Log-book of a fisherman and zoologist / by Frank Buckland.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Log-book of a fisherman and zoologist / by Frank Buckland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    gives us our latitude, and our longitude is our lead: we know every mile of the ground, by the cast of the lead; the soil which comes up on the grease at the bottom of the lead, tells us where we are, and that's how we works the oracle, if there ain't no sun. Sometimes we never sees the sun, nor nothing else for a long time. Yet we keeps our course, and don't get a mile out of the line, one way or the other. We trawlers often lose our nets on wrecks at the bottom of the sea; the * Hurricane' lost hers last voyage; it caught on a wreck on a Sunday, and we rode to it as to an anchor till ten o'clock on Monday night, and then the warp parted; we lost the whole kit and seventy fathom of rope, and it will cost a tidy lot of money to replace the gear. About eight hundred sail fish tlie North Sea; they come from Scarborough, Hull, Grimsby, Yarmouth, and other places. We can begin trawling fifteen or sixteen miles from Spurn Point, and there is smooth sand as fine as silk from Spurn Point to Horn Eeef, forty miles to the east of Heligoland, and also right across to Norway. The trawling ground is so big that these eight hundred trawlers are nothing to the space they have to fish, and sometimes we do not see any vessel for hours, although they're all on the fishing ground. Our trawl-beam is 42 feet long; the foot-rope is 84 feet long, and 15 inches round; the smallest mesh of the net is 2 ^ inches. The trawl is down about six hours, more or less, and in the summer from dark to daylight. We work in thirty to forty fathom water in winter; in summer we work in shore from twenty-six to twenty-eight fathoms of water. a
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