Heading for home after generations fished the rough waters of the Pentland Firth
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Kevin Green recalls a week’s fishing trip from Wick during the last years of the local seine netters.
The steady throb of the Gardner engine reverberated through the wooden hull of the seine netter as we rolled heavily in the North Sea swell.
Lifting fish boxes and stacking baskets against the base of the wheelhouse, I glanced landward as we passed the lighthouse on Duncansby Head and then my house in the village where a faint wisp of peat smoke showed.
Even on this June afternoon the air had a bite to it. Along the jagged shoreline an easterly swell crashed against the towering sandstone rocks but both the tide and the swells were with us, something we required to get our 65-foot boat safely through the inner sound of the Pentland Firth.
Like generations of my family I was fishing. My great grandfather, John Houston Green, had skippered a drifter in these waters. But the herring had long since been caught to near extinction, so by the 1970s and 80s seine netters like Star of Peace were after the whitefish – on the seabed.
The boat name reflected the religious Bremner family who were staunch Salvation Army members. Weather in the Pentland Firth often drove mariners to prayer but rarely gave them salvation.
The many losses prompted Sir Walter Scott to pen the lines, “It’s no fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives” in his book The Antiquary, when a customer was haggling with the fishmonger over the price of a haddock.
Haddock was one of the species we were trawling for, among other demersal species including cod, saithe, hake, monkfish and the king of the fish, the halibut. Now, these fish were also disappearing fast as inshore boats like ours caught the cod in their summertime coastal breeding waters and the fleets of European Union trawlers chased them into the deep wintertime waters beyond the six-mile UK limit.
“Aye, when the Spaniards get in, their fleet will be bigger than the entire EU fleet,” lamented Charlie Decca as we sat under the whaleback bow shelter while the boat surged into the Bores of Duncansby, the first of several Pentland Firth tide rips.
The cod-end
Charlie liked sitting here for a yarn and it was a good place to monitor the winches when hauling the net. He was not just a deckhand like myself, but was also the technician who had installed our Decca navigation system, a type of radio direction-finding wireless that generated latitude and longitude figures.
Its operator was looking down on us from the lofty height of the wheelhouse side window, where the dark, swarthy head of skipper John ‘Pot Black’ Bremner had emerged.
A lifetime at sea, like his father before him, had given Pot Black a decent living and a nice bungalow in the town but he wanted ashore soon. So, his younger son Malcolm, who was my friend, was being trained to run the boat.
Malcolm was sheltering in the stern with his brother John and the other deckhand, Parrot, who were busily repairing the cod-end. Their black plastic needles flashed around their three clasped fingers which were rough measures of the required net size.
The cod-end was the final part of our seine net, a trawl of about two miles long that bounced along the seabed and enveloped the fish; weighed down with lead and protected by rubber bumpers as it rolled over the seabed, rather than scrape it clean like conventional trawling.
So, as we steamed through the firth, all aboard the Star of Peace stayed alert to ensure hatches remained tight and the old six cylinder Gardner kept throbbing. Our bow was pointing west to Cape Wrath, the richer but wilder fishing grounds.
With the worst of the firth tidal rips behind us, I helped Charlie peel a mound of tatties while a leg of pork roasted in the galley oven. Glancing to port, the wink of Dunnet Head lighthouse grew in the gloaming as I crawled into my bunk in the stern and I pulled the curtain tight.
Shotting the net
“All hands!” came the cry from Pot Black the next morning as we readied to shot our net. After gulping a mug of hot tea, I struggled into my bib-and-brace oilskins then pulled my seaboots on before stumbling onto the deck.
At the bow the long pole with float attached, the dan-buoy, was being readied to cast. As it splashed, we steamed off in what would be a large triangular course, the coils of rope lashing out over the stern, followed by the sides of the seine net. Each coil was 120 fathoms (220 metres) and seiners often had 14 coils of rope each side of the net; which meant nearly two miles of gear to haul.
To sink them, the rope was lead lined. Eventually, the heavy cod-end was heaved over as well and we returned to the dan-buoy to complete the shot.
Reaching the beginning of our triangle, we picked up our dan and put its end rope on our starboard winch and the other on the port winch to begin the haul. The coming together of the two ropes herded the fish towards the cod-end.
As the catch sizes fell and the quotas tightened, skippers like Pot Black had to find new grounds, so couldn’t rely on familiar marks, or meezes as the old hands called them. Names of well known marks on this north coast included Shaal o’ the Sule, The Smoo and the Staigs at Cape Wrath.
Before the advent of sonar, knowing these grounds was essential to avoid snagging or loosing your gear. But as the fish disappeared, new grounds meant more risks had to be taken; and for some that included clashing with authorities.
We’d heard on the VHF that one of the fisheries patrol vessels was in the area. An RAF Nimrod patrol aircraft had already buzzed us, just in case we thought of going inshore of the three-mile limit.
Back on deck, with our net set, the twin winches sprang into life and we motored slowly ahead. This was the crew’s last chance to have a meal and a rest before the haul, so some of us ambled below to make sandwiches while others watched the steadily turning winches.
The haul time varied with the weather but could take us two to three hours. An acceleration of the winches was our warning that the haul was nearing completion as the two sides of the net met near the canoe-shaped stern of the seine netter.
Sule Skerry
Coming back on deck, the air seemed to be filled with paper airplanes that smashed into the sea – the white bodied gannets who were attacking our catch – a sure sign our cod-end was surfacing.
As this big ball of fish neared the stern, the aft davit was swung to hook it. Deckhand Parrot grabbed the knot at the end and tugged it before jumping clear, to be submerged in a mass of writhing cod, haddock and then an almighty crash as a six foot skate knocked deckhand John clean off his feet; something that got us all laughing.
Avoiding the sharp barbs on its tail, the skate was hoisted on the davit as one of its wings slapped John again with a glancing blow before we could heave it back “over the garden fence” as Pot Black called anything going into the sea. Then the sorting began of species into boxes. These were stacked on each side of the boat and in pairs as we began the gutting, much to the glee of black backed gulls and the gannets.
The six-inch bladed knives were razor sharp, and became dangerous as the hours passed and fatigue set in. Gutted fish were washed, boxed and lowered into the hold where some of the crew put ice on them. To seaward of us was the lonely rock of Sule Skerry where thousands of the gannets nested along with the seals. Talking about the silkies prompted Charlie to sing a few lines: “I am a man upon the land, And I’m a Silkie on the sea, And when I’m far and far frae land, My hame is in the Sule Skerry.”
The sonorous melancholy ballad felt to me like a lament for our dying industry. A few years after this trip the Star of Peace was decommissioned and by the early 90s only two seiners remained of the dozens from Wick.
My friend Malcolm went ashore to run the harbour masters office and I was offered a job in the department of fisheries (to count them rather than catch them!).
He and I would occasionally look over the newly laid pontoons at the recreational sailing yachts that visited briefly during our short and unpredictable summer; but only the occasional fishing boat.
