Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

Adrian angles the Kitty to meet the first pot buoy, on her starboard bow. The hauling jib – a right angle of rusty iron box section, with a stainless steel loop on one end of the boom and a hydraulic winch on the other – is located on the starboard side, behind the wheelhouse.

  “Haul from midships and shoot from the stern,” their dad used to say. Like it was some noble code of conduct that could never and should never be broken. In truth, doesn’t matter if you haul from starboard or port. Modern crabbers with drum haulers even pull from the stern. But most of those are catamarans, with twin hulls to spread their load. If you haul from the stern of the K, a biggish wave could easily breach her transom, and she’d go arse-down quicker than a weighted sack of kittens.

  On the Kitty the brothers haul from starboard midships, because that way Adrian can monitor each lift from his ripped and sticky captain’s chair. Also, it makes it easier to haul single-handed, on the days when Matty is missing, or too fucked up to be trusted to operate a winch.

  To haul a shank of 30 pots quickly, crabbers lift the uptide pot buoy first and use the flow of the tide to propel the boat down along the line of the shank. In a big tide the boat will move fast. Hauling pots at speed only works if the deck crew are co-ordinated, executing every movement like well-oiled clockwork.

  If you don’t haul pots as the boat drifts with the tide, you have to haul against the tide, which means running the engines against the current and churning the winch harder and faster, hauling pots up against the drag of the sucking sea. Adrian is fucked if he’s going to waste more fuel pulling against the tide, just because Matty and Tim are in a raggedy-arse state.

  The buoy floats past below the wheelhouse window while Tim is still trying to wrestle the boat hook from the pile of broken pots heaped in the stern. Hook jammed in the nylon mesh of a knackered pot. “The fuck you doing?” says Matty.

  “It’s stuck,” Tim whines. Matty grabs the handle and shoulders him out the way. “Give.”

  Matty now yanks hard on the shaft of the hook, ripping it through the mesh as he catches a glimpse of his brother’s face, staring sanctimoniously out the wheelhouse door, expecting, maybe even willing, Matty to fuck up at hooking the first buoy of the day. If he misses, then the K will run broadsides over the buoy. Once a buoy has gone under the keel, the boat has to go round 360 degrees, back up the tide to start all over again. Burning diesel.

  Which of course will give righteous Adie something to piss and whine about, and make Matty look bad. Like the dumb-fuck little brother he can so often be. But not today.

  Matty hooks the buoy, yanks it over the gunwale, throws the boat hook at Tim – who fails to catch it – and loops the rope into the V groove of the winch wheel, in one smooth fast motion – even before the boat hook has stopped clattering on the grey steel deck. Matty jabs the drive button of the winch, which turns, biting on the rope as it snakes through the stainless loop at the end of the boom. Below the loop, the rope runs straight down, under tension, into the murk. Water pings off the nylon fibres as they creak and stretch between the growling winch and a heavy metal crab pot, 125 feet beneath the lumpy sea.

  Even half-stoned, half-pissed, half-awake, Matty’s reactions can be fast, if he put his mind to it. For all his endless abuse, he’s still strong and swift and dangerous. Something which impresses and annoys Adrian in equal measure, as he watches his little brother handle himself surprisingly well, and haul the first shank in a manner that would’ve made even their father proud.

  There’s two ways to go when you haul a shank of pots. You can either haul and store. Or haul and drop. Hauling and storing means pulling the 20 or more pots on board one at a time, emptying the crabs out, chucking away bait scraps and stashing the pots on deck. Each metal-framed pot takes up the same amount of space as a pair of beer crates. So, chances are, on a ten-metre crabber there’ll only be space to store one shank, beyond that they start to get in the way of business.

  And then there’s the rope. A hundred-and-fifty foot of down-rope, leading from the floating pot buoy to the first anchor. Fifty foot more to the first pot. Fifty to the next. And the next… and so on, all the way along the shank. Another 50 foot from the last pot to the down-tide anchor. Finally another 150, up again to the down-tide buoy. All in all, a shit-load of rope to store on an already overcrowded deck. And, laying coils of rope on deck is just an accident waiting to happen.

