You feel your whole body at sea. Its rhythms force you to notice the way you hold yourself, making minute readjustments every few seconds to keep yourself balanced as the boat rocks. There are six degrees of freedom on a ship that dictate the ways in which it can move: pitch (a port–starboard movement from side to side), roll (the back-and-forth tilt from bow to stern) and yaw (the boat’s rotation). Every muscle learns to tense and relax in time with these motions in order just to keep yourself upright.
Once back down below, in my tiny bunk on the Filadelfia, it is a relief not to fight against these axes of motion any longer. The engine’s bellowing softens to a croon and my body is gently lifted and dropped by the sea in a rhythm that is not regular but feels natural within the womb-like space of the cabin. I fall asleep in minutes, resting easy in the knowledge that there is always someone on watch, guarding our vessel as it carries us over the seas.
With my seasickness decisively over by Tuesday evening, I take no pills before bed that night and wake at six with a clear head in time to catch the sunrise on deck. My first sight of the day comes through the bathroom porthole (out of which window Don and Andrew, practical jokers both, like to stick their hands and grab my ankles as I stand outside taking photos). It always gives a foretaste of what will confront me as soon as I climb up into the wheelhouse, like looking through a kinetoscope and seeing a world in motion behind its round hole.
The view out of the porthole is still black this morning, but I can feel the day just waiting to spark. I take my toothbrush from where it is tucked at an angle through a wire running down the side of the bathroom wall with the other brushes and, to save time in case I miss the sunrise, simultaneously run my arms and legs under the burning hot showerhead, banging against one and then the other side of the wall as the boat lurches. And all the while I look out through the circle of window, waiting for the sky to arrive.
The only mirror on board the Filadelfia hangs spit- and toothpaste-stained in the bathroom. I don’t like to check my reflection in it often and delight in the novelty of not having to bother with how I look out here. In cities, it is impossible to avoid the sight of your own face – it leers out at you from every polished car and shop front. There is not a moment when you are allowed to forget how you are seen, your appearance reified behind glass. Today I am taken aback by the wildness that greets me. There are flecks of cuttlefish juice across my face like black moles that intermingle with scattered sequins of flaking fish scales. My skin is a wind-burned red, my eyes somehow darker or deeper than usual, and my hair caked with guts and pieces of fish bone. The reflection returns a lopsided grin to me as I pull a fat glob of fish blood from my hair.
I hurry upstairs, shout ‘Morning!’ at Stevie, who is on watch, and throw open the wheelhouse door. It is all out there – not just a patch of sky framed by the interstices of skyscrapers; this is what the whole sky looks like, boundless in all directions. The sight still surprises me every time as if during the night my mind has unwrapped the sea’s clasp from my memory. Sometimes I wake to find us in a flat, cool desert; other days amongst yawning black waves like caves; others still to arctic scenes, the entirety of the sea white, as if overexposed, and the sky revealing further snowcaps.
Today’s pre-dawn blue is not a soft shade but an oppressive block of colour that seems to rush all the way up to our boat and slam against the deck, so vivid is its blueness. A heavy line of clouds has settled above the sea. Sandwiched between several blue tinted clouds, an expanse of golden light casts itself upwards and outwards. The light spreads across the line between water and sky, turning both a rich navy, the lapidary pattern carved out across the waves accentuated by the way the light falls on them. Horizon watching is the routine that steadies me on the Filadelfia, my fishing equivalent to reading the papers or listening to the radio over breakfast or watching television. And yet it is more than all those: all possible news expressed in a curve of blue. It makes me think of Newlyn, how this weather will blow back to them, and it makes me think of home.
Once I’ve had my fix, I make a coffee for myself and Stevie before settling in my seat beside the skipper’s chair to wait for the first haul of the day. At 6.30 the ‘booking out’ system is broadcast over the VHF radio. One by one, in alphabetical order, every Stevenson’s boat at sea calls to check in. The company brought this system in several years ago after one of their trawlers went missing. No one even knew anything had happened until two days after the ship had gone down. Now, each morning, whoever is on watch speaks the name of their boat back to those listening on land. In a firm voice the Filadelfia promises: It’s all right. We’re still out here.
The VHF also allows fishermen in range of one another to call each other across boats. Skippers use it to warn other fishing vessels not to come too close to their nets, especially if they have static gear below the water, and to let them know the coordinates of any rough ground nearby that might damage their hulls. But, more often than not, the VHF is used by fishermen to have a yarn when they’re bored on watch – one fishing boat to another, the two of them speaking of known things from back home that for a moment make the land feel that bit closer, that bit more tangible.
