We all have our callings.

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You would think that with my love of the sea I would have settled down in a little cottage overlooking it so I could spend my retirement gazing out forlornly and recall my adventures to any willing ear that happened to pass by.
Not so, I live ten miles from the sea on the edge of a little village next to a pine forest, which provides me with beautiful scenery as I watch the landscape change with the seasons.
Not quite the thrilling life I was used to but it provides me with the peace and tranquility, (without the distraction of the sea) I need to write my tales of adventure to any willing eye that cares to log into my blog, and to write at my leisure the book I promised myself I would write, if only for my own satisfaction.
Any other interest would just be a bonus.

However back to the story.

Its at this time of year when the kids burn the grass, a thing most young ones do in their youth, but when I did it, it was in places where no damage could be done.
Here,in this village when they do it, forest fires can be started.
The shepherds or herds as they like to be called here are used to burning the old grass to bring forth new shoots for the spring lambs, (burning the mares) the mares being the thick tufts of grass resembling the tail of a horse that need to be thinned out, and that is supposed to be where the young ones are supposed to get the urge to do it, but I think it is just a natural thing young ones do never thinking of the consequences.

Anyway, last night the mares were set alight, and with a strong wind blowing the flames towards the forest it wasn't long before the fire tenders arrived to put them out.
It only took them twenty minutes but that twenty minutes saved what could have become a raging forest fire.

As I watched the fire engine pass my window on its return to the station, I recalled when I was a boy living next door to a fireman which might have encouraged me to become one when I grew up, especially when I was given the chance to ring the bell one hot Sunday afternoon when we passed the fire station and the doors were wide open.
I was only about seven years old and the family had been out for a stroll enjoying the sunshine after church when our neighbour spotted us walking past and invited us in for a look round, lifted me up into one of the tenders and pointed to the strap that was attached to the bell and told me to ring it.
Needing no second invitation I grabbed it and began thrusting it back and forth.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! The noise could be heard all over the town of Ayr, and the folk passing by thought the engines were ready to race out to a fire, but smiled when they saw it was only a little lad clanging the bell, the envy of any young boy.

Another time, our neighbour happened to have stopped by his house on the way back from a fire, and just by chance when he was leaving to return to the station, I was leaving my house to catch a bus to school.
"Going to school" he asked, "hop in and I'll give you a lift."
I had to be lifted up, too small to hop in, but I could see out of the window, and waved to some of my school chums who were heading for the bus, and after being dropped of at the school gates I was the talk of all the school, teachers and pupils alike being the envy of them all, having lived the dream of most young boys, whose ambition it was to become a fireman when they grew up.

Today the fire engines have changed dramatically with sirens replacing the bells,what was referred to as the fire engine is now called a tender,and now with females in the service, both the males and females are referred to as firefighters, but regardless of my experiences I never once wanted to go down that road.

My ambition was always to follow in my grandfathers profession and be a fisherman.

Having achieved that I never once regretted it, loving every storm, every beautiful sunset and sunrise, taking the good with the bad, living the dream I carried with me throughout my childhood, leaving the firefighters to fulfill their calling, and the teachers who envied me then, to ponder on what might have been had they followed their dream, but then again they are fulfilling their calling, albeit, maybe their second choice, but it wouldn't do if we all worked at the same occupation, as some of us are only meant to dream of what might have been, while carrying out some other form of work, which are all equally important, when it comes to keeping the wheels of life turning.

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Breaking the law.

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In the seventies so much herring was being caught thanks to new methods of fishing (mainly pair trawling and purse seine netting) with modern instruments in the wheelhouses that showed the skippers where the spots of herring were, how deep they were and gave images of their nets capturing the spot leaving no escape route for the fish.
This was a boom time in all methods of fishing with great prices being paid by foreign buyers coming from Europe and Russia, with Russian factory ships lying off the west coast for weeks salting and curing herring until they were full, then head back to Russia while another would take it's place.
Mackerel too were heavily fished in this way but never reached the same high prices as the herring.

