For two weeks we were out early and late experimenting, and for two weeks I scraped together (Heaven knows how!) sufficient for the "hand's" retainer and my own board and lodging. And then—success came to us as by a miracle. Instead of mud, or shells, or weed, we found fish in the cod-end: fat plaice, luxurious sole, skate, and whiting.
What we had done to our otter trawl I don't think anyone knew, least of all the "hand," and I am none the wiser to this day, but it caught fish. We treasured that trawl as something exceedingly precious, and nothing, nothing whatsoever, would cause us to alter its ropes or leads a hair's breadth. We lived in constant dread that we should meet a "hitch" (an obstacle on the bottom of the sea) that would make it necessary to cut the warp and lose this wonderful trawl. It would have taken two weeks, perhaps two months, to discover another like it, and we were averaging fifty pounds a week.
Success breeds ambition, and I installed a motor auxiliary engine. Further, there is only one way of catching more fish than by trawling all day, and that is trawling all night. The fish, especially whiting, do not see the net coming in the dark. So we acquired the habits of night-hawks, sailing at four o'clock in the afternoon, and returning at six the next morning. It paid. It paid handsomely. What should I not be able to report at the next general meeting of dream merchants?
It was a fine sight on a pitch-black night to see our wake streaming away like smoke from the propeller, so bright with phosphorescence that it seemed a powerful light must be hung over the stern. And to watch the net, lit with a myriad tiny lamps, creeping in yard by yard. Then, what a splashing as the big skate and plaice came alongside!
It must be remembered that the dream ship's career as a fishing smack was during the last phases of the great war. She saw three German submarines, two steamers sunk, and had her stalwart ribs severely shaken by depth-charges on several occasions. In fact, as one concussion caused her to leak, I had serious thoughts of decorating her with a wound-stripe on the starboard quarter. What the effect of one of those fearful implements of destruction must be at close quarters, and while submerged, I can hardly imagine. I only know that one was dropped about half a mile from the dream ship, and from the cabin it sounded as though someone had hit the oil-tanks with a sledge-hammer, and felt as though she had run bow on, and at a nine-knot clip, into an iceberg.
Over twenty good, sound fishing smacks belonging to the fleet with which we sailed were sent to the bottom by German submarines. In one case the crew were stripped of their jerseys—the only article aboard the smack that seemed to appeal to the Hun—and left on deck while the submarine submerged under their feet. The one survivor's chief complaint appeared to be the loss of his jersey.
On more than one occasion a German submarine appeared in the midst of the fishing fleet, which they favoured as an unsuspected lurking-place. Warps were cut on the instant, and, under full sail, a hundred smacks might have been seen racing harbourward minus their gear. This became such a common occurrence that patrol boats were sent out with the fleet, and "forbidden areas" created.
These last were unpopular with fishermen. The authorities seemed to pitch inevitably on the most prolific grounds to place under the ban. Poaching became general. In one instance the skipper of a smack, who had had a bad "week's work," decided to make amends or perish in the effort. He altered the registered number of his boat, which is carried in large white figures on the mainsail and bow, with whitewash, burnt-corked the faces of himself and his crew, and sailed for the banned area.
For hours he trawled backward and forward across the holy ground, with dread and hope alternating in his heart, and with the first hint of dawn hauled in his net, to discover that in the general excitement he had "shot" his trawl with the cod-end untied!
Nothing daunted, he returned to the attack the following night, and as Fate the Jester so often decrees, on this occasion, when the cod-end was securely tied and all going well, the hated voice of the fisheries inspector, better known as the "bogey-man," came out of the night, close alongside: "You are reported for trawling in the proscribed area."