Watkins’s equipment was finished several days before all of ours had arrived from the south, and his boats sailed from Mallaig at six one evening. For the next few days we heard reports that his fleet lay every night in Loch Bracadale, but no one was able to tell me anything of his success or failure. We followed him, with all our equipment apparently to specification, on May 7.
CHAPTER V
The 1946 Season: Moonen Bay, May 6–20
THE 1946 season, which was to have been our first as a working fishery, became a year of trial and error, a gradual achievement of efficient technique by rejection and replacement of equipment. It was a season of fruitful experiment, though at the time I regarded it as a working failure rather than a necessary period of learning both for the catchers and the factory.
On May 17 I wrote in my diary:
Lord —— was right. Five years and £50,000 to experiment. I can afford neither. We have been at work for ten days, the first ten days of what was to have been our first trading season, and every day has revealed more of our ignorance and the inadequacy of our equipment. We should be at school, if there were a school to teach this new trade, not trying to earn money. Every day, almost every hour, teaches us a new lesson, but at a cost we cannot pay. I do not think our capital can carry us beyond this season. We must capitalise in experience every failure and disappointment—nothing now can prevent this summer being full of both.
We had sailed from Mallaig to Soay on the evening of May 6. We checked that the essential parts of the factory were ready for use, and a little before dawn, towing the Gannet behind us, we crossed the Soay harbour bar on a full tide and headed up the coast for Moonen Bay. As we crossed the mouth of Loch Bracadale the grey sea-mist was beginning to lift on the dawn breeze, and the fantastic three-hundred-foot rock spires of MacLeods Maidens showed partially unveiled right ahead of us. The mist furled up quickly, and when a little further north we passed the single rock An Dhusgeir the early sun was covering the whole sea with light. We came up into Moonen Bay, the giant cliffs of the south headland towering above us, and a pair of golden eagles wheeling above them against a pale blue sky.
We ran onto a shark almost before we knew it, the fin shining high out of the water a stone’s throw ahead. The gun was loaded and a harpoon already on the barrel. I reached it in time to have quite an easy shot, and missed—the harpoon passing over the shark’s back with the same playful change of direction that I had seen a year before. A few minutes later I had a second shot, with exactly the same result.
We hove to and held a consultation. It was difficult to concentrate; we were in the middle of a big shoal, and they were all round us. Some, close inshore under the cliffs, were “breaching”—shooting clear out of the water, turning half over on their sides and falling back on to the surface with a tremendous smash. It was like the report of a gun, and left the surface dotted with seething white patches. I wondered what speed the shark must reach below water to carry several tons clear of the sea. There were never more than one or two fish in sight at the same time, but it was obvious that the bay was full of them.
We put Bruce, Tex, and Neil Cameron aboard the Gannet, and cast her off to try another shark with the whaling gun. From the Sea Leopard I watched them close alongside a big fish, and saw the shark go down with a great flurry, but they did not fire. I supposed them to have run too close to the shark for the depression of the gun, for the Gannet’s gunwale prevented the muzzle from going below forty degrees—a range of about seven feet. After a few minutes apparently working on the gun they turned back to us. They had not been able to get the whaling gun to fire at all—the caps blew but not the main charge of powder. I wrestled with it for half an hour, drew the whole charge and reloaded, but for all the result I could get the black powder might have been coal dust.
There were still two sharks showing, so we rigged the harpoons onto the iron pipes, and the Gannet set off as a hand-harpooning boat again. I stayed on board the Sea Leopard, and watched them with a growing despair. The harpoons were too bulky to be driven far in by hand; they had been designed to be propelled at very short range by a heavy charge of powder, and probably not even Foxy could have pushed them far into a shark.