So much fish was being caught that the powers that be decided to close the North sea to herring fishing for five years and the west coast for three.

This meant that even the seine netters like the "Wanderer" (the boat I worked on at the time) would have to dump any of that species if we happened to catch them.

Sometimes it was hard to escape spots of herring when fishing for white fish especially as the herring were not being fished for by the herring fleet, allowing them to multiply rapidly, which was the reason for closing the fishing in the first place, although there was no immediate signs of any scarcity of them.

During the time when the herring came into the Firth of Clyde to spawn all the fishing fleet from prawn trawlers to seine netters like us, could catch anything from ten to fifty boxes a day and were supposed to dump them back into the sea where, once being towed inside our nets for hours had no chance of survival, so instead of throwing them back to feed the seagulls and gannets we would land them on the quiet out of sight of the fishery officers who prowled the harbours during landing times.

One day we hauled our net to find it full of good sized herring, about eighty boxes in all, a good haul at the best of times, but the thought of throwing all that fish away at the cost of around a thousand pounds was too much to even consider so we kept it aboard and I boxes it in the forward part of the hold to try and conceal it.

We steamed away from them for an hour and shot our gear again hoping to catch white fish this time, but once again it came up with a good haul of Herring, so once again I boxed them forward in the hold and hid them behind empty boxes and some full boxes of white fish that had been caught earlier on in the trip.

We had a good catch of white fish aboard before the herring started interfering with our trip so with the hold almost full, albeit mostly with illegal fish we steamed for the harbour to land.

Sure enough the fishery officer was on the prowl, and much to our dismay jumped aboard our boat as soon as we were tied to the quay and asked to see what was in the hold.
Confident enough that the herring were concealed we opened the hatches and as I looked down onto the floor of the hold from the deck, all I could see running down, thick and white the length of the hold was milk (sperm) that was seeping from the male herring, a dead giveaway.

The fishery officer never mentioned it and climbed down the ladder behind me when I entered the hold in preparation to land.
As he looked aft where the bulk of the white fish were stacked, his back to the hidden herring, he remarked on the good catch we had and was pleased that no herring were among them, chatted for a short while then climbed back out again, and went ashore quite happy.
I scratched my head in amazement wondering how he never spotted the milk on the hold floor, or even asked to see the fish in the forward hold, and I still wonder to this day why we were not nabbed.
We landed the herring at night, straight on to a lorry when all was quiet, or supposed to be quiet anyway as ten to twelve boats were all waiting to do the same thing.
The buyers would purchase our fish and send lorries down at night when the fishery officers were off duty, load them up and whisk them away to their factories where they were prepared for their outlets the next day.
The herring were sold at a cheaper price than would have been had they been sold in the markets and bid for, but the rewards were greater for us, as all the money from our contraband was split evenly among the crew, tax free.
"Stoker" we called it, which was managed in some way every week but never in such abundance.

The fishery officers eventually became wise to our game and would patrol the harbour at night, making it more difficult for us, but we always found a way around it by landing at harbours that had no markets but enough room for a lorry to come alongside the quay where we lay and load our catches that way.

In recent years, boats who tried to flaunt the quota laws have been caught and given heavy fines, lucky to walk away with their fishing licences intact, licences that never existed in the seventies but now every boat has to have one, and log every fish that is caught.

All the fun has gone out of the job, and the Klondike days are gone, the fish are getting scarcer, and who knows if it was the illegal fish landed or not, all I know is that I had fun when I was at sea regardless of all the rules.

The adventure is still there, the storms still have to be contended with, and the fish will recover, as the fleet has been cut drastically, I only hope that there will still be a Scottish fleet to enjoy the bonanza when they return, and the European Union has not damaged it enough that only foreign boats are left and allowed to plunder our waters, and clean them up the way they ruined their own.

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Broadcasting and copyrights then and now.

