by Lamorna Ash
We move on to the cod-end knot, which I see the men undo on nets at the start of every haul to release the fish bulging within them, before refastening to send back down to the seabed. Kyle tells me that there’s always huge pressure resting on getting this knot right; if you mess it up and the cod-end comes loose while you’re towing the nets, you could lose a whole haul worth of fish, which could be worth in excess of several thousand pounds. ‘When you get good enough, I could let you tie it!’ Kyle grins, just as I find once more that the flimsy knot I have just tied falls apart in my fingers as soon as I tug it. I refuse flat out, imagining Don making me walk the plank if we lost that much money in a single haul.
Finally, Kyle teaches me to eye-splice rope. You fray out the three twisted threads intertwined together in a piece of rope and turn them back in on themselves to plait into the main body of the rope, making a hoop shape at the rope’s end. Kyle unravels the end of the rope part the way down and tapes the ends up. Then he weaves the middle strand back into the rope, before repeating the action with the strand to its left, and then to its right, until all of the strands are plaited back into the body of the rope. I find splicing easier than the other types of knots; it reminds me of all the plaits that friends and I used to do on each other as children. Kyle agrees, saying that he is great at plaiting hair now: you just have to pretend it’s rope. I start to get the knack of it, feeling how knots are not single, finished objects, but processes. Like any art, their craft takes time to learn and disappears if you do not practise it often.
The sunshine comes streaming in through the windows. Splicing puts you into that particular state of detached concentration that becomes the perfect condition for conversation. Walter Benjamin attributes the lack of repetitive, monotonous work in the modern age to the decline in oral storytelling. ‘It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to,’ he writes. When such rhythms of work used to be carried out, the weaver ‘listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself’. Together with the degeneration of craftsmanship, Benjamin predicted storytelling would also unravel.
And yet, here we are: Kyle and I taking turns to tell each other stories about our lives as we rhythmically plait one strand after another back into the cord of rope from which the strands first came. We start to speak of our origins, discussing what it is we think we are. In many ways, Kyle’s ‘whats’ are more fixed and definable than mine: he is a fisherman; he is Newlyn; but he is also about to become a father, which will bring with it countless new strands of identity that will complicate his simple relationship with the sea. My own terms sound more nebulous when voiced, the outline that rounds me less solid: I am London, which is vast and forever shifting, but some of me is here too. I am a writer; I don’t plan to settle, or even meet the person I might settle with, until I am at least thirty. No, none of it is graspable like being a fisherman in Newlyn, I think.
‘It doesn’t feel enough to say I’m a posh girl living in London and spending a lot of time on my own writing. That description doesn’t sound like a whole person to me,’ I say to Kyle, looking down at my piece of rope to hide the embarrassment of articulating these fears.
‘Hang on,’ Kyle says, ‘you know you’re posh?’
I snort.
‘Oh! I thought I was going to have to tell you!’ He grins. ‘You’re the first actual posh person I’ve met.’
‘How am I doing, then, for a posh person?’ I ask him.
‘Yeah, you’re all right. Very slow at splicing.’
The sky is prismatic now, a full palette of pastels carved into it. I head back up to the wheelhouse, where Don is listening to Ed Sheeran. He watches me grinning into the sunshine and remarks, sagely: ‘I wouldn’t enjoy it too much. We’ll pay for this.’ He regards the sky sceptically. ‘A day of good weather like this always tells you there’ll be storms coming soon.’
From the wheelhouse, I see Andrew leaning against the bulwarks on deck. He is topless, showing off his bronzed chest and dark blue tattoos, and holds a knife between his teeth as he works lines of rope through a ripped piece net to mend it. The sun is hot, reflected off the sea and onto the deck, but I am still not certain it’s take-your-top-off weather. There is a self-awareness about Andrew: a practised, film-star coolness that the other men lack. Over the week he narrates countless stories of girlfriends and wild parties in Newlyn, his life on land apparently a perpetual, almost teenage, haze of pleasure. A past girlfriend once told him that ‘dating a fisherman is like dating a new man each week. You’re always a bit different,’ Andrew remembers fondly. ‘They find it sexy too,’ he says. ‘When you’re making them breakfast and you tell them “I caught this fish, and now I’m cooking it for you”.’ I think back to the cooked fish breakfast Andrew made for me several days ago and smile.
