Lifesaving Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page B

gnawing through a major cross member that if broken would be the end of any hope of recovering my seine gear. When the raft half floated, it looked good. When it was hard aground, it appeared to be bent in the middle and threatening to snap in two. A tiny voice deep in my mind whispered, “That might be a blessing in disguise.” Stifling the voice, I went back to figuring a way out of this, short of giving up and letting nature run its course, which is how my gear ended up here in the first place. Or, at least, that was the story I was buying as opposed to the conspiracy theory that rumbled through the island’s rumor mill. Winter is rough out here, I knew. But who would be bored or hateful enough to sabotage me?
    Even at high tide there wasn’t enough depth of water to pull a boat alongside the offshore edge of the float in an attempt to rescue the netting or twine from it. The twine itself—I couldn’t venture a guess at how much it weighed. Four hundred fathoms long, ten fathoms deep, with a leaded line on the bottom edge and corks to float the top edge, allowing the net to hang vertically in the water like a fence—just the twenty-four thousand square feet of webbing was enough to squat the float low into the water prior to hitting the beach. Half of my gear was configured into a purse seine, which has big brass rings along the bottom through which a rope or purse line runs that can be cinched to gather the bottom of the net together to capture whatever fish are encircled. The purse also sports extra-heavy mesh on the bunting end to reinforce the twine when a great weight of fish is lifted through the water. It was quite a mountain of gear, for sure. And right now the inexperienced eye might describe it as a mess. But it was actually quite organized with the end of the top piece of twine clearly marked for ease of loading into dories (double-ended, nonpowered boats designed to carry fishing gear). If the float broke apart, there would be no ease of anything. I hoped the extra Styrofoam flotation we had just spent hours securing under and all around the bottom lip of the deck would add enough buoyancy to the raft to allow it to be pulled off the rocks. At this point, scuttling the whole works would be more of an embarrassment than any significant loss. But I had to admit that this herring adventure, not unlike many of my bright, salty ideas, had been a bust. Just because you call yourself a fisherman doesn’t mean you catch fish. Not a natural at anything, like everything else in my experience, I had a fairly flat learning curve for herring seining.
    The sun was out in force now. Its beam on the water stung my eyes. So I closed them and easily drifted back to the warm and not so distant memory of great anticipation of slamming the herring. My crew—Dave Hiltz, Bill Clark, his son Nate—and I spent a very ambitious day and a half early last spring, driven by visions of dollar signs, working like mules to get the bottoms of three dories scraped and painted and launched, and six hundred fathoms of herring twine aboard Alden’s boat, the
Grace Egretta.
The dories that we literally slapped antifouling paint on were the best of the bunch strewn around Alden’s shorefront on Orr’s Island, and were part of a package I agreed to, sight unseen. The guys and I had driven my Jeep to Alden’s place with a plan to return home via water with our new herring venture in tow. Things went pretty much according to plan. Alden had seine twine in heaps all over the place—some on the wharf, some under tarps above the shore, and some stored in and on top of old truck bodies. Somewhat disorganized, Alden did manage to show us where things were and even dug up a couple of old paintbrushes from his fish house, or “condo,” as he delights in calling it. Although he kept assuring me that I was buying the best of what he had, when some of the twine ripped when pulled between two