Musicians (pop stars mainly) are complaining of lost revenue, due to their music being downloaded from the Internet, but copying music is nothing new, as pop songs were recorded onto tapes during radio broadcasts in my day.

To try and counteract these measures, Disc Jockeys were either told to talk over the start of the songs, and cut short the endings, or maybe it was the Disc Jockeys collaborating with the artists to safeguard their copyrights.

Either way it was a complete nuisance when we were recording the songs, but it never stopped us, and if you were sitting playing your tapes in the car with the window open, people walking past could never be sure if it was the radio or the tape deck that was playing the music if, on recording we never pressed the stop button before the DJs voices could be heard. It was all a matter of timing, and if you were willing to put up with the DJs voice, then it didn't really matter what was being said over the music as long as we had the main part of the song blaring for all to hear.

DJs still talk over the songs they play, but it wasn't always that way, so it's thanks to my generation that we still have to put up with their gibbering even though tape decks are almost a thing of the past.
I say almost, as I still copy some songs from the radio, and play the tapes on an old player I have at home, but I can no longer go to the beach, open a window and blast out the top ten from the comfort of my car on tapes I made up, as it only has a CD player, and although the car is only four years old, the said CD player is all but out of date already, before I even got round to making any discs.

The pop stars of today are facing the same problems as the stars of old, only this time the Internet does more damage, so I do sympathise with them, although they still make enough money to keep the wolves from the door, as did the stars of yesteryear.

I have no wish now, to copy in any way the songs that adorn the charts these days, as I think the old ones are the best, and I have already copied all of the the ones that I wanted.
There are a few good songs still coming from this generation but they are few and far between, so I'll leave all the copying to the younger ones, and let them worry about copyrights, but I am sure of one thing, no matter how many new ways of transmitting music comes along, and no matter how they try to safeguard it, someone will always come up with a way to overcome it.

Hopefully the new ways of broadcasting will provide us with a way of listening to the radio without all the needless banter over the music from the DJs, and we can go back to the days of old when you sat down to listen to the radio, and heard all of the songs that were played, then got the dedications for the next song from the more subdued DJs.

The shoals of cod.

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There was still a cold winters chill in the breeze that blew off the sea on this March afternoon as I strolled along my usual haunt at Ayr beach, bringing back memories of the cod fishing around the Ailsa Craig at this time of year.

Although there was a breeze blowing the sea was calm, and had been for weeks now, something that did not seem to happen during the cod fishing when I was at sea, as I remember vividly getting tossed about every day with lumps of sea crashing down around us as we gutted cod continuously from daylight to dark, our hands freezing from the icy blast that whipped up the waves.

It was always after a cold winter that the cod were at their thickest, and as this was the coldest winter we have had for years, I was wishing I could get down to the fishing grounds to see for myself if there was any cod left to catch, as a few years ago, the European Union put a stop to fishing for them during the spawning season to try to replenish the stocks that had seemingly depleted over the years.

The cod came into the Firth of Clyde every year at this time to spawn bringing boats from all the fishing ports around the coast of Scotland to cash in on this bonanza.
For around three weeks of March the cod were at their thickest, small catches appearing just before the main flood, and then again, after they returned to the deeper water, making the season last for about six weeks in all.

Each night Ayr harbour was full of fishing boats waiting to squeeze into a space at the quay to unload their catches to the eager buyers who, although the cod was plentiful, would try to out bid each other to acquire the green gold that could make or break their year, also for the fishermen whose livelihood depended on the shoals, and getting the best prices possible for their fish.

It is hard to believe that these shoals do not come here anymore, because even though they took a slaughtering, year after year they would return in greater numbers to go through the process all over again, until one year the numbers started to decline.

The winters had been getting warmer, and we had started to catch the cod in the deeper waters where they returned to after spawning, but we always believed that there were plenty more fish in the sea, so we carried on regardless, after all we were there to make money and that was what we were doing.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we began to catch cod with both male and female reproductive organs inside them, and I often wondered if that was natures way of making sure they survived.