The Filadelfia has two VHF receivers on board, which resemble nineties-style clunky black telephones with curly wires. While making my way up from the galley, I often hear what sounds like a raging party going on in the wheelhouse, only to find Don alone with a phone to each ear, shouting over two other croaky voices gossiping about market prices and turbot sightings. A few months ago there were so many Cornish boats out in the Channel that the VHF was ‘bloody steaming’, as Don puts it. Back in the eighties it became a craze amongst Newlyn’s inshore fleet to yell catchphrases from the TV series Happy Days over the VHF. As soon as one fisherman yelled ‘Perfectamundo!’ into the radio, a whole host of ‘Perfectamundos!’ would ricochet around the bay, until someone eventually decided the joke had gone too far and would gruffly call out ‘Shuurrup!’ A moment later a new round of cheerful ‘Shuurrups’ would take over instead as the boats scooted around Mount’s Bay.
This morning after breakfast Don is cut from his yarning by a great belch on the other end of the line. ‘Better out than in’, cackles the other fisherman from across the sea.
‘Too right,’ Don replies, and the man lets another rip. In these moments, it as if we have never left the Swordy at all.
In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez describes a moment when, staring out from a cliff above Lancaster Sound – a body of water between Canada and the Arctic – he sees a group of narwhals emerge from the sea, the clash of their great tusks creating triangular arches above the water. In that moment, he writes, ‘the urge to communicate, the upwelling desire, is momentarily sublime’. Narwhals use clicking sounds deep below the water to communicate with their companions and locate prey and obstacles such as floe edges. The hollow, helix-shaped tusks, which they are famous for, allow the narwhal to navigate and feel the characteristics of the water acutely. For years there were various, imaginative speculations about the purpose of these swirled tusks, with most believing that narwhals clashed them against one another in displays of aggression. However, as these tusks contain about ten million nerve endings it is more probable that narwhals use them to communicate information about the seas they have travelled through with others – a creature’s entire life journey passed to another in a single touch, a single crack of horn on horn.
Narwhals and whales are far from silent. Blue whales are the loudest creatures on the planet, communicating to each other in a series of moans and clicks and grunts at a volume greater than 180 decibels. These vibrations can travel along channels in the sea for thousands of miles, telephone lines between whales crossing over the breadth of the oceans. We cannot know for certain the biological reason why blue whales call to one another from such great distances, but I like to think that they, like the fishermen, are just yarning and burping across the vast regions of the seas, letting each other know: It’s all right. We’re still out here.
Don ends his morning yarn to prepare for the first haul of the day. I watch the derricks creak up, heaving with them the nets from the depths and the sea around them turns a muddy, olive green – the cowsherny hue from Nance’s Glossary. Each haul is an unknown quantity, providing a moment of intrigue that breaks up the day. Whoever is on watch is arbitrarily chosen as the person responsible for the fish caught during that haul, receiving either great praise or a tumult of insults depending on the quality of the catch. While both cod-ends rise up and over the deck, the watchman and I lean out through the windows, rubbing our hands together saying: ‘This feels like a good one!’, and ‘I can just sense the turbot down there this time, you know?’
We catch only one turbot that morning and a pitiful number of undersized monks. From the wheelhouse Don sends the nets back down into the water a little more forcibly than usual, his tone with Stevie that little bit sharper. Along with a baseball cap, an old sock and various other detritus that have somehow ended up amongst this first haul, the men have to throw vast numbers of dead fish back into the waters too. It is like watching a fishmonger take the freshest fish, or a baker his just-risen bread, and chucking it straight into the bin.
Around half the fish I saw caught on the Crystal Sea had to be thrown back into the sea, although they were dead, because of quota restrictions, and it is not much better on the Filadelfia. The immense frustration and sadness amongst fishermen regarding all this waste is plain. When I asked David, the Crystal Sea’s skipper, about it, he replied sparely: ‘We don’t talk about it; we try not to think about it.’
There is a belief held amongst many that the seas are common property, the shared heritage of mankind. And yet, like the serpent symbol of the ouroboros eating its own tail, our sense of the seas’ commonality is chased by our desire to govern them, to territorialise the waters. The unpeopled spaces between land turn out to be far less neutral than we might imagine. It was by means of the seas that the first colonial missions set out over the world; deep below its surface, countries test out nuclear weaponry that damages marine life, while submarines prowl in wait for the first cries of war. And in every region of the world fishermen fight over the seas’ fish stocks.
