"Log of the Deep-Sea Gamblers"

Transcripted from The Sunday Times Weekly Review article published on 4th June 1967. Article by Michael Moynihan.

Sunday Times writer Michael Moynihan lived with the trawler crew (above) on a month-long Atlantic voyage.?This is his log.?In it are the classic ingredients of the life-isolation, hard work, hope; gales, ice, shipwreck; and in the end, likely as not precious few fish to show for it all...

DAY ONE

At 12.30 p.m. MTV Ross Otranto, 880 tons, rusted from five years of deep-sea trawling, noses cautiously through the lock gates of St. Andrews Dock, Hull, into the Humber.?“Where to?” hails a voice from the dockside.?Skipper Ken Nielsen takes out his cigar, pokes his head from the bridge window and calls “Newfoundland.”?Then shrugs laconically: “Perhaps.”?The dockmaster makes an entry on his pad as casually as a London bus inspector logging a Number 9, Mortlake-bound.

Skipper Nielsen, six-foot-three, powerfully- built, one of the most experienced and respected in Hull (recent near-record ￡18,000 trip off Greenland; approx. ￡260,000 in 2022) greets me: “Can you gut a fish?”?The Mate, Dave Williamson, takes me below to a two-bunk cabin in the deck-hands' quarters.?Fixed table and bench, two lockers, no porthole, bare electric light, ventilator squirting tepid air: cramped and austere, but luxury, I’m told, compared with older trawlers.

Back on the bridge the Mate bursts in: “Eh, Skipper we’ve got a stowaway.”?This is a dockside “bum” who has probably followed a Deckie aboard for free booze.?Skipper’s immediate worry is his responsibility insurance-wise.?He decides to dump him at Scarborough or Aberdeen.?We are butting an angry North Sea, Skipper below, when a scruffy, pale-faced youth lurches on to the bridge, and leans back gripping the handrail.?Entering later, Skipper blazes at him: “Get off my bridge, you!” As the glazed-eyed stowaway doesn’t budge, Skipper hurls himself at him, seizing him by the jacket-lapels in a tightening grip.?The Mate joins in with a hand-chop.?Exit stowaway, violently.

In his cabin this evening Skipper, evidently tensed-up, reveals his quandary.?Should he make for Greenland and likely cod??Or should he take the biggest gamble in his 16 years as a Skipper and head for... he opens an atlas and stabs a finger on St. Mary’s Bay, South Newfoundland, some 2,400 miles from Hull.?“Halibut.?Every Skipper’s got his dream of a goldmine.?That’s my ‘X marks the spot.’”

If the rumoured halibut materialise, this could be the richest trip in trawling history.?If not-in this cut-throat industry every skipper can feel down his neck the avid breath of would-be successors dreaming of ￡10,000 a year.?“The Gaffers (owners) want fish, not excuses.”?Especially they want, for publicity and prestige purposes, the Silver Cod Trophy, awarded to the trawler the year’s highest tonnage.

Halibut or cod??Newfoundland or Greenland??Risk all or play safe?

DAY TWO

I am awakened at 6.30 a.m. by a cut in the relentless throb and hum of the diesel electric engines; and go on deck to a clear, chill morning.?From the harbour at Aberdeen the pilot cutter skims towards us.?The pilot gives a grudging hand to the stowaway, bleakly sober, as he jumps aboard, then hails Skipper on the bridge.?“Greenland?” Again a shrug: “Perhaps.”

Afternoon dinner (food substantial and varied), the Deckies invite me for a “dram” in one of the two adjacent four-berth cabins.?They are aged from 18 to 48; the oldest is an ex-Skipper, one of the many back where they started, who sits mostly silent, smoking his pipe.

Insurance regulations restrict the liquor allowance to half a bottle of duty-free rum and six cans of beer per man per trip.?The rate this lot is going it looks like it won’t last the day.?“That right you met Jayne Mansfield?” Sex, booze, four-letter words-the mixture is as expected.?But soon they are vying with grievances about what one calls “an existence not a life”.

With only two-and-a-half days ashore between trips averaging three weeks, ten days of this on the fishing grounds working 18 hours a day on deck in all weathers, theirs is a gruelling treadmill only tolerated for the pay.?With a basic wage of ￡12 6s 9d (approx. ￡200 in 2022), plus ￡6 12s 6d, for every ￡1,000 worth of fish caught (approx. ￡15,000 in 2022) they can average ￡25 a week on a good trawler (approx. ￡360 in 2022).?As “unskilled labour” they could not hope for comparable pay ashore.