And yet, I get the sense that fishing matters to Andrew beyond all else. Unlike some fishermen, who express anguish at the separation they must endure each week, it is part of the appeal for Andrew. He could easily have taken a break while the Twilight was being fixed up, but he tells me he soon gets bored on land and so jumped at the opportunity when Don offered him a berth.
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville devotes a chapter to a mariner on the Pequod called Bulkington. Though only just returned from a four-year treacherous voyage, he immediately leaps at the opportunity of returning to sea once more to join Captain Ahab in his quest to hunt down the white whale. ‘The land seemed scorching to his feet,’ Ishmael explains. Like the ‘storm-tossed ship’, the comfort of the port is more grief for men like Bulkington. ‘But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God –, so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!’ The leeward side, the part of the ship that is sheltered and turned from the wind, provides him no solace, when on the other side lies the wide, open territory of the ocean.
His head in profile, Andrew squints into the far reaches of the sea. Its gentle undulations draw stripes across his face so that he looks like some great watery cat. Lopez writes of a particular day he spent on one of his Arctic trips, just sitting ‘high on a sea cliff in sunny, blustery weather in late June’, watching seals and birds crossing the landscape. He describes how the rush of joy and exhilaration he experiences at the sight of creatures in their natural habitat is summed up in a single Eskimo word: ‘quizannickumut, to feel deeply happy’. Andrew is more at ease out at sea, more deeply content in his own relationship with the water than any other fisherman I have met.
I follow him out onto the deck, proudly informing him that I can splice now if he needs any help. ‘Sure,’ he grins, and gives me a few ends of rope to splice, which he can then work into the net. ‘It’s just knitting, really,’ Andrew tells me. When he was a decky learner, the older fishermen all made thick-knit jumpers to pass the time while they were on watch. We stand together for a good few hours, warmed by the sun, listening to Don’s music blasting from the wheelhouse above, until the rough rope has turned my hands bright red.
Still thinking about Don’s Cassandra-like weather forecast, I ask Andrew if there are many fishing superstitions left. ‘I’m looking at one,’ he replies with a wicked grin – the ‘aren’t women bad luck on boats?’ refrain dogs my time in Newlyn. ‘Oh, and this one,’ he says bringing his hands up to his head and waggling them while sticking his front teeth in front of his lips. I am momentarily dumbfounded by this, before realising he’s imitating a rabbit, a word you cannot say on board a boat unless you want to be met with terrible fate. If it so happens that you really do need to mention rabbits during a voyage, the men call them ‘underground greyhounds’. There are countless other creative substitutes for taboo words. It is bad luck to run into a pastor before going to sea; Nance writes in his Glossary that the fishermen call men of the church ‘fore-and-afters’ or ‘white-chokers’.
Light dapples the waves as we look o
ut at the blued world below and beyond the Filadelfia, the endless depth of which is suggested by the intensity of its colour. My mind breaks the surface and dives down to observe the fish spiralling and ricocheting around the sea like a chaos of unconnected atoms. ‘Yeah, it’s the same thing all day, every day,’ Andrew says into the wind, ‘but there hasn’t been a single week I’ve been out here where something extraordinary, something you’ve never seen before, has not happened.’
