“All right. Anything you say.”
Several hands made the dory ready. Into it they put three or four tubs or half casks in which was coiled hundreds of fathoms of stout line furnished with a strong hook every two or three feet. Each hook was baited with a fat salt clam, for the early catch of squid had been exhausted by the dory fishing. There was also a fresh tub of bait, buoys, and a lantern.
A youth aboard clambered up to the cross-trees, gave them the direction of the trawl buoy-light, and they started. It was a clear, starlit night with only 147 a gentle sea running and no wind to speak of. There was not a hint of fog.
The Charming Lass lay now in the Atlantic approximately along the forty-sixth parallel, near its intersection with the fifty-fifth of meridian; or eighty to a hundred miles southwest of Cape Race, Newfoundland, and almost an equal distance southeast of the Miquelon Islands, France’s sole remaining territorial possession in the New World.
Code and Ellinwood easily found their trawl buoy by the glimmer of the light across the water. They immediately began to plant the trawl-lines in the tubs aboard the dory. The big buoy for the end of the line they first anchored to the bottom with dory roding.
Then, as Ellinwood rowed slowly, Code paid the baited trawl-line out of the tubs. As there are hooks every few feet, so are there big wooden buoys, so that the whole length of the line––sometimes twenty-five hundred feet––is floated near the surface.
When the last had been paid out, a second anchor and large buoy was fixed, and their trawl was “set.” Next they turned their attention to picking the trawl already in the water.
As the line came over the starboard gunnel Code picked the fish off the hooks, passing the hooks to Pete, who baited them and threw them over the port 148 gunnel. Thus they would work their way along the whole of the line.
Many of the hooks that came to Code’s hands still had the bait with which they were set.
“Must be in the bait,” he told Ellinwood. “The fish wouldn’t touch it. This is no catch for five shots of trawl.”