The Tongan and Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’Ofa describes how the dividing lines we have drawn through the sea reorder the land: ‘Nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific islands states and territories that we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other.’ The seas were mapped out and politicised, leading to terms of ownership like ‘Our Waters’ (as in ‘Get Our Waters Back’ the much-touted slogan of the Brexit Vote Leave campaign); and yet, though the sea is a site of damage, loss and corruption, it is also synonymous with life, generation and the flow of ideas between diverse places. It is all these things at once, every contradiction and inconsistency.
In 1968 the biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin published a paper called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in which he argued that individuals are motivated by their own self-interest to overuse common property. If the seas are left unchecked as a communal resource, Hardin explains, each man will ensure he spends as much time and effort at sea as to be certain no one else can take his share. The tragedy of the commons, as with most economic theories designed to make sense of an unpredictable world, is not as simplistic as first outlined; humans cannot simply be reduced to inherently selfish agents, as they cannot be reduced to purely good or evil. Rather, it seems clearer now that the rising competition over the produce of the seas is also intrinsically tied to the expansion of capitalism around Europe, the advancement in fishing technology and the more desperate conditions created by post-war austerity.
The introduction of individual fishing quotas (IFQs) throughout Europe during the 1960s was an attempt to tackle the tragedy of the commons, each fishing boat being allowed to catch their appropriate share of fish within the seas they hunted. Privatisation became a quick fix to the problems of commonly owned resources. The assumption went: if each fisherman had a property right over their share of the fish in the sea, instead of believing they were all chasing the same stocks, they would be more likely to conserve fish for the future. As competition over the stocks of the seas increased, agreements were drawn up that attempted to ensure each country was given fair fishing access to the seas. Before joining the EU, Britain signed the London Fisheries Convention (1964), which stated that every signatory nation (twelve in all) could have full access to the fishing grounds between 6–12 nautical miles from their coastline, as long as they had already been fishing there during the previous decade.
In the 1970s the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was introduced, which controlled the fishing rights of all EU member states. While the CFP’s intentions were commendable, their strict legislation caused destruction and controversy too. Even today, despite their attempts to reduce damage to fish populations, 40 per cent of EU stocks are still overfished. Moreover, the rigorously enforced quota limits have led to increased waste from boats: returning dead fish to the sea because they are either undersized or the vessel does not have enough quota to keep them. Similarly, as happened with pollution quotas, fishing quotas could be leased, sold and auctioned off. Wealthier families and larger companies began buying out smaller boats and purchasing greater percentages of the quota until they held a monopoly over the area. This has increasingly happened in Newlyn, with young fishermen struggling to enter the industry due to the price and demand for quotas.
That the percentages of quotas awarded to each member state of the EU has not changed since the CFP’s inception is a large part of why the majority of fishermen in the UK voted to leave the EU (polls suggest the figures were as high as 92 per cent among fishing communities). Under the CFP’s rules, though every member state has the right to manage the resources in its EEZ, or exclusive economic zone (up to two hundred miles from their coastline), the fishing area of all member states is considered one zone that everyone may fish in. For example, around 58 per cent of fish caught in the UK’s EEZ was landed by fishermen from other European countries, with only around 16 per cent of British fishermen’s catch coming from other European fishing zones.
Newlyn’s fishermen, who play an active role in politics and avidly express their views on all things fishing via Twitter (most of their handles being the name of their boats rather than their own) are growing increasingly frustrated with the way in which fishing has become a pawn in political debate. The phrase I hear again and again is: ‘We’re being sold down the river.’ They hoped that Brexit would allow them to readdress quota distribution and access to UK waters. However, while fishing rights played a sizeable role in Vote Leave’s campaign, in reality the fishing industry only contributes 0.05 per cent to the UK’s GDP and employs fewer than 12,000 people. There are concerns therefore that it will become nothing more than a bargaining chip if the EU ties fishing rights to other parts of trade deals.
It is not only the CFP who manage quota. The UK government is able to choose how quota is distributed amongst its fleet and for the last forty years has chosen to give the ‘ten metres and under’ boats (which make up 88 per cent of all vessels in the UK) only 2 per cent of their rights to fish quota. There remains a patent disjunction between legislation that attempts to protect fish populations and the complex realities of the industry: not only do fish populations frequently migrate, regardless of scientific advancements it will never be as straightforward to divide fish between fishermen as it is to apportion land and livestock between farmers. Legislation will always move more slowly than our awareness of the immediate issues facing the planet, and fishing legislation is particularly knotty. But in recent years the CFP has had successes in preventing further collapses in fish stocks and restoring those that have been almost wiped out; a discard ban has gradually been put in place to prevent more waste of fish, requiring fishermen to land all that they catch unless it is undersized or a banned species; recognising that inshore fleets are a more sustainable form of fishing than trawling, the quantity of quota they receive is also in the process of being readdressed.