The grounds around the Ailsa Craig where these cod used to shoal, have not been fished for some time now, and given the conditions of this winter I would love to be able to have a couple of experimental hauls just to see if the warmer winters was one of the reasons the cod started to dwindle, or if it was the damage caused by us that depleted the stocks so much so that there came a point of no return.



















Having kept all my hunting instincts even though I left the fishing years ago, I still think there are plenty fish in the sea, and that the cod found another place to spawn during the warmer winters, and now that we have had a cold spell just at the right time, my instincts when I walked along Ayr beach yesterday with the chilly breeze hitting my face told me the cod were there.

Whether it was just the smell of the cold sea air bringing back memories of the good old days, or my instinct I'll never know, because I'll never get to prove it one way or the other thanks to the laws of the European Union, which in this case might be good or bad. Who knows?

The yearning for these days, and their memories will never leave me, and no matter how many walks I take on a cold March day, this year or in years to come, I will be down at the fishing grounds around the "Craig" catching large hauls of cod, and there is nothing the European Union can do about that.

A painful reminder.

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One day when we were fishing off the lighthouse that serves the south eastern corner of Arran, warning the many ships on passage to, or from the Clyde ports of the danger from the island "Pladda" which lies close to the shipping lane, we were contacted over the radio by the captain of a passing coaster who wondered if he could get some fish in return for some whisky.

These ships are called coasters because their routes mainly take them around the coast of Britain, sometimes travelling to European ports, but never venturing too far afield, across large oceans, although they are big enough to do so.

This particular ship towered above our small fishing vessel, but kept a safe distance from us even though the sea was calm, while he waited until our haul of fish was aboard.
The fish we were catching that day consisted mainly of whiting, with a few boxes of large cod and the odd plaice through them, which was all adding up to a good days work.

It would have been about mid-day when this event took place, giving us a welcome break from our routine of constantly shooting, hauling and clearing up one lot of fish just before the next lot came aboard, so when the exchange of whisky for some fish came, the offer was hard to refuse. Not that it would have been refused at any other time, as I am sure you know.


Once the net was safely aboard we edged as close as we could to the waiting vessel, keeping just enough distance between us to allow their crew to lower a rope down to us where we had a basket of mixed fish waiting for the rope to be tied to then hoisted up, emptied, and returned with the whisky.

Sure enough when the basket was lowered back down to us there was three bottles of a good malt whisky (Ballantine's) in payment for our fish.

Great whisky! We all adjourned to the galley where we all indulged in half a mug of this amber nectar before carrying on with the rest of the days fishing.

AH! It was a good dram, heating the cockles of our hearts, putting a glow on our cheeks and giving us an energy boost to continue. (I'll call it that anyway.)

As soon as I was back on deck I delved my hands in among the fish to pull out any large cod and put them into separate boxes from the smaller fish to give us a better idea of how much quality fish we had.

Just as I came across a big cod, I felt a sharp jag at the tip of my middle finger on my right hand, just under the nail, but thinking nothing of it I carried on, as quite often we would get jags from the barbs that grew on some of the species we caught, like the gurnard.

Our hand were always leaking blood from somewhere, between cuts from our knives, or scrapes and punctures from the defensive armour of fish like the gurnard who had spikes coming from various parts of it's body, and spikes that I had often experienced jagging into me.

When the working day came to an end and my hands began to dry out I could still feel the niggle from the jag I received, and on examination I could see a black dot under my skin which meant the spike had broken off, so I tried to squeeze it out but to no avail.

Usualy this does the trick, but as half a day had gone past the skin had started to cover over the wound, trapping the spike under my skin, so my next move was to cut around the spike and try to squeeze the, by now very sore and irritating intruder in my fingertip.