  Sensible alternative is haul and drop. Haul the pots one at a time. Empty out the crabs by opening the ‘parlour’ door, held shut by two bungee chords with hooks, chuck out the old bait and stuff in new bait, before shutting the parlour door and then hefting the pot back on to the gunwale, just before the next pot breaks surface beneath the winch. And so on.

  A good crab pot crew works like a conveyor belt. Pot up. Swing off jib. Heft onto table. Open door. Empty crabs. Empty bait bands. Load bait bands. Close door. Heft onto gunwale. Drop. Turn to quickly sort crabs into boxes, just in time to swing the next pot off the jib. It’s like a mechanical ballet. A rhythm. A dance to the music of whining gears, crashing pots, scuttling crabs, twanging elastic, the dull splat of bait and hoarse roar of sea.

  Against all odds, the brothers’ first shank goes well. There’s shouting and swearing and Matty throws a blue velvet swimmer crab at Tim’s head, for going too slow and not clearing the baited pots quickly enough to leave room for newly-hauled pots on the work table. The small furry blue crab bounces off the back of Tim’s head and over the gunwale to freedom. Lucky crab. Blue velvet swimmers, unlike brown, edible crabs have no market value and no regulated minimum landing size limit, so most potters chuck them in a fish box, where eventually they get stamped on, when the box is half full. Stamped and stomped by a dim lad like Tim, in a pair of white steel toe-capped wellies, until they’re just a sickly sludge of guts-and-shell.

  The sludge is frozen and kept until winter, for whelk pot bait. By the time the dying crabs have been left in the sun for a few days, starving and suffocating to death, then mushed with a boot, they’ll stink worse than a week-old dead badger. And there’s nothing a whelk likes better than putrid stinking bait. Lobsters too. For all their culinary class and high-end fan club, lobsters are carrion-loving, bottom-feeders of the lowest kind.

  Baiting the pots is a mug’s game. As a task, it’s always delegated to the lowest crewman on any crab boat’s well-defined ladder of hierarchy. It’s a horrible job. Once the pot hauler has tipped out the trapped crabs, the baiter uses both hands to stretch open the thick rubber bait bands and remove the chewed remains of the now gag-inducing old bait. He then lobs it over the side, and replaces it with new, slightly less stinky, fleshier bait.

  Big rotting fish heads still attached to a few inches of spine are the easiest baits to handle. They’re the easiest to fit in position under the band, because it snaps down on the backbone and holds the head in place. But nothing is easy with both hands stuck in a pot, using one to stretch the rubber and the other to insert the bait. Nothing is easy when the boat is lurching, the bait is soft and covered in thick grey slime, your hands are freezing and the guy hauling pots is threatening to dump the next one on your head, if you don’t hurry the fuck up.

  The most common mistake a baiter can make in his fumbling hurry is to forget to close the parlour door properly. On a commercial potter, if a pot’s hauled and the door is found open, so the bait’s been wasted and any crab has been able to escape, it’s the baiter who gets a kicking from the skipper. Or the hauler. Or both.

  If a run of pots is hauled, empty of catch and empty of bait, the pot-baiter always gets the blame. Badly banded bait will fall out as the pot drops to the seabed. And if the bait’s fallen out and so the pots have fished a wet without bait, then everyone’s wasted their time. Once again, it’ll be the pot-baiter who gets the shit.

  Skippers want to see baits tight, clinched by the band. But getting baits to sit tight is fraught with complications. Bait is slippery, mushy, impossible stuff to handle with or without gloves. And if you
do wear gloves on a crab boat, the rest of the crew will mercilessly take the piss, at best. More likely they’ll sneak a treble hook or a cod’s gall bladder down a couple of the fingers – just for a laugh.

  Tim is an annoying, mouthy twat. And yet he’s wise enough to know wearing a pair of gloves working on the Kitty will only put him in line for a heap of crap. A blue velvet swimmer to the back of the head is nothing compared to some of the abuse he’s taken from Matty as part of this daily routine.

  “Fuck you,” is all he mutters, as he struggles to loop his fish-gizz-slimed fingers under the next bait band, and pull it open to insert a pollack head that’s already way too fetid to handle. The rotted cheeks pop off in his fingers as he squeezes the head under the band leaving him a handful of mushy fish flesh and a pot that’s now only baited with bones. But there’s no time to stop. Certainly no time to replace the heads. So he hauls the pot to the gunwale and sneakily drops the fetid cheeks into the sea, before launching the pot, and turning back around to the table, where two more pots already wait, as Adrian eyes him accusingly from the wheelhouse.