The inadequacy of time off is easily the biggest grievance.

Married men particularly complain that they are relative strangers to their own children.?They urge a minimum three days between trips and double the number of paid holidays.?Other demands: increase of basic wage by ￡2 a week; provision of gear by the owners-with wear and tear, a Deckie can spend ￡50 (approx. ￡700 in 2022) a year on oil-skins, gloves and seaboots; provision of bedding and mattress - at present they have to bring their own.

They are highly critical of the “Gaffers” whom they see as ruthlessly exploiting casual labour, discarding men when they are physically played out.?It is felt that a trawlerman who has given years of service to the same firm should be found reasonable dockside employment instead of being reduced to labourer’s pay or the dole.

All the Deckies claim to be a member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, though some have not paid subs for months, none has been to a union meeting and they regard union officials largely out of touch with the realities of a trawlerman’s life.?Jeers greet “Sonny,” who for some time worked in a Hull factory, when he puts forward with almost missionary zeal, the idea of a crew’s “shop steward” holding “properly constituted” meetings on trips.?“You get up and say, ‘Brothers, I have a proposition to make-’.” “Brothers, the Mate’s called me a bastard.?Brothers, I propose a deputation to the old man…"

Bottles clutched against the increasingly violent lurching of the ship, they turn to accidents and gruesomely describe fingers sliced off or “filleted” in trawling gear.?Ted boasts 26 stitches in his head in an Iceland hospital after being unconscious for two days.?Derek recalls a self-inflicted wound he witnessed – a Deckie-learner so miserable that he broke a finger in an iron door in order to be put ashore.

This evening in Skipper’s cabin, legs are braced against the next stomach-raising lurch when the Mate looks in: “It’s piping out there, Skipper.”?Up to the bridge.?Clinical-looking instruments gleaming in the dim light-automatic pilot, radar, fish-detector-and the intermittent cacophony from the wireless room where “Sparks” sits, ear-phoned, on his bolted-down chair, give a desirable sense of permanence.

In a Force 7 gale, waves rear and topple with a shuddering crash on the foredeck.?Ben Brenner, the Bosun, at 54 the oldest man aboard, with 40 years of seafaring behind him, indicates a light flashing on the port bow in the howling night.?“Cape Wrath.?Last sight of land until-wherever we’re going... “

DAYS THREE TO FIVE

In your bunk at night, curtains drawn to give an illusion of security, the sounds of the battened-down ship are heard inextricably mingled with the sounds of the near-continuous gale she is riding.?Poundings, whistlings, thuddings, splashing, bangings, gurglings, ratlings, creakings.?But surely that sound like calico being ripped is the raging, forced-back sea-a hands-breadth away through the Formica-lined steel plating, icy to the touch?

It is a crazy world by day, every movement timed to the lurching, heaving rolling, sudden shattering bumps.?The proximity of handrails, ladders, levers, doorhandles, table edges, bolted seats becomes essential knowledge.?Even putting on trousers can be a kind of short-lived Cossack dance.

From the bridge the ship is seen as something alive, and very much kicking.?A grey-green wave 40 feet high rears its foam-fangs above the bows, poises and strikes.?The crashing deluge rebounds from the gear-littered foredeck and leaps 25 feet to pound against the double-glazed, plate-glass windows.?Through swirls of seawater the bows can be seen miraculously coming up for air, ready for the next.

“No vessel afloat is as sturdy as a trawler,” claims Skipper.?Beaufort Scale description of a Force 10: “Seldom experiences inland; trees uprooted, considerable damage occurs.”

In his unbolted cabin armchair, Skipper every now and again toboggans down the red-carpeted floor into the fixed table as we talk of Mediterranean beaches and the best route by car from Hull to Monte Carlo.?He is thinking of a villa near there in July with his wife and four children-no problem with earnings last year of over ￡8,000 (approx. ￡115,000 in 2022) he puts ￡1,000 a year aside in insurance against that always problematical future.

The Mate, Cook (Stan Fenton) and Sparks (Dave Walker) take holidays when the goings good.?Stan the ship’s joker, with the sad white face of a clown, dilates on the friendship he struck up with a retired Indian Colonel and wife on a Spanish holiday.?“Playing at millionaires now and then, you can put up with all this...”