Nothing worked, the spike seemed to go deeper instead of coming to the surface, so I gave up and turned in for a good nights sleep, but that too was disturbed by the throbbing of my finger, and even after getting up during the night to take some pain killers I still could find no comfort from the pain.

I worked all the next day with it, and as the day went on the pain seemed to ease, probably due to the coldness of the water my hands were constantly in, then we were off ashore to land our catch, and as my hands dried out the pain returned with a vengeance.

After we landed and everything was ready for the next trip, I took myself up to the outpatients department at the local County Hospital where my finger was x-rayed only to be told that the x-ray showed nothing, and there was nothing they could do, but the throbbing in my finger told me otherwise.

It was a week later, at the end of the next trip, after getting little sleep through the pain from such a small spike, that I visited my own doctor, who on examining the source of my pain decided to freeze the whole finger and cut open the tip with a small scalpel.

By this stage I would have let him operate without freezing my finger, but he insisted, and after three injections he decided that my finger was numb enough to begin.

He started with small slices, working his way in, creating as neat a hole as I have ever seen, until I jumped, withdrawing my finger from his grasp as I felt the scalpel touch something.

The doctor poked away with a needle for a couple of seconds at the spot that had made me jump, then withdrawing it showed me the offending spike.
It was barely visible on the tip of the needle, but there it was, the smallest thing you could imagine, but none the less had caused me no amount of pain.

As it turned out, the small tip of the spike had lodged itself beside a nerve in my finger, which had caused the throbbing pain, and the relief was immediate as soon as the offending intruder was removed, even though my finger was still numb.

It was hard to imagine how such a small thing could cause so much pain and discomfort, and it brought to mind the story of the little boy who removed the thorn from a lion's foot, with the lion being so grateful he befriended and looked out for the little boy from then on in.

Well I can tell you,I now know how that lion felt, and that I felt the same way for the doctor who relieved me of my pain, although I did not go as far as looking out for him from then on in.
Someone who can carry out such a delicate operation with such skill and understanding of his patient needs no help from a lowly fisherman such as I, but he is still practising at the same surgery that I go to, and as long as I live I will always be grateful to him.

I carry a small scar on that finger, and it is a reminder that it does not need to be the big things in life that can give us the most problems, sometimes it's the smallest irritations that are the hardest to bear.

(The Wanderer was bigger than these punts seen in the top picture, as you all know, but I just thought I would show you a photo of a coaster.)
Any old excuse to show boats, now the whisky......just savour that too.

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My fifteen minutes of fame.

Once the Wanderer was up and running with all the trials out of the way it wasn't long until we started breaking the port record time and time again, so much was her catching power. The experience of the crew, also contributed to the feat, because without a good crew, no matter how efficient the boat and skipper is you will not have success.
The local paper "Ayrshire Post" wanted to do a feature about the fishing fleet that worked out of Ayr, so who better to sail with for all the information they needed but the top earner of the port.

We were sailing at midnight during the summer hake fishing,so the Ayrshire Post editor sent a reporter and a photographer out with us for a two day trip to get enough information to fill the centre pages.

Sure enough right from the first haul coming aboard it was obvious that there were plenty fish to be had, and with just a gentle breeze blowing, the boat was only rolling about slightly, but not slightly enough for the photographer.

As soon as the breakfast was dished out and he entered the galley, he immediately turned around and was seasick over the side, which brought back memories of my first day on the Olive Tree, only I had been out in a force ten gale, this was just a breeze, but the motion affects people in different ways, so I did have some sympathy for him.

As the day went on he felt better and began taking photos of the crew, trying to relate the photos to the story the reporter was writing which helped to take his mind off the slight pitching of the boat.

We had a bit more fun with him when a Gannet hit the mast and landed on the deck when we took it over to him and told him to take a photo of it, and with the Gannet's beak snapping away he took off into the galley dropping his expensive camera among the fish he was about to photograph, giving us a good laugh at his antics.

The reporter, photographer, and camera survived managing to do a good job and two weeks later our stories and photographs were plastered across the middle pages as promised.