During the next five hours the Gannet harpooned eight sharks, but never managed to keep one for more than half an hour. Again and again I watched Bruce—who, though small and compact, was enormously strong—struggling to push the harpoon in deeper in the first moments after the shark had been struck. On one occasion he seemed to forget all sense of self-preservation, and I saw him still holding the pipe and thrusting fiercely while the tail seemed through my field-glasses to be right over his head, bouncing him up and down on the Gannet’s foredeck like a marionette with the harpoon pipe for puppet-string. After three hours I decided to take the Sea Leopard, northward up the coast, so that I could at least find out the extent of this shoal and add to the slender data on the fish we were hunting.
I rounded the Neist Lighthouse point and turned north up the coast of Skye. The wind was freshening, and round the point there was a very short almost pure white sea, on which the Sea Leopard bucked and jolted sickeningly. The lighthouse men, whom I did not yet know, were watching both boats through telescopes, and I felt ashamed of their having seen so many failures.
I waited some time under the immense nine-hundred-foot cliffs of Poolteil without seeing a shark. There was a big whale cruising round the entrance of the bay, his glistening back giving the appearance of a great elliptical wheel revolving below the surface, the tiny recurved dorsal fin far back upon the visible circumference.
After half an hour I turned south again and headed for Moonen, and at two miles I could make out with the field-glasses that the Gannet had a shark on in the choppy water off the lighthouse point. She was being towed slowly, and it looked as though a harpoon had really taken hold. I circled her and lay hove-to a hundred yards off while they prepared to transfer the shark to the Sea Leopard, but in the middle of these preparations the rope went slack, and they hauled in a harpoon whose barbs had bent backward like a reversed umbrella.
We had barely got Bruce on board and the Gannet in tow when a freak gale blew up out of a clear sky. We headed into Moonen Bay and anchored under the cliffs. The force of the wind was terrific; it formed pockets and shrieked out at us from the cliff wall, turned and came howling back from the sea; it was ahead, astern, everywhere. The day was still bright and sunny, and the wind whipped the sea into a thousand spray-whirls, each with a brilliant rainbow upon it. There was no time for big waves to form; the whole surface was a flying mass of thin crystal spray dashed in all directions by those hurricane gusts. One gust carried away the Sea Leopard’s galley chimney with a tremendous clatter, another lifted her dinghy from the deck and whirled it overboard.
We lay riding out the gale for the rest of the day, examining each of our failures in minutest detail. The first and main cause was of course the whaling gun’s failure to fire at all, but Bruce had actually pushed the harpoons far enough in by hand for the barbs to engage, and in both cases they had bent backward as though made of putty. The weakness was at the curve, where the barb hinged into the harpoon shaft and the steel was thinnest. Bruce had harpooned one big male shark a few feet forward of the tail; the fish had paid no attention at all, apparently not even feeling that foot of steel in his back. He remained at the surface as though nothing had happened, then swam very slowly away about a fathom down in clear water. Only when a snarl in the rope caught the fair-lead and jerked on the harpoon did he feel the check and start running, then the barbs bent back easily and the harpoon pulled out.
That was point number one; the steel used by the gunmaker was too soft, and it would be a long time before new barbs could be made. None of us could find an explanation for the failure of the whaling gun. We decided to test the Oerlikon at targets again, and abandon it altogether if the harpoon deflection seemed consistent.
When the wind began to drop in the evening we sailed s
outh into Loch Bracadale and lay the night at Port na Long. We found Watkins’s fleet anchored at the other side of the bay, with no sign of activity from the Gloaming’s boilers, and the Perseverance was not among the catchers. Bruce’s gloom lifted for a moment, and he chuckled.
“That’ll be why they weren’t in Moonen today. They’ll be having some sort of trouble, and the Perseverance’ll be away to Mallaig to put it right.”
It was a fine calm dawn the next morning, but we decided that we could not carry out tests with the Oerlikon gun under the inquisitive eyes of the opposition ships, so we sailed at first light for Soay, and anchored in the east harbour. There we fired twenty shots with the Oerlikon at floating targets. It was clear to begin with that the water was deflecting the harpoons almost on impact, and after a dozen shots the tubular harpoons began to bulge under the pressure of the explosions, so that they stuck half-way up the barrel. It was one lesson learnt; we never used that gun again.