Below decks, like the widow’s cruse of oil, the liquor ration is still holding out.?Joining one session, I am greeted by Tom, only 18, but toothless, with the glittering eye of an Ancient Mariner: “No Union.?No Fish.?Sex.”

Sex is the all-absorbing topic.?Even in Scrabble dirty words count double.?“Beano” and “Dandy” are far outnumbered by “blue” magazines.?Pin-ups are not pinned up but passed around as among connoisseurs.

Passed around in quite a different way are well-thumbed snapshots of “Our lass.”?Home reminiscences have none of the blurred edges of a night out in St. John’s or a dockside “awg-gy.”?They are eloquent with exactly remembered minutiae.

Bill Irvine, Chief Engineer, aged forty-eight, toothless, in a greasy vest, talks non-stop for forty minutes about his wife and two sons.?“First night home our lass’ll get out the bit of paper-got all the accounts on it, we’ll go through them and I’ll ask, ‘Any bills lass?’ ‘Electricity she’ll mebbie say.?So much... Then I’ll know where we stand.?Later we’ll be passing the shops, I’ll see summat and say ‘Fancy that lass?’ ‘Eh, we can’t afford that, lad!’ ‘D’yer fancy it? ‘Ere, ‘ave it.’ I’m the ‘appiest alive pleasing our lass.?When I’m leaving, I’ll take the wad of notes from my pocket, give them ‘er, then slap two quid on top.?‘Ere, get yourself a perm, I’ll say.”

Skipper has decided on Hull-Rotterdam rather than Hull-Dover-Calais.?Also, on halibut.?So, we’re Newfoundland-bound-after that goldmine.

DAY SIX

Canadian radio warning that a hurricane (Force 12) is moving easterly from Chicago.?To ride it out Skipper orders ballast water pumped from for’ard tanks.

Evening.?No hurricane and wind abated to Force 6.?But faulty engine has created a new problem.?With ballast water gone, it is necessary to use, for cooling purposes, water needed for boiling cod and halibut livers.?We must now replenish the water supply.?St. John’s is iced up.?Heading for St. Pierre.

DAY SEVEN

Sunrise and a scene of chilling beauty: ice, ice everywhere; a painted ship (how Rembrandt-rich rust can glow!) on a frozenly painted ocean.?The ice shimmers from the Newfoundland coastline to the horizon like something Walt Disney might have dreamed up for an Arctic Fantasia – but with music less sinister than the crunch, crack, swish, of Otranto’s bows carving through.

In the chart-room The Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot (published by the Hydrographer of the Navy) contains 17 pages of pictures and 30 of text on ice.?Varieties include brash, close pack, consolidated pack, open pack, very open pack, very close pack, frazil, pancake, hummocked, young, rotten,?“The most serious danger is that caused by pressure of the ice on a vessel, which may result in the crushing of the hull or the nipping off of the ship’s bottom...”

And. Under “Precautions when best”: “No material injury is likely to occur to the crew of the vessel if they are on the alert and prepared beforehand, the boats being placed on the ice, furnished with provisions, clothing and portable fuel...”

This is pancake ice and gives Skipper few qualms.?After five laborious hours he steers us into open water.

DAY EIGHT

St. Pierre: a straggling main street of wooden buildings, sidewalks powdered with snow, narrow cobbled alleys giving a faintly Continental flavour.?Status symbol the pram.?Severely-dressed matrons are seemingly pushing them in all directions, large and small, deluxe and utility.

The small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were retained by French settlers under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.?De Gaulle is expected here enroute to the Montreal World Fair.

Entente cordiale in a well-stocked café.?Souvenir hunt.?The proprietress of one shop asks where we are from.?“Hull? Ah oui, it is near to Quebec.”?“No, no, Madam,” says Stan the Cook reprovingly.?“’Ull, England.?‘Ull, Yorkshire, England.”?She gazes incredulously at the scruffy Otranto in the harbour below.?“From England??In that little boat?”