It surprised me somewhat just how many people who knew me had read the story, and approached me about the spread, the following weekend when I was ashore.

An old headmaster who I hadn't laid eyes on since my primary school days spied me and stopped to talk, asking all sorts of questions about the story and my job, telling me how proud he was of me, tackling such a tough job, and being so successful at it.
He had also come from a fishing background, but chose to teach, and never knew I had a similar background, and salt water flowing through my veins until he read the story.

That was just one example of what happens when you get your fifteen minutes of local fame, I seemed to bump into people who I had not seen for years, and of course a conversation would start about the newspaper article.

National fame beckoned,(or so we thought) during the winter when a TV station was making a serial which needed filming done at one of the main trawling ports, with a good catch being landed, one of their main priorities, to make it realistic.

Ayr not being a trawler port as such, made do, being closest to their studios, and with us landing that night they were guaranteed to get the large catch they needed to make it look as if it was filmed at a port like Aberdeen.

Word reached us over the radio, before we entered the harbour that they were there and wanting to film us coming in, our catch being landed while two actors walked past talking to each other.
Then the next scene was in the fish market where our fish lay spread out waiting to be sold, with us still running in adding more boxes.

All the filming of us consisted of the boat docking, "where the crew all posed" we weren't asked to but we did, weighing the fish and running into the market with the actors standing waiting to buy them, then even more filming of us when we were loading the empty boxes and ice aboard for our next trip.

We were at sea when the program reached the TV screens, so we made sure our partners recorded our acting debut for us to keep and show friends and relations in the years that were to come, something even more for my headmaster to be proud of, if he happened to watch it.

The first chance I got I put the tape in and settled down to watch, glass of Bacardi in one hand and my cigarettes at my side for the hour long program.

The scene where we entered the harbour came up quickly, but it wasn't the Wanderer that docked, it was another Ayr boat that was built of steel and looked more like the trawler they needed.

When the two actors walked past us it was filmed in a way that blocked us out, and even the market scenes showed no signs of our crew, only a few harbour workers and the salesmen.

The only fame I had from the filming was the large catch of hake waiting to be sold was all boxed and iced by me, and nobody but me and the crew would ever know.

Ach fame is not all it's cracked up to be, just think of the amount of times I would have got stopped in Ayr if they had shown us posing needlessly as we docked, and if the headmaster was content enough with the write up in the Ayrshire Post, then so was I.

(top photo) is a picture of me taken by the Ayrshire Post photographer after I had pushed about a dozen baskets out of the hold, then he asked me to pose with one. Hmmmmmmm.

(The next photo) is just to give you an idea of a fish market during sales.

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You can't keep a good man down.

So much for the threat from the skipper of the Girl Margaret, that he would see to it I would never work at the fishing again, his ego was bigger than his capabilities, as I was offered a job immediately, on a spanking new boat "Wanderer 11" that was due to be launched at the beginning of 1976. Meantime I filled in my time working on one of the top earners that fished out of Ayr "The Terra Nova" until after the launch, making more money at home than I was on the Girl Margaret, so much so that the skipper of the Wanderer kept coming down to make sure I was still wanting to sail with him.

This new boat "Wanderer 11" was more than I could have wished for when dreaming of improving catching capabilities, as it had every mod con a fisherman needed for the job, and was seventy feet in length, with every inch utilized to the full, plenty deck space, and plenty room in the fish room to hold all the large catches we secured in the years to come.

One of these large catches consisted of the "dogfish species" I wrote about in my last post, and in this case we caught over twelve hundred and fifty boxes in one, two hour haul at the seine net.

The dog rope I mentioned in my last post, is a rope that is attached to the cod end, and runs along the length of the net to the tip of the net wing, where we can reach it as soon as the net surfaces, allowing us to handle any such heavy weights like this haul of dogfish, or the bombs I wrote about in earlier posts.