He starts to catalogue the unbelievable things the nets have pulled up during his time as a fisherman – the trinkets the sea has chosen for itself, which the contraptions of man have brought up again, sometimes many years later. Fishermen often discover, amongst the congeries of fish brought up during hauls, whales’ skulls and cavernous rib cages, curved like a vaulted ceiling, their thick bones bleached white by salt. Kyle keeps these to give to his uncle, who now has a whole whale burial ground in his garden. On the last day of our trip, Kyle gives me a dark lump of honey-coloured amber, larger than my balled fist, containing a petrified insect, which came up in a haul. One day we pick up a grizzled and barnacled anchor so large that it unsteadies the boat’s ballasts. Since there is not enough space on board, Don drops it to rest once more amongst the other lost things, warning other fishing boats nearby of its whereabouts on the VHF.
The sea marks used to indicate the location of underwater hazards are called cardinal marks. Each cardinal mark around a hazard, such as a shipwreck, indicates a distinct compass direction, which allows the fishermen to navigate away from the looming danger. In the day you can tell which direction the hazard is from the cardinal mark by the four distinctive warning stripes, like a wasp, which show whether it is to the east, west, north or south of the hazard. At night, cardinal marks north of the hazard show a continuous flashing, to the south six quick flashes and one long flash, east three flashes and west nine flashes. These human marks are strung up across the breadth of the ocean, letting vessels know how to move safely through the borderless waters.
Another time, Kyle got a message on the VHF warning nearby fishermen of a large tree floating across the sea. He thought it must be someone taking the piss until he saw it, an oak tree silently drifting past the Filadelfia while he was on watch. And each man on the Filadelfia tells me of humpback whales that dwarf their boat, of schools of a hundred or so dolphins right beside them, and of turtles and pancake-shaped sunfish waving their fins out of the water.
On the Crystal Sea, we once lugged up a mess of thick, coiling wires covered in seaweed and barnacles, which I initially imagined were the tentacles of some ancient octopus. The crew informed me that they were in fact old, obsolete communication cables: long stretches of twisted copper wires that extend between continents across the ocean floor. The first transatlantic telegraph cables were laid in the mid-nineteenth century. I hear a story of one Cornish fisherman who pulled a stretch of cables up in those early days of transatlantic communication and was convinced he had discovered a type of seaweed that contained copper. He travelled most of the way along the line of cable up towards Ireland, pulling up the copper seaweed as he went, certain he would be rich for his discovery. Instead, the ships that laid the cables along the ocean bed had to begin their work all over again.
With the coming of telegraphy, Porthcurno, near Land’s End, suddenly became a thriving cosmopolitan area. Skilled men and women from cities around the UK were sent down there to work at the telegraph station, where many of the world’s submarine cables came ashore. The Cornish were somewhat suspicious of these telegraph stations that cropped up around the coast, attracting hordes of foreigners. In 1904, Cornish Evening Tidings reported a belief circulating amongst those living on the Lizard that the reason they had been suffering such awful weather recently was because of Marconi’s telegraph station in Mullion, declaring the high level of electricity coursing through their villages was ‘plainly an uncanny presence and capable of the worst, in the eyes of all good fishermen, who do not believe in upsetting the laws of nature’.
As the heavy copper transatlantic cables began to be replaced with fibre-optic cables, the Porthcurno telegraph station became less necessary. In 1970 the station was finally closed, the staff moved on and Porthcurno once more became an unassuming, seaside village. All these years later, trawlers are still ripping cables up from the sea floor – past technologies a museum left below the sea.
You hear stories, too, of trawlers bringing up enormous bags of cocaine and marijuana thrown overboard by smugglers when navy ships approach to search their boats. Now and then mannequins with half-eaten arms and seaweed tangled through their nylon hair are found caught in the nets, brought on board and dressed up to make the other crew mates jump out their skins. In Marianne Moore’s poem ‘A Graveyard’, the speaker observes how, from its surface, the advancing motion of the sea ‘under the pulsation of light-houses and noise of bell-buoys’ looks as if ‘it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink/ In which if they twist or turn, it is neither with volition or consciousness’. If a body brought up from the water breathes or gasps, it is neither with volition nor consciousness either, but that does not stop man from believing there is some mystery, some regenerative power of the seas that might bring lost things back to life for us.
