While trawling in the English Channel and touching on the North Sea I witnessed time and again proof of the varying ages. For as another trawl came from the ocean bed and was loosed onto the deck, occasionally, treasures from the past were revealed in amongst the catches
- Pieces of rigging or other, which had come from age-old galleons that were sunken in ancient wars.
- Then quite unexpectedly a catch might reveal live ammunition in the form of bullets, grenades or perhaps even a bomb! That was dumped there, following the not so distant Second World War.
However life on those seas is not as romantic as one might imagine, for during the winters, seamen are truly tested. Through ever lingering hours that last all day and go all through the night, leaving minimal time for sleep. To the freezing, wet conditions that leave one a bit pissed off and a little cold chested.
- The motion of the boat ploughing through the sharp swell of the channel, the rain and freezing driving winds during the nights Give little opportunity for comfort as another trawl comes over the gunnels with two net fulls of various fish Ready to be quickly sorted into baskets.
- Next the baskets of fish are one by one emptied onto a cleaning tray where they are rapidly gutted, before being packed into the ice room below deck where they are kept until supplies run thin and the boat must return to land, somewhere.
- The waters on which we worked were deadly if fallen into for to say that they were cold would be to understate. They say that one slip into the drink would leave the ill-fated folk with only fifteen minutes of breath left to breathe before they permanently visited Davey Jones's locker. Also the phenomenal tide that runs through the English Channel would quickly take the unfortunate night time swimmer away from the boat so fast that there would be absolutely no chance of finding them, in the erratic seas. This is a thought that constantly ran through my mind as I scrambled up the mast, and clung on to it's swaying trunk thirty feet above the water, in order to free the rigging subsequent to an ice up causing it to slip it's pulley.
- Following up to two weeks on the ocean our boat the Petronella would dock so as to re ice, unload the catch in the most intriguing way depending on the level of the tide, restock our supplies and after just one night spent on land we were once more on our way back to work which was a bloody shocker.
- So round and round it went, twelve hours on and six hours asleep rotating between the three of us deckhands which ensured that our thinking was little more than that of zombies.
- After about three or four months of being harassed because I am Australian by the red headed engineer named Bob.
- While docked in Northern Scotland one night I knocked four teeth out of his big loud gob.
- It was there, in Aberdeen, that I was admitted to hospital for I had badly wounded my knuckle.
- And as the boat sailed back to England without me I was right in supposing that I had lost my job.
- No worries though, for a month or so later, when I was working on a boat fishing for crabs.
- I boarded the petranella while it was docked at Shoreham by sea, for a chat with the boys and although Bob's teeth were still nowhere to be seen, we all still managed with him, to have a little more than a chuckle!