DAYS NINE TO ELEVEN

“Hoist away!” The winch chugs and after two and a half hours dragged along the seabed the dripping, bulging “cod-end” of the net swings over the foredeck.?From the bridge Skipper watches intently as the mate tugs at the slip-knot and the feebly writhing contents cascade into the fish-pound.?A mere half-dozen halibut (one a six-stoner worth a good ￡10 on the market (approx. equivalent to ￡140)).?Poor quality cod.?A good deal of “rubbish” - dabs, lung-fish, and so on- to be chucked back.

Three days and nights down the east side of Placentia Bay, up and down St. Mary’s Bay, we seek in vain.?As the occasional flat white bulk of gutted halibut slithers the shoot into the fish-hold, Skipper, a worried man now, mutter: “The waifs and strays...”

DAY TWELVE

10 p.m. Urgent summons from the cabin to the bridge.?Going through ice again.?Skipper, in an unwonted state of agitation, leads down to his cabin, flops in a chair.?“Never had anything like this before.”?He throws out of his hands with a helpless kind of laugh.?“It could be a question now of saving the ship.”

His dream of halibut abandoned; he has steamed from St. Mary’s Bay to find dangerously heavy ice-floes originating from Labrador drifting in from the South-East.?His intended route in that direction to the Grand Banks and cod is now impassable.?Masses of lighter ice are also coming in from the South.?

To return to the Bay (where a small merchantman has taken shelter) would risk being iced up there, perhaps dangerously, perhaps for weeks.

We are now steaming West through ice stretching as far as the eye can see, and heavier that that we came through earlier.?But the possibility of being beset is not Skipper’s preoccupation.?What he fears is a strong Southerly swell that could bring those heavy floes within range.?A floe weighing hundreds of tons, lifted on the crest of a heavy swell, could “toboggan” down with impact enough to smash through the hull.

From the bridge, the white wilderness, luminous in the afterglow, seems to heave with a purposeful menace.?Otranto’s bows shoulder through the honeycomb of rifts at two knots.?“Ice covering seven to eight-tenths must be traversed throughout at slow speed, so that any impacts should not damage the hull.” states the “Pilot”.?“At night, navigation becomes extremely difficult, as it is impossible to decide the best route through the ice...”

“Ah, we’ll be all right, you can trust this Skipper,” says the galley-boy Bob, my ebullient Geordie cabin-mate.

But in the bunk below him, curtains drawn, blankets wedged against that chilling Formica, it is impossible not to concentrate on the ship’s slow, grinding battle with the pack-ice-rubbing up against the ship’s sides just out there like Something trying to get in.?The worst moments come when a heavy bump shudders down the length of the ship and the engines stop.

Once, Otranto’s bows are lifted on to the back of a particularly heavy floe.?For twenty minutes she rides it until her weight avails, the floe cracks and falls apart and she gropes on.

But that Southerly swell does not materialise.?Twelve hours after entering the ice we break clear.

DAY FOURTEEN

5 p.m. Another summons to the bridge.?“If you want a story all over your Sunday Times This may be it.?I hope not.”?In dense fog some three miles to our starboard two Hull freezer-trawlers have collided.

For two days and nights now “ghost-ships” have been trawling in our vicinity in fog enveloping the Grand Banks.?Their existence is only betrayed foghorns mournfully bellowing at each other, on the radar where they are seen as shifting green blobs, and by the cackle of chatter on the intership radio-telephone.

On a trawler bridge, particularly on freezers away for eight weeks or more at a stretch, the radio-telephone is more than an aid to navigation and fishing.?It is a lifeline between lonely, bored and often worried men, barred by their office from too much matiness with their subordinates, knowing that to the “Gaffers” they are only as good as their last trip.?The voices of Joe, Ray, Arthus, Norman and the rest have become a familiar background to the fog-watch, swopping notes on trawls made or prospected, often just yarning.?Now there is a different ring to them.

Othello (steaming) swerving to avoid Illustrious (trawling) has been hit amidships.?Believed badly damaged.?Operating in tight pack of five freezers.?If she goes down rescue operations for the crew of twenty-six in visibility nil will be hazardous.

The salty Yorkshire voices come through our bridge loudspeaker a little breathily, but well under control.?A sense of urgency is most marked by the comparative absence of four-letter words.

“How you doing now?”

“Can’t get to the engine room for the... smoke.?Dynamo’s still going so can’t have taken much water”

“We’ll come alongside when you know what you want.”