To improve the mood on the boat after the dismal first day, Andrew fries us up some freshly caught lemon sole. We eat it piping hot with buttered slices of white bread. I have never tasted such fresh fish, the flesh pure white and flaking off on my fork.
‘Just think, you might’ve gut those sole yourself,’ Andrew says to me. ‘And now you’re eating them.’
‘If she’d gut ’em, we’d know as there’d be half the guts still in there!’ Stevie interjects wryly.
Kyle, with his indomitable appetite, passes up the offer of fresh fish for breakfast and chooses a starter of Pot Noodle followed by a ravioli sandwich. Afterwards, I follow him up to the wheelhouse and we get chatting. Kyle is only a year or so older than me and both of us are a good twenty years younger than anyone else on the boat. We take these mornings together during his first watch to discuss shared memories of the nineties and noughties as kids: TV shows we watched and computer games we played, the music we listened to, the terrible nightclubs we went to as teenagers and the outrageously stupid things we have done while drunk in them.
Kyle first went to sea when he was ten, skipping school to go out with his cousin. When he arrived back in the harbour his uniform was always filthy and covered in scales. This is it, he thought, this is living. Though he persevered with his schooling and got pretty good results, it was not enough to keep him from the sea. After leaving school at sixteen, he found a berth on a gill-netter. It made him grow up pretty fast – you can’t mess about at sea like you can at school, he says. Kyle still has a huge amount of knowledge to mine from the Filadelfia’s older crew members. Any time they offer him some pearl of wisdom, he leaps up to follow them, learning while I’m aboard a new technique to mend nets and how to shimmy along the derricks so as to apply oil to keep out corrosion.
In fishing, Kyle has found a sense of purpose and a community. He remembers on his eighteenth birthday, climbing up from the cabin for the early morning watch and feeling miserable at the prospect of being at sea on his first day of adulthood. But, as he reached the wheelhouse he was greeted by the familiar sight of Lamorna Cove, on the final stretch home. ‘Couldn’t let you miss your eighteenth, could we!’ the skipper called out from the wheelhouse, and led him down to the galley where the whole crew had gathered to present him with a birthday cake they’d smuggled on board. ‘They did all that, just for me,’ Kyle pauses and smiles out at the sea.
When they were still teenagers, Kyle and his fishermen friends would head straight from the sea, in their yellow gum boots and fish-stained tracksuits, to go clubbing in Penzance. He doesn’t go out much anymore though, he says, since he and his wife are about to have their first baby together. I suddenly feel much younger and more immature than Kyle. Though we are practically the same age, my friends and I from our middle-class backgrounds in London get to act as kids much longer, messing about at university and believing the appropriate time to settle down and start a family occurs some time in your thirties. We in the cities are far less worldly than we like to think, just by the nature of our being in a cosmopolitan environment. Kyle told me he once visited Manchester. People kept asking him what he thought of Manchester and wasn’t it a great city? Eventually he felt he had to be honest and just said to them, ‘But, where’s the sea?’
Kyle’s stories are always left-field. He tells me that when he first started fishing, he used to write his phone number out on scraps of paper, seal them in old water bottles and chuck them overboard. Any time he got a call from an unknown number he’d excitedly shout down the phone: ‘Hello! How did you get this number?’ And they’d say: ‘Have you been mischarged for PPI?’ or something, and he’d say: ‘No, but did you find this number in a bottle?’ Another day his friend caught an electric ray, or torpedo fish as they are sometimes called, by mistake and the force of electric current passing through his body knocked him right off his feet. He grins at the memory.
Out the wheelhouse window, beyond where our feet are stretched out over the dashboard, a ghost of a sun is trying to break through the clouds. Kyle can’t wait for the weather to improve again. Last summer they tied a fish box to the back of the trawler and water-skied across the sea. Another time, Kyle was on night watch after a particularly long week of fishing when a huge black monster suddenly erupted from the sea, water rushing off its dark sides. It turned out to be an enormous Danish submarine that had been hidden from the sonar. I can imagine Kyle, the sole member of the crew awake, standing on the edge of a fishing boat gazing up at this silent, menacing warship towering above him. While he couldn’t see any of the boat’s crew, he said he could feel on him the eyes of men who were not likely to have seen the outside world for three months or more. A moment later the submarine slunk back below the water, leaving a brief, foaming whirlpool. Kyle rubbed his eyes and went to make himself another coffee, unsure if he had imagined the whole thing.
