones of fish. I thought of Honolulu harbour with its coffins, but the chill black air blowing down from beyond Norway belongs to a planet which does not contain anything as frivolous as tropics or Hawaiian languors. Fraserburgh is a typical fishing community and the
Garefowl
a typical small trawler, high-prowed, blunt, a mere 56 feet long. There is a lot of wood in her. She is quite unlike the high-tech monsters moored elsewhere in the port, as much factories as ships and bristling with arrays of aerials, antennae, DF loops and radomes.

Donald takes us out quite fast through a maze of high stone jetties and harbour walls. Because of the upward-tilting bows there is very little forward vision. Grey, weed-streaked blocks of stone slide past a few feet away, then a white lighthouse, and we are heading for a place where we ‘might pick up a few haddock’. This is a good three hours’ sailing, but as we may be out for three or more days there is no great hurry. In the intervening time Donald tells me his woes. He sits on a chair with his feet propped on the boss of the wheel. From time to time he glances up at the illuminated compass set flat in the wheelhouse ceiling and twiddles the spokes with one foot. To his left glow two screens: the radar and the brightly coloured display of a Koden fish-finder. Directly before him are a Decca Navigator and Track Plotter.

‘Whatever we find,’ he says, ‘you’ll have a ringside seat at a calamity. If we catch a lot, ten to one we’ll be discarding most of it as undersized. If we catch nothing it’ll only go to show. They’re a desert, these waters. A desert. You’ll see.’

Conventional wisdom expresses the problem as too many boats chasing too few fish. Indeed, reducing the number of fishing boats in the North Sea, even if it means governments having to buy them out (‘decommissioning’) is supposed to be one of the main objectives in Brussels. Immensely complex bureaucratic yardsticks are variously applied: tonnages of boat, horsepowers of engine (expressed as kilowatts, however), the numbers of licences issued for boat owners to catch ‘pressure stocks’ (the most threatened species). These aside, the mass of regulations governing every other aspect of fishing is a bureaucrat’s dream. Those prescribing net mesh sizes draw bleak snorts from Donald, while a new mandatory eight-day tie-up period causes an outburst.

‘What the hell is a small trawlerman like myself supposed to do? Last month I was at sea five days. How can I make a living like that? I won’t work weekends, why should I? My father told me on his deathbed that if ever I worked on Sunday I would have nothing but grief and die poor, and I believe him. So that’s eight days gone out of the month. Then these new EU regulations mean I have to go down to the Fisheries Officer and give him twelve hours’ notice of when I
want to take my tie-up. That means your boat is tied up in the harbour for eight consecutive days, excluding weekends. How can any man reckon in advance when to take his eight days? It depends on the weather, doesn’t it? Or repairs. So as it happened the weather was awesome as soon as my tie-up ended. Out of the sixteen days I
might
have fished last month, I could only get out on five. Probably we’d all of us accept eight days off a month, even ten, provided we could pick and choose and didn’t have to take them all in a block. It’s killing the industry and driving us to crime.’

I imagine bootleg whisky or drug running and he is angry that I am taking what he says too lightly. He thrusts a recent copy of
Fishing News
at me, then snatches it back at once and begins to read from it by the light of the various screens.

‘And this is by the editor himself, mind,’ he says. ‘“It’s impossible for any skipper with a boat over 80 feet to stay viable now without breaking at least one of the three main rules – misreporting, using a smaller mesh or making illegal landings. Impossible on the quotas we have now. We’re being forced to be criminals.”
*
Crazy, you see. Any night you can go down the port in Fraserburgh and Peterhead and watch boats illegally landing catches way over the quota straight into lorries. You can wager there’s never an FO there. I don’t know where they all go to. They just vanish at the right moment.’

Having reached the grounds Donald loses way to shoot the net. By the light of the stern spotlamps it flows overboard, followed by a series of plastic floats the size of skulls. The two trawl doors are also swung into the sea, heavy iron rectangles whose drag in the water will keep the mouth of the trawl open. Soon it is all at 60 fathoms, the speed increases to 4 knots and there is nothing to be seen but the twin two cables thrumming the length of the boat from the winch for’ard and out into the darkness astern.