We sailed at once for Mallaig, and all afternoon the telephone lines to Birmingham sizzled under my anger. I told the gunmaker of the total failure of all the equipment he had sent, useless guns and useless harpoons; that I had a full factory staff and a full crew to pay, overheads of a hundred and sixty pounds a week, and no apparent means of catching a shark. I arranged for him to buy another whaling gun to replace the Oerlikon on the Sea Leopard, and to make some harpoons with nickel-chrome steel barbs that would not bend. He could not promise these before the end of the season.
In a pretty despairing frame of mind I walked down the pier to the Gannet and went over the whaling gun with minute care. The system was that of an ordinary muzzle-loading gun on a very big scale—the powder charge being poured down the barrel from a measure. After that the wads are rammed on top of it, two hard felt discs of exactly the right diameter, pushed home with a ramrod. A wooden stick of the same length as the barrel slides down inside until its metal-bound end rests upon the wads. The top end of the stick, just showing at the muzzle, has a socket into which the harpoon itself fits. The charge of black powder is exploded by two caps struck by a big hammer, the caps fitting onto nozzles which have connecting channels to the powder-chambers.
This system sounds elementary, but there are many possible reasons for the charge failing to explode. The caps themselves may not fire, if the hammer-spring is too weak, or if some minute obstruction in the hinge prevents it striking with the spring’s full force. The caps may be damp—it is extraordinarily difficult to keep things dry in a small boat at sea—or they may be “duds,” of which one may expect one or two in every box.
If the caps explode and the main charge does not, the connecting channel may be blocked, or the main charge may be damp with spray that has seeped down the barrel, or the grains of powder may be too coarse to be fired by the cap’s explosion. To overcome this last difficulty it is usual to pour in a little fine-grained powder before the main charge.
Tex and I went over that gun millimetre by millimetre, as though we were looking for a mouse’s finger-prints. We withdrew the wads and charge with a claw-like instrument made specially for the purpose, and cleaned out the chamber with swab after swab until the last came out as clean as it had gone in. We probed the connecting channels with fine wire, and blew down the barrel until we both had the wide black rings round our mouths that later became almost a hallmark of our trade. We tested the hammer-spring and lubricated its action; we dismantled the trigger mechanism and checked it for any possible fault; we fired cap after cap to make certain that we had not been sent a faulty lot. At the end of two hours there was nothing more left to examine, and we decided to fire a test shot.
“Let’s wake Mallaig up,” said Tex; “if we’re not firing a harpoon we can put in a hell of a great charge of powder without any danger.”
We loaded with as much care as we had cleaned the gun, and I think we put in something like twenty drams of powder. With the 1946 harpoons, which weighed about eight pounds, the gun was “proofed” for seven drams, with a recommendation that four or five would probably be enough.
“Ready? Let go!”
There was a roar like a cannon, and all Mallaig’s gulls rose in a clamorous white canopy above the harbour. A big puff of grey smoke drifted away across the water, and there was a cheer from the decks of the Sea Leopard lying not far off. Startled heads popped from the hatches of the ring-net boats, some grinning and some churlish.
The relief was enormous; the whaling gun was not, after all, quite useless, and we felt that if it would fire even once in three tries we could catch enough sharks to keep the factory supplied.
“Let’s take her outside the harbour and try again, this time with a harpoon stick.”
We started the Gannet’s engine and took her half a mile out to sea. We reloaded with eight drams of powder, slid a harpoon-stick into the barrel, and turned the gun seaward, pointing upward at an angle of thirty degrees. I jerked the trigger cord, and the little boat shuddered under the recoil as again the gun fired perfectly. The harpoon-stick was invisible at first; then we saw it perhaps two hundred yards away and a hundred feet in the air, sailing outward and upward in a giant parabola. At about a quarter of a mile its trajectory seemed to flatten out about three hundred feet up; it sailed on, a tiny match-stick against the pale evening sky, and it was almost lost to sight when it began to slide down in a long arc to the sea.
Neither of us had been prepared for this, and we talked excitedly.