Before Kyle can start on another tale, Don hoists himself up into the wheelhouse with a grunt, his face ashen and his eyes red from a few hours of broken sleep. ‘You better have caught me some lovely fish while you’ve been gossiping away…’
Each time I return to the deck during the haul, my reward is to learn how to gut a new fish. Halfway through the week, on Wednesday, I am taught how to gut hake, a round-headed fish that was recently declared sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), and is mainly caught by gill-netters. The MSC scientifically assesses whether fisheries are caught in a sustainable way and are not being overfished or damaging other marine populations in the process. I find that hake smell more acrid than lemon sole, and when I slice their bellies open they are often teeming with worms.
We also bring up scarred fish, their histories written out in their scales. Small nicks and bites in their sides suggest past scrapes with monkfish; roughness along their gills are signs that they have narrowly avoided the fate of being dragged up in a net once before, or perhaps that they were manhandled by a previous fisherman a few years ago and thrown back overboard for being too small. I inspect each fish with great care, opening up their mouths, tracing my gloved fingers over every fin and line and scale. It feels a privilege to get to see these hidden parts of a fish, like the inner workings of a clock. As soon as turbot are caught, the fishermen make a slit just above their strong, fanned tails to bleed them out so that they don’t lose their bright white colouring. They stand out in hauls, like slices of the moon, cries of joy spreading around the boat if ever more than four are caught in one go. When you look under the flap of skin on a turbot, you can see their gills are bright purple and ruffled, like an Elizabethan collar.
At close proximity, most fish skin is fractalled with dark lines. In her poem ‘The Fish’, Elizabeth Bishop writes how the fish’s ‘brown skin hung in strips’:
Like ancient wallpaper,
And its pattern of darker brown
Was like wallpaper:
Shapes like full-blown roses
Stained and lost through age.
The colour and shapes painted over the skin of each fish we gut reminds me of some aspect of the land. A particular Dory’s back has echoes of the beige cubic patterns on the carpet in the Star, the dark circular mark on its side, known as ‘St Peter’s thumbprint’, a faded spillage across one cushion; the pinks of a monkfish’s gums are the exact shade of the cushions in the cottage in the Fragdan. Sometimes in the long gleaming strand of guts that you pull clean out of the fish come surprises, such as a second smaller fish in a translucent bag, as if my knife were a fishing rod diving into a second great sea, whose swilling waters were folded inside the first fish’s belly.
On the deck of the Filadelfia I hold one of these gossamer-thin pouches drawn from the inside of a fish up to the sky and marvel at the completeness of the thing within, its dim gold eye just discernible, its body curved slightly as if caught in the motion of a wave. I wonder how it got in there. And then, dumbly, it enters my mind that these bagged fish must be the unborn babies of the fish I am gutting. The revelation sickens me and I almost drop my knife. For a while I can’t continue gutting, the delicate, dead fish hanging limply from my hand like a goldfish won at a fair.
It is only after a few weeks back on land that I remember the vague details I do know about fish reproduction. Firstly they would be eggs, not fully formed fish. And secondly, most fish spawn eggs externally, which are then fertilised by the male fish (only cartilaginous fish, the jawed vertebrates with skeletons made of cartilage rather than bone, such as rays and skates, fertilise their eggs internally). It was not a fish embryo after all, but a smaller fish eaten whole by the larger one, its body undamaged in the process.
By dinner time I am starving and spoon myself out a generous helping of hunter’s chicken from the stove (though still about half the size of the other men’s portions). This is Kyle’s speciality on board. He wraps chicken in bacon and cooks it in the oven for several hours, while it swims in an oozing layer of treacle-like sauce. The resulting meal is sweet and moreish. Food always tastes better at sea. Kyle says that sometimes he makes his missus the exact same recipe he prepares on the Filadelfia but it never tastes as good. After a day of being thrown about by the boat’s lurching and with your body exhausted from the work of the hauls, to sit together out of the wind and eat hot, satisfying food is a feeling comparable to no other.
When I start to thank Kyle for the meal, he holds up his hand. ‘Stop with the thank yous. Just finish your plate,’ he tells me. ‘That’s the only thanks I need.’ There are small shifts in behaviour one has to learn at sea: a kind of sea manners. I learn to put the toilet seat back up after I’ve used it; to help in the fish room without getting in people’s way; when people need a coffee refill; which snacks are each men’s favourites and so should not be finished off by anyone but them; and when someone wants to be left alone.