There will be little to do for the next four hours. Ordinarily the men would crawl into the wooden hutches down below to sleep or read, but nobody is tired yet. Dawn is only an hour or two away. Tea is brewed and the wheelhouse fills with men who have sailed with
each other for years, have known each other since childhood. Two of them grew up in the same street as the murderer and their contemporary, Dennis Nilsen.
*
It is like sailing in the company of great auks, an extinct species. They are rationally angry at the botched and muddled decisions by successive governments and the EU; underneath is a more passive note of sadness that their livelihood is coming to an end and with it the long traditions of an ancient community.

‘There’s still a mess of money to be made out here,’ points out Graham. ‘You’ve seen all the new housing outside Fraserburgh? All owned by fishermen, if you can call them that. Some are little better than boat drivers. They know nothing about the sea but ten years ago they liked the look of all those grants London and Brussels were handing out like blank cheques, so they ordered up boats costing millions and then fish prices doubled twice over and they got rich. Mind you, they’re still paying off for those boats and all that flashy tackle. But they think in far bigger terms than men like us can. With that gear they’re landing £50,000 worth of fish at the end of a week’s trip, having broken every law in the book. They’ve rigged the nets so the diamond mesh is squeezed practically shut. They might have put blinders on into the bargain – that’s another net covering the first. Or if they’d had a governor on their engines to de-rate the horsepower they’ll have broken the seal half an hour outside Fraserburgh. No problem. They know how to put a lead seal back on so the fisheries inspectors can never tell. Then they’ll probably land their catch illegally. It’s a joke, ken? And if they’re caught, what’s a £5,000 maximum fine to them? It would put us out of business, but not them. Some of those families run three or four boats.’

‘We’re not saints,’ Donald puts in. ‘Don’t think we never bend the rules ourselves now and then. We have to, otherwise we’d starve. There’s nothing left out here for us small folk. It’s all been swept clean. Winnie Ewing was right: the stupidest thing we ever did was give up our 200-mile limit around Scotland. Now we’ve got every Tom, Dick and Harry hoovering up fish as if there’s no tomorrow. Which there won’t be. We’ve already got non-EU members out here.’

‘It’s not only the numbers,’ says Graham, ‘it’s the technology. Progress is killing the fishing industry. Nowadays you can spot a sardine at 20 miles, shoot your net to almost any depth, sweep the sea bare. And nobody has the will to stop it. Take mesh size as a single example. We’re restricted to a 90-millimetre mesh. That’s fine. We’ve tried all sorts of sizes and combinations in the past and we’ve proved you can keep fish stocks up if you use a 90-mill. diamond with an 80-mill. square panel. Imagine your trawl net, right? Like a great sock. It’s all 90-mill. diamond except for a strip around the top of the ankle. That’s 80-mill. square. Square mesh doesn’t close up when you put a tension on it. Now, when your fish see the headline going overhead they’re already in the mouth of the net. Their reaction is to swim upwards. If there’s a square-mesh panel the small ones escape. They swim right through it while the bigger ones get swept on down to the codend. It’s called a codend but it’s got nothing to do with cod, ken? It means a sort of bag.’

‘As in codpiece?’

Graham says he doesn’t know about that. ‘Anyhow, we have to use 90-mill. diamond although they’re now talking about putting it up to 110, which will catch bugger all. If they do that we’re out of business overnight. They’re always talking about conservation. Conservation this and conservation that. Well, we’ve proved you can fish with 90-mill. and still have conservation. So guess what they’ve just told the prawners they can use?
Seventy
mill. and
two
nets per boat.’

‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ Donald asks the rev. counter. The Kelvin diesel below vibrates reassuringly and jars the surface of his tea into a shimmer of concentric rings. ‘It’s the truth what Graham’s saying. Two 70-mill. nets. Of course you need a smaller mesh to catch prawns, but since they’re allowed to land a percentage of fish together with the
prawns they just shoot their nets anywhere and take up every last tiddler. So much for conservation. And how is it conservation to allow the Danes to trawl for sand eels off Lerwick? They’re only ground up for fish meal and animal food. Thousands of tons of them, just to feed dogs and throw on the fields. You’re not going to tell me it doesn’t have an effect. There are half the seabirds here compared with a few years back. They lived on sand eels, you ken. It’s down to greed, simple as that. Short-term profits today and hang tomorrow. What we’ve got up here is an entire industry in a mad scramble to cut its own throat.’

A new sun below the horizon is beginning to disclose a haggard sea. As the dawn light strengthens, the surface takes on rumplings like a sheet of thin metal being shaken soundlessly. Out of pinkish, opalescent air the first fulmars arrive as if they knew the
Garefowl
would soon be hauling up. Shortly afterwards she is hove to and wallowing in the choppy swell. The winch growls and wet hawsers begin sighing through sheaves, spraying drops of water. After some minutes the skulls bob up far astern and the cloud of fulmars circles and lands, coming ever closer. The heavy doors come up and are secured outboard, one on either side of the stern. They are freezing cold to the touch, black except along their bottom edges where they have been freshly scratched and polished by dragging along the seabed for four hours. Their cracks and joins are caulked with mud.

Hauling up is an immemorial business. The nets and skills and patience have all been deployed and now it is time to find out how well one’s family will live for the next few days. Countless representations of the Sea of Galilee underwrite this moment: images of straining arms and bulging nets, of the glittering harvest of the deep. Nowadays powerful winches do most of the work, but there is still a fair amount of manhandling, of lumps of machinery with great inertia swinging dangerously while men dodge around the edge of the stern above a frigid sea. When the codend is finally hauled out, the picture is suddenly not at all immemorial but dismally contemporary. A soft sack of fish appears, about the size of a bundle of hotel laundry and festooned with rubbish. The heads of flatfish stick out at all angles, eyes bulging with pressure, and from them and between
them hang rags of plastic, bin liners, torn freezer packs, lengths of electric cable, flattened orange juice containers. The brutal meeting of still-flapping bodies with machinery is contemporary, too. As the codend is hauled free of the water the fish caught further up the net are already being minced as they are dragged over the hydraulic pulley high above the stern. Their shredded bodies drop into the sea to be pounced on by gannets.

The full squalor of the net’s contents is not revealed until the codend is swung inboard and emptied into a wooden sty. Into this mass of bodies smeared with grey North Sea silt wade men in wellingtons, crunching and kicking among the dying, sorting out the unwanted with their feet: paint tins, a length of rusty chain, a battered steel drum, a work gauntlet, two beer bottles encrusted with growths, lumps of torn starfish, clods of jelly, the silvery sack of vacuum-packed coffee with the name of a Hamburg supermarket still legible. The rubbish of a thousand fishing boats and oil rigs and supply vessels is daily fished up, winnowed out and thrown straight back into the sea, building up on the bottom into an ever more concentrated and handpicked stratum of garbage.

There is about the architecture and layout of certain new housing estates on the edges of provincial towns something which makes it easy to guess they have been built on landfill over what, until a year or two ago, was the municipal tip. A clutch of abandoned gravel pits has been steadily filled with a million soup tins, dead refrigerators, burst sofas, outdated phone books and skiploads of dustbin contents. For years it was picked over by flocks of seagulls following a lone bulldozer as it levelled the heaps of rubbish. Finally, it was tamped down and topped off with a layer of soil from an excavation elsewhere in the county, and streets and houses and lawns were planted over the landscaped charnel. One imagines the street lamps as long hollow spikes driven deep into the festering seam to flare off the methane. It is a familiar inland prospect at the blurred borderland between the suburban and the subrural where the terrain is anything but pristine.