  Adrian heard a film actress talking on the FM radio – back in the days when it worked. Matty cracked it with a wooden-handled bass descaler because the cassette bit ate up his Bob Marley tape. This woman had won an Oscar or something for her part in some big costume history movie, and she was explaining how much of an up and down rollercoaster her working day was. Said it was hours and hours of mind-numbing boredom; make-up, costume-fitting, standing around waiting for the ‘right light’ or something – interspersed with concentrated short bursts of intense, adrenalin-rushing drama, which was then followed by more hours of tedium.

  Adrian thought how she could’ve been describing crab-potting. Steaming to and from the crab grounds is like a time warp of tedium. The hours stretch out in some bizarre continuum. Seconds last for minutes, as the boat seems to stand stock-still in the middle of the sea, even though the engine is flat out, rattling its main bearings like a biscuit tin full of masonry nails.

  But then, haul a shank of 30 pots in a five-knot ebb tide with the wind on your port side and suddenly you don’t have enough hands, enough space, enough crab boxes, enough time to do anything but haul, tip, sort, bait and shoot. Until finally the last pot in the shank is back in the water, with the down tide anchor tossed in after.

  Some shanks, especially in the Hurd’s Deep are shot close together, maximising the coverage on the good deep rocky ground. Especially if there’s a plot with enough rocks and fissures to hold crab, but not so many to make pot-hauling a snaggy, suicidal affair.

  Shanks that are too close together do cause more chaos up on the deck. There’s just no recovery time between each shank. No time to catch up from the last shank, with a pile of crab that need to be sorted by size and lobsters that need to be separated from the crab, and each other. Lobsters’ claws have to be banded with thick rubber straps to stop them cutting and chopping and crushing the fuck out of each other, or the crabs.

  Lobsters are psychotic cannibalistic mother-fucking baby-eating sociopaths, who cannot be left alone together without being neutralised. As Adrian’s dad always said – as a way of teaching the necessity of hauling all pots within 48 hours of shooting – “Leave two lobsters in a pot together overnight, and in the morning you’ll only have one”.

  It’s a good lesson, but one which these days Matty and Adrian struggle to abide by. Sometimes they shoot pots that soak for up to a week or more. It’s because they shoot too many pots, too far away from harbour, in some of the ugliest seas anywhere in the Channel. They spread themselves thin and wide, so some shanks soak for much longer than they ever should. The result is a lot of damaged lobster and crab, because a big lobster who finds himself stuck amongst his brethren for too long, soon turns violent and hungry and cannibal.

  Adrian points Kitty’s nose towards the next of their pot buoys, which he can’t actually make out yet because of the size of the chop and swell of the grim sea over the Deeps. The craters, reefs and peaks of the boulder-strewn hills that litter the bottom of the Deeps cause up-welling seas that affect the surface even 200 feet above. The heavy swell means Adrian can’t see either a buoy or a flag, but the note in his black book and the corresponding waypoint on his frizzing GPS plotter tell him that the next shank lies just over half a mile to the north-west. They’ve come as far south, the furthest from port, as they need to go. Now all the shanks left to haul are dotted to the north and west. The way back home.

  There was a time he would have just set the autopilot, to hold the course to the next waypoint. It even had an alarm, a high-pitched whine that would yell when the Kitty got within 100 yards of the next shank. But like everything else on this miserable fucking boat, the autopilot was broken, long ago. So now, instead, Adrian points Kitty’s nose roughly to where the GPS says the next pot buoy is located, and stretches two bungee chords, one on either side of the wheel, and hooks them in position. It is rough. A guesstimate. Kitty will veer off east or west of where they want to go by several degrees. But the bungees will steer her in the general direction, and give Adrian ten minutes without his hands on the wheel. Ten minutes to go out on deck to help Matty and Tim catch up with themselves.

  Matty is sorting crabs between the worktable, various boxes cluttering the deck, and the live well – a 600-litre tank of circulated seawater beneath their feet. The hatch is open. Water from the brimming well slopping on deck with every pitch of the short waves that shoulder Kitty’s starboard bow. Waves fuelled by the growing, growling wind that funnels up the Channel, the weight of the east Atlantic at its back, giving it more guts than it deserves. It’s a snotty wind that promises worse to come.