“How far was that?”
“Half a mile at least—you couldn’t see it when it hit the water.”
“More like a mile, I’d say, if you compare it with any bit of boat’s rigging—after all, it’s a yard long and seven inches round.”
When I went to sleep in my cabin on the Sea Leopard that night I felt that the previous day was removed from the calendar. Success would begin tomorrow.
We sailed for Soay that night, and lay at the factory pier during the short dark hours. At the very first light we crossed the harbour bar and set north for Moonen, with the Gannet in tow. Tex stayed aboard her, refusing to have breakfast until he had fired innumerable practice charges from the gun, which for some personal reason of his own he had now named “Sugan.” Our progress up past Loch Brittle and Loch Bracadale in the dawn was like a royal naval procession as “Sugan” boomed again and again in our wake. Tex was satisfied at last, and we hove to a mile south of the Maidens to take him on board. He had had two misfires that he couldn’t explain, but each time the gun went off with the same caps and charge on a second trial.
We were all keenly excited; we sat in the fo’c’sle, eating a second and a third breakfast, telling each other that there would be no more time to eat that day. The wireless threw the first sand upon our rekindled spirits. The voice came into the fo’c’sle on a sudden hush.
“Iceland, Faeroes, Shetland, Hebrides; moderate to fresh northwest wind, backing west, strong to gale later. Visibility good.”
Tex said: “There’ll be shelter in Moonen as long as there’s north in the wind.”
“Moonen’ll be hopeless as soon as it starts to back into the west. We’d better make the most of our time and get going now.”
We put Tex and Neil Cameron aboard the Gannet and sailed north toward the Maidens. The wind was just beginning to freshen, and tentacles of white mist about the steeple summits were writhing as they began to lift clear. A great dark bird was circling round the pinnacles, as big as an eagle but with an unfamiliar flight; I knew that it was no bird I had seen before. As I watched, it turned and flew up Loch Bracadale, gliding down in a long plane to alight on the water—a Great Skua.
We were a mile off the Maidens when we saw the first sharks. They were scattered over a wide arc to the north of us, seven of them steady at the surface, and others appearing with a flash of fin as they rose and submerged.
We took the Gannet to within a few hundred yards of the nearest fin, and Tex cast off the towing-rope directly our propellers had stopped. We had cons
tantly to bear in mind the danger of towing-ropes or shark ropes fouling our screws. The Gannet swept on past us under her initial impetus, and in another second she was in gear and away at five knots.
We kept abreast and a little to seaward of her, and watched as she made her first approach. The shark’s course was erratic, and the Gannet failed time and again to follow it. We could hear Tex yelling a steady and stentorian stream of blasphemy to poor Neil at the tiller, and after twenty minutes without getting a possible shot Tex came back to us to ask for another man. It had irked me not to be at the gun myself, but the Gannet was Tex’s charge, and it was no fault of his that my own gun on the Sea Leopard was useless. Here was my chance, and I went aboard to steer the Gannet myself with Bruce to work the engine.
The shark behaved less capriciously with me than it had when Neil was trying to follow it, and at the end of five minutes’ manœuvring we were running down on him from astern, a trifle too fast, but with the certainty of a fair shot at point-blank range. The gun was at its maximum depression, and by chance the boat rolled a little on a wave at that moment, so that a slight extra push on the tiller brought the harpoon head within a yard of the shark’s back. “Sugan” boomed, and the boat shuddered down her whole length as the harpoon went squarely home; even in the jumble of foam I could see the yard-long harpoon-stick jutting from the shark’s side. The tail was somewhere under the Gannet—the shark could not raise it to dive, and the tiller was jerked out of my hand as the rudder caught blow after blow from the tail. The harpoon-stick jammed against the boat’s side and snapped off short, then the rest of it became levered from the harpoon, and for a fraction of a second we had a clear view of the steel wire trace leading straight into the shark’s side. The whole harpoon was inside him.
“He feels it!” yelled Tex. “He feels it!”
Harpoon at a Venture Page 10