Andrew tells me of the time when they could make out between the flapping bodies of fish in the cod-end a thing so white it was almost blue, parts of it flaking off to reveal pale bones. Without warning this form took a huge, noisy breath, scattering fish left and right to reveal, caught there within the net, the body of a grown man. Andrew explains that sometimes when a body is brought up from the seabed, the gases in it expand and cause a sudden expulsion, as if the person is taking one last heaving breath – ‘Scared the living daylights out of us’. No one knew what to do with this ghost from the depths, his bare ribcage stuffed full of small fish like an aquarium. They wondered who he might be, whether his family were out there somewhere, waiting for their husband or father to come home, and so kept the body in the fish room, handing him over to the authorities once back on land to see if they could identify the lost man.
The thing we see this week that Andrew has never seen before appears on that Friday evening. Midway through pulling up the gear, Andrew shouts to the wheelhouse for us to go and look over the portside of the boat. Down in the water, right up by the nets, there is a lone leopard seal pup. It’s pale grey with dark spots, smaller than any of the fat seals I have seen lolling around Newlyn harbour, whom the fishermen curse and swear at because they dare to nick fish from their nets. (‘If they took the whole fish, I wouldn’t mind so much,’ one fisherman tells me, ‘but they take little bites of every single fish, so when it comes up in the cod-end the haul is ruined – thousands of pounds lost, just from that one bleeding seal.’) Any fish-hunting competitor, be they French, Cornish, Spanish – or seal, is begrudged equally.
‘I’ve never seen a seal cub this far out to sea before,’ Andrew yells up to me. I try to capture a photograph of the pup, but the image blurs in the dark so that it just looks like a patch of shadow across the frame. Still, it is not the seal’s appearance that has struck the men as extraordinary; it is the fact that a young seal has come this far out on its own, that space has somehow shrunk and brought this young creature right out to our boat in the middle of the sea. ‘We’re not your mum, lad,’ one of the crew cries down at him.
While on a boat in the Arctic, Lopez makes eye contact with a seal on an ice floe. In that silent moment of recognition, he realises that ‘to contemplate what people are doing out here and ignore the universe of the seal, to consider human quest and plight and not know the land, I thought, to not listen to it, seemed fatal’. As we witness our baby seal’s encounter with this strange, manmade hulk of metal roaring through and disturbing its natural environment, none of us can help but listen to its universe. The very tangibility of fishing makes it impossible to ignore the non-human lives intermeshed with our own. When fishermen suddenly find
swarms of cuttlefish and yellow fin tuna– which are usually found in warmer waters – off the UK coast, they cannot but notice the changing of the climate. When in a single year – 1980 – the population of mackerel dropped to almost nothing, they cannot but recognise what sustained overfishing might do the oceans, what we will do to the liveability of the planet if we continue to pretend we cannot hear it.
There is a clear sense of guilt when fishermen tell me of the overfishing in the 1970s and ’80s; how the drive for wealth fuelled by competition and rapidly advancing technology on boats damaged the populations of certain species, especially mackerel. But attitudes have changed. Fishermen realise that the supply of the sea is not illimitable. They talk about sustainability with utter seriousness now; it is a continual process of learning about the invisible world below you so that you can continue to support it while it supports you. We cannot hide from our impact on the sea, and we must endeavour to work harder at improving our relationship with it. As has been seen in the improvements in fish stocks in the last few years, oceans can be replenished.
Besides the wondrous, strange things the nets bring up, in every haul we find a large amount of plastic. There are tiny plastic beads drifting through the waters from our face washes, plastic bottles and plastic six-pack rings that sea creatures become trapped in, and plastic islands in the middle of the sea, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where floating waste is brought together by ocean currents. There is not a place left untouched by what we have done to the planet.