“This visibility’s not too... bright”

“I’ll hold a bit and see what she does”

“Seems to be on a level keel now, don’t know why”

“Would you like a motor-raft to take some of your men aboard??We could ferry back and forwards.”

Skipper interprets as it proceeds.?In the early stages, when it was not known how much water Othello’s engine room was taking in, it has been treated as a “May Day” emergency.?The offer of a motor-raft from Freebooter has been accepted and some half of Othello’s crew taken aboard.?The rest are left in case they are needed to fix a towing-line from another trawler.

Eventually Othello is able to make for St. John’s under her own steam with an escort vessel.?Also proceeding there are Illustrious with damaged bows, and Freebooter – to land the men who didn’t need rescuing after all.

DAYS FIFTEEN TO TWENTY-ONE

The Grand Banks.?The cod would seem to be elsewhere.?Greenland, in fact- news has come that the trawler Somerset Maugham, last year’s trophy winner, has netted a record ￡21,000 on the Hull market with Greenland cod (approx. ￡300,000 in 2022).

For Skipper, who gets 10% of net profits after expenses of the trip have been deducted, the fact that we will now be four weeks out is an added worry.?He is visibly strained, almost obsessed, snatching cat-naps between three-hourly trawls, sustained at times only on raw eggs, tea and tranquilisers.

For the Deckies the fact that this has been an ”easy” trip – nothing worse than fog and rai – is countered by those dwindling bonuses.?Over 18-hour stretches on deck, hauling and shooting gear, gutting fish, they have impressively emerged as disciplined members of a team, tough, agile, alert.?“Unskilled labour” seems a quite inadequate description for such a deft, danger-fraught manipulation of ten tons of intricate trawling gear.

Sober, appetited trebled, off duty almost demurely playing Scrabble, Canasta, dominoes, they are no longer so identifiable with what J.B. Priestly once called “a race apart, perhaps the last wild men of this tamed island of ours.”

DAY TWENTY-TWO

“Well, we’ve had almost everything else thrown at us – we might have expected this,” days Skipper.?“This” is a heavily-rusted cylindrical object. Some four feet long, that thudded amid the cod onto the fish-pound after one of the last trawls.?A Deckie rolls it to the port side and lashes it to a stanchion.

It is beginning to dry out in the sunshine when the Bosun examines it.?He feels through a gash in the side, finds crystals forming and gets a hosepipe playing on it.?The Skipper orders it thrown immediately overboard.?A depth-charge.

Three years ago the trawler St. Herbert hauled up a similar object.?It, too was lashed up and left.?It exploded.?The Mate in the fish hold and Deckies on the foredeck were killed.?The Skipper, at a bridge window has his face smashed and died in the lifeboat, lowered as the ship began to sink.

DAY TWENTY-FIVE

Nearing the Outer Hebrides after the smoothest of Atlantic crossings.?Ben the Bosun and Bill the Chief Engineer share a 22nd wedding anniversary.?Fresh salmon for dinner – we freakishly landed an eight-pounder.?Stan had a Sunday Times Magazine 1964 cutting of Robert Carrier salmon recipes ever since he had to cope with the last.?No white wine to cook it in, but a pre-dinner, saved-up bottle of St. Pierre champagne to drink an anniversary toast.?Bill missing.?Stan goes to the engine-room to fetch him, comes back: “’E won’t come.?Just standing there – tears pouring down his face.”

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT

Back through the lock-gates to St. Andrews Dock.?The Illustrious is there, having her bows seen to.?Ordered taxis waiting for all the crew.?Mad scramble to get away, to use every moment of shore leave, quietly or riotously, to forget the sea until, in three days, it calls them back.

In his spacious dockside office, Mr Tom Hudson, chief “Gaffer” says: “Sorry you had a disastrous trip.?Not like Nielson...”

MORNING AFTER

7.30 a.m.?The Fish Market.?Overalled merchants, in heavy clogs to grip against fish-slime, gather round the serried ranks of kits.?Six of the largest halibut are laid out for individual sale.?A merchant fingers the fins of that six-stoner.?“They’d be spread out if it had real flesh on it,” he says, disapprovingly.?But it fetches ￡9 10s.?The whole lot fetches ￡6,500 (approx. ￡90,000 in 2022).?Reasonable, in the circumstances.

Transcripted from The Sunday Times Weekly Review article published on 4th June 1967. Article by Michael Moynihan.