This was our second haul of the day, having caught sixty boxes of dogfish the haul previous, but when this lot appeared we knew we had a different task on our hands getting them aboard than we had before, as they were crammed in tightly all the way down the bag.

Dogfish have very rough skin, and if you run your finger along it from the tail up, you are in danger of drawing blood, as it is capable of cutting into you, also they have two very sharp pointed spikes on their back behind each fin which can penetrate deep into whatever part of your body it happens to come into contact with if you are not careful, the only consolation being, if any, they have no teeth.

The fact that their skin is so rough makes it harder to run them down the bag into the cod end, and there being so much bulk of them this time, it was impossible to move them, so after hauling the first lift aboard with the help of the dog rope, the rest were stuck fast all the way up the bag, with no way of maneuvering them into the cod end for another lift.

We were fortunate that it was a beautiful, calm summers day, or the weight of the dogs would have burst through the net with the surge of the sea. We were also fortunate to have lifting derricks both forward and aft, the one aft used while seine netting, and the forward one placed there for use if we ever went to the herring fishing.

We were lying drifting with one end of the net in the power block, and the other on the deck where the empty cod end lay with no way of filling it, and in between, a mass of dogfish that if landed to the market would fetch enough money to cover our expenses and give us all a very good wage.

The only option we had was to lift the cod end high on the forward derrick, and secure the other end of the net to the stern of the boat as best as we could, then cut the net on the middle of the bag, just enough to let two crewmen stand on the mass of dogfish and throw them aboard manually.

The first two to try it was the youngest members of the crew, who were the lightest among us, also the most foolish, or gullible given their inexperience, did so willingly with a rope tied around their waist, and fastened to the boat..........just in case the net DID burst under the water, and there was a sudden evacuation of dogfish, and men from the net.

This trick worked fine, and as we emptied the bag, by this time taking turns inside the net now we knew it was safe, the catch was soon mounting up on the deck where they were washed, thrown down the fish room and boxed.

By the time we had about half of them aboard, we managed to strap the bag up along the side of the boat between the aft, and forward derrick, and bring the remaining catch to the surface, but still they wouldn't run down the bag, so we had to keep cutting the net, throw the fish onto the deck, temporary lace (repair) the hole we were cutting in the net as we went along, making sure we were safe enough standing on the solid mass of dogfish, and as the day was quickly passing we had begun to steam slowly towards Ayr, to try and catch the market before it closed.

It was quite amazing how well the task went, and we all survived without anyone of us plummeting to the bottom among a shoal of dogfish, but we all did bear the scars of the spikes as they frequently jabbed into us during the procedure.

Not one dogfish escaped, and by the time we reach Ayr most of them were boxed, with the remainder being boxed during landing, over thirteen hundred boxes in all, for just two hauls, but two hauls that took all day, and well into the evening before we were cleared up, ready to mend the net, and sail back to where we caught them.

When the first haul of that next day came up we were all glad to see that it was a pleasant haul of white fish that broke the surface, fish we could handle without standing on top of them while they were still in the bag.

As for the dogfish, we either caught them all that day or the rest scarpered, after seeing the fate of their chums, as we never saw that kind of bulk in one haul again.

The story in the last post happened a few years later, but it never proved to be as difficult as that day, there being less dogfish, and not so crammed into the bag, which allowed us to run them into the cod end after each lift.

The memory of my experience on the Wanderer did enter my head that night on the Boy Peter, and although I suffered with jabs from the spikes, the ordeal, even with the shortage of cigarettes, was nothing in comparison, but the stories are ones I thought I would share with you, letting you know the lengths fishermen go to, and the other dangers they put themselves in to land their catches.

Top photo (The Wanderer 11 in her first year. She was updated on a regular basis with a shelter deck added, and rope reels replacing the original rope bins. Had the shelter deck been added at that time, it would have made our task much more difficult.)

Second photo is of "dogfish" but not swimming in shoals of the amount we caught that day. ha ha.

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