  European Marine Directive says all hands working on deck on a commercial fishing vessel must wear life jackets. Three self-inflating CrewSaver jackets hang on a cup-hook screwed in the plywood at the back of Kitty’s wheelhouse. No one ever wears them. Like gloves, they’re objects of derision. A piss-take opportunity.

  After an obligatory Sea Fish Industry ‘Safety At Sea’ course, where he and eight other Weymouth skippers spent the day in a Scout hut, watching a Powerpoint presentation by a retired Welsh miner on accidents at sea, Adrian took to wearing his. The big Welsh lump of a man told them every year one in 14 commercial fishermen dies at sea. After the day, and the slides and the presentation and the statistics, Adrian wore his inflatable CrewSaver for a week. All that week Matty sneered and took the piss, with the unrelenting repetition of a five-year-old. Eventually, Adrian gave up wearing the CrewSaver, not just cause of Matty’s bitching, but because it got in the way and made his neck ache.

  Now the jackets hang on the hook. Nobody wears them.

  Matty and Tim, crabs and boxes, ropes and pots, water and bait, knives, bands, velvet swimmers, half a lobster and a short metal baseball bat, slop from side to side, gunwale to gunwale, as Kitty rolls from the short punchy waves.

  Adrian wades in to the chaos, picking crabs off the table and the deck, checking them quickly against a metal measure. All the undersized brown crabs are thrown overboard. Matty in his messy frenzy will chuck small crabs over his shoulder. Some crack against the wheelhouse frame, bouncing off on their way to the sea. Some hit the steel jib bar, shells shatter, legs get smashed off. Matty couldn’t give a shit. He treats undersized crabs like hateful little bastards that deserve to be mutilated, because they aren’t big enough to be of value to him. They’re too small to translate into booze or drugs or fags, or lock-ins in The Sailors. They have no conversion-to-Matty’s-life value. So they might as well die.

  Other crab men are careful with undersized crabs, seeing them as the future. Small crabs become big crabs. It only takes a matter of time. You work the same grounds month after month, year after year, you catch the same little crabs again and again. Little crabs become big crabs. Treat them well and they’ll go back, grow fat and you can catch them again once they’re sellable. This kind of forward planning doesn’t work for Matty. If the
little fuckers aren’t worth having now, they aren’t worth having.

  Ten minutes of Adrian’s time on deck, with the wheel lashed, makes a difference. The downside of lashing the wheel is the passage is made rougher and uglier, so it’s harder to keep a decent footing on deck. When Adrian is steering, he can feel Kitty’s path; subtle shifts of the wheel help her ride up or down or slide across aggressive waves. Steering helps the boat work with the swell. A good skipper can help keep the working platform stable, even in the messiest sea.

  Two bungee cords, strapping the wheel rigid in one locked-off position, do fuck all to keep the deck stable or safe. Bungee cords only steer one course, in one direction, which means the hull smashes into waves. No deviation. No finesse. No pitch-and-roll. Just bang, crash, bang. And the shocks and vibrations make the deck a dangerous, unpredictable place to be.

  It took ten minutes of rough riding and lurching, but between them, wordlessly, without ever meeting each other’s gaze, the three men caught up with the four shanks already pulled. One hundred and six pots have so far been hauled, emptied and re-baited. Crabs are stored: keepers in the live well, velvets in the whelk bait box. Lobsters banded and separated. Stored in shallow fish boxes, two layers deep with a cloth laid in between the layers.

  In total the catch is 58 brown crabs over the legal minimum landing size limit and nine lobsters. Not bad. Still, at Brixham Fish Market – given that the Spanish, Italians and French, the biggest buyers of Weymouth-landed crustaceans, are fucked to Friday and back, because of the Euro bullshit – today’s crab price is pants. Haulage fees to Brixham are hiked, because of fuel prices and so, so far Kitty K hasn’t even washed her own back yet this morning. She’s drunk more diesel than the catch will fetch. Four shanks in. Four fairly good, disaster-free shanks hauled, but still no one on board has earned a single Euro of their own.