We sit with the telly on, our mouths sticky with hunter’s sauce as the Filadelfia grunts and rolls over the waves. As I get to know her better, she seems to me like the kind of old woman who refuses to age gracefully, getting bits and pieces of herself Botoxed – a new engine, telly, more efficient nets – but still sagging in the neck, her external parts beginning to rust and flake, everything about her more rudimentary than the Crystal Sea. Most of the time no one says anything, too tired by this point in the week to utter more than a brief smattering of thoughts on a particular game show contestant or a question about tomorrow’s dinner. Another fisherman tells me that when they’re back on land, the reason fishermen like to gather together in the pubs is because ‘We don’t know what to say apart from fishing. The sea takes away everything else.’ Nothing new happens on trawlers; the world does not change beyond the repeating cycle of hauls. Like the manners peculiar to the sea, a particular kind of vernacular emerges while fishing too, one that varies in each part of the boat. During the hauls on deck language is contracted, focused right in to convey instructions quickly, which are nonetheless always interspersed with at least one wisecrack at the expense of another crew member. This staccato dialogue is itself distinct from the more meditative, multi-directional conversations that occur on watch.
Describing life on the fictional Narcissus, Joseph Conrad reproduces the ways he hears men at sea interacting, the fragments of conversation captured perfectly through ellipses: ‘Here, sonny, take that bunk! … Don’t you do it! … what’s your last ship? … I know her … there years ago, in Puget sound … This here berth leaks, I tell you! … come on; give us a chance to swing that chest! … did you bring a bottle, any of you shore toffs? … give us a bit of baccy… I know her; her skipper drank himself to death … he was a dandy boy!’ I imagine the sea and the engine beating over this punctuation, slicing through dialogue and causing the end of sentences to be washed away. That night, as the men come and go from their short sleeps, I stay in the galley with the TV still buzzing on. Like Conrad’s narrator, I am privy to a whole host of fleeting exchanges between the men, while I lie slumped along the back bench in my tracksuit and thick socks, snug beside the hotplates burning away on the stove.
Up in the wheelhouse, I hear Kyle call up the Billy Rowney, skippered by Danny Fisher (nickname ‘Fish’) whose trawler lights we can just make out to our port side. Kyle asks the man on watch if his friend is about and the watchman replies: ‘I think he’s turned in for the night, why?’
‘Oh,’ Kyle looks dejected. ‘Nothin’ – just wanted a yarn.’
The watchman tells him he’ll let the friend know once he’s awake. A few hours later, Kyle gets his yarn. For almost forty-five minutes I listen to the two of them happily chatting, half a mile away from each other over the waves, reminiscing about the best steaks they’ve had in Penzance and Newlyn, their love of the Meadery restaurant and what they’ve eaten at sea so far this week. On the Billy Rowney last night they had a ‘real rich supper’ (rich means delicious in Newlyn) of breaded scallops and monk. Tonight, they’re finally heading home after a gruelling week, so having the traditional ‘Billy Rowney Going Home Meal’ of jacket potatoes and steak. The men sign off on the VHF, promising to speak again soon.
‘Where are we going next, Old Man?’ Stevie shouts up to Don.
‘I know where the megrim is and the lemons, but where are the bloody monks and turbots?’ I hear Don reply, and later: ‘We’ll try down south-east way tomorrow.’
If we were to continue our course ‘down south-east way’ eventually we would reach France. Some trawlermen reckon it’s too hard and stony down that way, but Don loves those grounds, knowing that in those territories you’re away from the other boats, pushing out alone into the sea. This knowledge runs through Don’s blood; his great-grandfather was a fisherman and sailed all the way up to Greenland to hunt amongst the ice sheets. They talk of other boats they have had relationships with. Don was skipper of the Sarah Shone for thirteen years, she was ‘a fucking gem’, while Kyle has especially fond memories of the young crew on the Joy of Ladram. Once he and his mate went to the back of the boat when it was blowing a hooley and re-enacted the Titanic scene with Rose and Jack. When they get to talking about a fisherman who hanged himself the day we set out from Newlyn, I think of Conrad’s dialogue once more, and the sadness that lurks between the ellipses: ‘give us a bit of baccy … I know her; her skipper drank himself to death … he was a dandy boy!’ The lines speak of how you can never know how much another person is really struggling inside their own head.