The wind was light, and they had only reached Hawk Island by six o’clock. So, not caring to risk another experience making Loon Island Harbour in the night, they anchored, and sailed over the next morning. They had provided bait for two days’ fishing before they left Southport, so they stood on past Loon Island Harbour and ran out direct to the fishing-grounds.
They had a fair afternoon’s fishing, and also set two short pieces of trawl, for hake, a few fathoms off from one of the reefs. Captain Sam had provided them with these. They were long lines, each with about a hundred hooks attached at intervals by short pieces of line. At either end of the trawl-line was a sinker, and also a line extending to the surface of the water where it was attached to a buoy. This, floating conspicuously on the water, would mark the spot where the trawl had been set.
Baiting these many hooks all along the trawl with herring, bought for the purpose at Southport, they set them at a point lying between two reefs, in about twenty-five fathoms of water, where Will Hackett had informed them there was a strip of soft, muddy bottom, a feeding-ground frequented by these fish.
Then they ran in to harbour with their catch of cod, and took them up to the trader’s wharf.
“We’re going to have some hake for you, too,” said Henry Burns. “That is, we expect to. What are you paying for hake these days?”
The trader, Mr. Hollis, eyed the young fisherman with an amused expression.
“Going right into the business, aren’t you?” he said. “Well, I like to see you young fellows with some spunk. Don’t fetch in so many that I can’t handle ’em,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye; “and if you underrun your trawls twice a day, so the fish will come in here good and fresh, I’ll pay you half a cent a pound. You’ll find it some work, though, when the sea is running strong. Got to take the fish off the hooks in the morning, and then underrun again at evening and bait up all the hooks for the night’s catch.”
“We’ll do that all right,” responded Henry Burns. “We’ll bring them in fresh.”
They put in hard, busy days now, rising at the first of daylight and going outside as soon as the wind would allow. They had only one dory with which to tend the trawls, so two of the boys usually tended one, and then the other two took their turn. It proved, indeed, hard work when the sea was high.
If the night’s catch had been good, the trawls came up heavy; and there was ever the danger, with the pitching of the boat, of running one of the innumerable hooks into the hands. But they soon became expert at it, learning how to sit braced in the boat and hold the trawl with a firm grasp, so that it might not slip through the hands, and how to unhook the fish.