Sunday, June 12, 2005

My Job (well, it was...)-Part 4

Well, where did we leave off?

Oh yeah. We are all going beddie-by on the first night.

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After what was (hopefully) a good night's sleep, we wake up at 6am. Well, we get up at 6, invariably someone is already awake because of the thrashing about that the boat takes when there is a little bit of weather. Tools bang around in toolboxes, drawers sqeak, some jackass left something on the dinette table and its sliding around....things like that.

Anyways, the first person who gets up (usually me) takes a few minutes to make coffee. Now, we don't have any of those wussy coffee makers that most of you have sitting on your kitchen counter as we speak. We have a 45-cup percolator strapped to the wall. The reason that we don't use a regular coffee maker is twofold. One, it doesn't brew enough...these guys would go through a pot before we even got our shoes on. And two, they are too messy. Every time that the boat rocks, the coffee that is dripping from the filter to the carafe gets sloshed side-to-side in mid air and spills down the side and onto the burner making for a nasty smell and an even nastier me. I don't much care for the smell of burned coffee.

We would usually brew up a gallon of coffee at the time and seeing as how only two of the guys drink it regularly throughout the day, you can usually get most of the day out of it.

After sitting around for 45 minutes to an hour getting the cobwebs out of our (perennially empty) heads while eating something small, we would get dressed and put our rain gear on (no small feat in itself) and then drag our sorry asses out on deck to get ready to haul the anchor and go to work.

After having hauled the anchor, off to the first string we go. It was usually within a half-mile or so but sometimes you had to steam a few miles into some shitty weather which would always start everyone off in a foul mood. Nothing like some spilled coffee or a nice shot of icy water dumped over your head to get the attitude in a bad place.

While on our way to the first string, I would set up whatever it is that we were going to listen to for the day. If it was in the summer, we could usually get several radio stations in. If it were in the winter, it was CD's all the way. The reason that I was nominated as the music man was that I was the only one who owned more than 8 CD's and would dare to bring them on the boat. Well that, and all their CD's sucked. My captain once gave me a "Pink" CD to put in. I handed it right back to him and told him to put it away before I slapped him baldheaded.

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That reminds me...

One time, my captains buddy (who was also a fisherman) was filling-in with us for a few trips. It was during one of these trips that they discovered, of all things, a "Supertramp" tramp. Now, being the children of the 80's that they were, they would play this tape every-fucking-day after lunch. Now, I can take any kind of music in small doses but when something is blared every-fucking-day at 9-million decibels, "the logical song" begins to sound like a screech monkey with his nuts caught in a rusty lawn mower to me. After the 4th day of tortue-by-Supertramp, I politely asked them if we could play something else after lunch. Of course, they thought that I was outnumbered and I could do nothing about it, so they put it in anyways. Not only that, they turned it up extra loud just to piss me off, giggling like schoolgirls all the way.

You don't want to piss off the only guy with access to the stereo while you are working.

I waited until we were partway into our next string while they were busy on the other side of the boat, then I walked in, calmly popped the tape out (they assumed that I was just turning the stereo down), walked back out on deck and THREW IT AS FAR AS IT WOULD FUCKING GO out into the ocean!! You should have seen their faces, they went from amusement when they first put the tape in to irk me... to bewilderment while watching me carry the tape out on deck... to astonishment as they watched it sail over the horizon. They just looked at me with a strange look, then turned back to what they were doing and nothing more was ever said about it.

I didn't have any other "radio problems" after that.

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When we get to the first string, we all take up our positions...

...Now, this is just how one boat does it. While all boats have basically the same setup, there are many different ways to work a boat and every boat has its own system. This was ours...

One person is standing at the back of the boat, one is directly amidships in case the captain misses his mark and he has to grab the buoy, and the captain is at the hauling station approximately 2/3 of the way up the port side. As we pull up to the Hi-Flyer and poly-ball that marks one end of the string, the captain gaffs the buoy, unties it and slides it back to the man amidships who then slides it down the rail to the man at the stern.

The reason that we have to do it this way is that the boat is not completely open along the rails. There is part of the overhead that comes down and attaches to the rail between the captain and the man amidships while the net pen (basically a giant wooden box that goes from rail to rail and is 6-feet tall) stands between the man amidships and the man on the stern.

The man on the stern puts the Hi-flyer in a customized rack and waits as the man amidships hops up into the net pen. While the captain starts to haul the endline (the rope that connects the hi-flyers to the nets), the man on the stern reattaches the rope to the hi-flyer and hangs the poly-ball on a post. We then wrap the line from the poly-ball around the hi-flyer and then hang the ball outside the boat. The weight, and more importantly, the shape of the ball keep the hi-flyer from flopping around in its holder and snapping off in bigs seas or when ice builds up on them in the winter.

While hauling the endline, not too much is going on. Its a good time to get caught up on some things that you may have forgotten to do and to suck down the beverage of your choice until the net starts coming up.

to be continued....

next entry, hauling the nets and (hopefully) catching some fish

9 Comments:

At 5:41 PM, Blogger Becky said...

This is better than "The Hungry Ocean". Cassette tape overboard made me laugh!

 
At 6:37 PM, Blogger The Cod God said...

Yeah, that wasn't a bad book.

She's much more entertaining in person.

 
At 10:12 PM, Blogger Maryka said...

"THREW IT AS FAR AS IT WOULD FUCKING GO out into the ocean!! "

I raised you right. I'm damned proud.

 
At 10:41 PM, Blogger The Cod God said...

The booze and pills haven't robbed me of all my faculties. I still hate fluffy crap from the 80's.

 
At 11:42 AM, Blogger Erin Nicole said...

my brain is still trying to materialize the image of grown men wanting to listen to pink.

i'm disturbed.

 
At 7:13 PM, Blogger The Cod God said...

No, no, no.

It wasn't "men".

It was "man".

And I lose that term loosely.

 
At 8:14 PM, Blogger Wheel Gun Bob said...

Tell us more about these loose men.

 
At 7:03 AM, Blogger The Cod God said...

Don't get your hopes up.

You've already had them.

Remember "Glory-Hole" Tuesdays?

 
At 10:50 AM, Blogger Wheel Gun Bob said...

Who could forget them. How much money would you make?

 

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