Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We landed last night it is now my trip off,  Alec and the crew sailed again straight after we had landed. Last trip was a tough trip, as many niggley things went wrong. The start of the trip was difficult as the tide was very strong and we had a job to find fish, then when we got on some fish, I was on watch on thursday night when the engine eased all of a sudden. The engine had droppedto tick over and was still in gear but I had no way of controlling the revs nor could I knock the boat out of gear.

We have electronic controls for the engine and this system had failed, so we had to haul the nets, as with the amount of tide running and little way on the boat we could wrap all the fishing gear up. We got the trawl doors to the surface without any problems but as we hauled the nets towards the boat sure enough port net was in a big knot, so after a couple of hours of jigery pokery we managed to untangle the net, so with the gear safely onboard I was then able to go down to the engineroom and rig up the emergencey controls. I am glad to say that the spare controls worked well so luckily we were able to resume fishing.

This was not the end of our troubles as the next night we had a hard fastner and we were afast on the port side of the net, with a very strong ebb running away we were listing over quite a lot and the gear was under the boat so I had to knock the boat out of gear so we could ease the strain on the equipment, I then heaved up on the port side to try and tip the gear out of the fastner, which to much relief the net then jumped clear. I was then able to go ahead again and we then heaved the net to the stern, once again the net was all wrapped up and we had to clear it again. There wasn't much damage thankfully but we did part the fishing line, which we patched up and we were able to shoot back again, this time we kept clear of the hitch.

The fishing did pick up and the trip went well after the troubles we had, but when we had landed last night we blew a hydrolic pipe, Alec and dad were there to help this time, so it was fixed quite quickly. They say that bad luck comes in three's so lets hope thats the end of it for now. On the other hand the weather is very fine and the sea is calm so it just goes to show, you take the rough with the smooth.