My Job (well, it was...)-Part 6

Jesus, it's been a week since I tortured everyone with my last entry. How times flies here at home-shit-home.

Speaking of that, it looks like we'll soon be moving. We'll be leaving the Cod Mansion for an upgrade....the Cod Estates. That's another story for another time.

Where am I? I mean, where were we?

Oh yeah, the endline is up and we are hauling the gear. Woo-hoo!

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After the end line has been hauled and the net is coming up, it becomes time to pay attention. Like I mentioned in My Job-part 5, (wow! Trot Nixon just made a GREAT catch!!....yeah, yeah, back to fishing) hopefully the end of the string isn't all twisted up like Snoop Dogg and it starts to come up smoothly.

While hauling the nets, we all have certain jobs that we have to do. The way that one person does his job directly affects the others as well. If you have some jackass screwing things up, everything gets fucked.

You have the captain who is at the hauling station controlling the net-lifter and the boat. If all is going smoothly, he doesn't have to do anything besides that.

After the captain, there is a man who stands immediately behind him (if your name is Billy, you stand extra close) and keeps the net from tangling up on the net-lifter. Remember that tuna-can on steroids thing that I described earlier? That thing.
He has the easiest gig going. All he does is keep moving the net down the table and clearing a few fish as they come around. Clearing the fish is when you untangle the fish from the net so all you have to do is "pick" it out. Only if we get a lot of fish in the net(s) does he ever have to fish. Naturally, the laziest guy usually loves this position.

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Now, we usually only went with the captain and two crew members because we were extremely fast. We out-fished boats that had 3 or sometimes even 4 crewmembers on deck. I'm not tooting our own horns, just stating facts. Looking back after surgery on both wrists and my back, I think that we should have taken that third guy and made a little less money (every boat allots the same percentage of the money made after each trip to the crew, no matter how many that there may be) every trip. Oh well, live and (never, for me) learn.

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With our normal crew of two, the next guy down the table would be right at the very end....my usual haunt. Hey, shit flows downhill (or down table in this instance) right?

The guy at the end does most of the work. The first 6-10 fish come straight down the table to you. Anymore than that, the man at the net-lifter will start picking fish. He also packs all the nets. With each net weighing 100lbs while wet and there being 100-120 nets a day to pack, it can wear out the arms and shoulders after a while. In addition to tossing the nets, you need to also figure in that the man at the end of the table picks most of the fish (which weigh between 7 to 40lbs) and then tosses them across the table over the deck and into a pen that is about 7 to 10 feet away. It's all a nice recipe for some tired wings...or torn tendons in the shoulder (me again).

If there happens to be a third crew member on that trip, he would stand almost directly across from the captain and his boyfriend (Billy) clearing the nets from the net-lifter. He will only pick fish out of the net when the man at the end got backed up. If he wasn't needed at the table to pick fish, he would be by the fish-pen, where the fish first go after removed from the gillnet, dressing fish (removing the gills and guts) and basically being our soda-bitch. He would be closest to the fridge, so was constantly going in and out to get us stuff.

So, that would go on for as long as it would take to haul the string. The standard amount of time to haul a string would be about an hour. It can go as fast as 35-45 minutes, but that was quite rare. On the other hand, we have also had it take several hours do to the amount of fish. It can also vary because of the weather, the tide, the shitheads that you have for crew that trip etc. etc.

After hauling the string, hopefully you have lots of fish to cut. When that happens, we have two guys cut the fish and one guy gut them. The proper way to dress a fish is to make a quick cross-cut to free up where the gills attach to the underside of the head, another quick cross-cut where the throat attaches to the gills (making sure to cut the throat all the way through to the spine), and one straight cut from the throat across the bottom of the belly and finishing at the anus. This should take anywhere from 1-2 seconds.
To properly gut a fish, you grip the fish (it varies from person to person as to where they exactly grab it), grab the gills firmly and rip them out in one quick motion. After that, make a downwards sweep through the stomach cavity of the fish with your hand somewhat opened grabbing all the guts along the way. This should also take about 1-2 seconds, if you are any good. Once you finish that lovely chore, you throw the now gut-free, but quite bloody, fish into a big tank full of water in order to rinse it off.

Once all the fish are done, you need to put them into the fish hold to ice them down and properly store them for the trip. I'll explain that next time.

to be continued....


- The Notorious C.O.D.