19> The March of the Spidercrabs

The coast and sea south of Aberystwyth looks bare and vast after the waters here in North Pembrokeshire.
Paddling a kayak there looks like it might feel dispiriting. A wide empty horizon to paddle towards, like walking down a long, straight road, can sap the soul.

When you get to know a bit of sea as a hunter, it’s not so bad, as you build up a mental map of different bits of ‘ground’, to the extent that you start to feel when you are on certain locations, without even having to take a bearing. You feel at home, even if you don't think much of the neighbourhood.

But there’s no denying that some landscapes are relatively featureless, and accordingly barren.
Not all deserts, of sea or on land, are man-made.

There is a gleeful, klondike feeling when you find a good patch. But there can be a corresponding dread when you come to its edge, and sense the desert beyond.
That dread is heavily spiced by your latent guilt as a plunderer. Are you being greedy? You get to smell when to move on. You keep catching the same undersize lobster.
The ground will recover more quickly too if you don't hammer it.

Though you haven't got to take on board all the current collective shame about what we have done to the Planet.
There's a lot of it flying about.
Often it's thinly disguised urban moral superiority, peppered with envy.

Think of Eden as Local.
It is a garden for you to tend, not an entire planetary ecosystem to fret for.





Taking blame for the totality not only blights your adventure, which is the Earth’s gift, but maintains the old, imperious patterns we need to escape from.

See Ecological Guilt as a re-run of Original Sin.

Someone out there is trying to disempower you.





A lot of the present-day barren tracts of monoculture sitka spruce and rye-grass were probably relatively featureless areas of scrub-oak and prairie beforehand. They would be hard and soulless places to pioneer new communities in.
The endless moraine-strewn seabed off Aberystwyth has encouraged the large-scale potting for crabs, whelks and prawns, and would not suit smaller fishing operations, that need richer returns.

I went to the harbour in Aberystwyth. Fishing there has moved into another league going by the amount of gear stacked up on the quay.

Outside of the narrow strip of rocky ground where I fish my kayak here, seems to be a vast desert of sand, inhabited by a few hermit-crabs. I was wondering about netting it, for plaice & sole, and with a bigger mesh for skate. The advice I got was not to bother, but to stick to netting for bass & mullet.
The reason being that there is a plague of spider crabs, who march ever further north every year. There were meant to be so many in North Wales this Summer, they were walking up the beaches... well, that might have been added for dramatic effect.






If you set a tangle net, you get spider crabs. They’re not worth much, but there’s so many that doesn’t seem to matter in the culture that fishes by numbers. Some fishermen are even putting bigger entrances in their pots to catch the bigger, cock crabs.

Now, I don’t want to catch spider crabs. I find something spooky about them.

The other plague out there is dogfish. I knew about that one: I caught about a dustbin-full of them in a net once, but have just been catching them singly here. So that rules out plaice nets.

I am disappointed.




My old “rats and dogfish” theory came to mind. This observes that we have brutalised eco-systems, so that omnivorous, aggressive species thrive, and specialist ones die out. This theory extends to human culture too.
I hope its not really like that. If it is we need to make something better equally infectious.

One answer would be to start eating the rats and dogfish...

Perhaps I will have learn a bit of rod-fishing after all.

18> What Kayak...

Landing in that haven set me to thinking.

My ‘home’ beach is surf-bound in northerlies, and we seem to be getting them more often nowadays.




The bay that I took refuge in floods on a big tide but I could hoist a light kayak up the cliff onto a safe ledge.
From there, I could work a net in the nearby bay, sheltered from whatever surf raged past outside, in a milky, perfect fishing sea.

I suppose what I need is an unsinkable, sea-going coracle.

I occurs to me that St David and the rest of his mob of saints, were the first extreme sportsmen.
They built crazy, fun boats out of skin and wattle, and jumped off cliffs, letting the current take them wherever the Lord felt their purpose lay, 'blown by the winds of the spirit".
His Church is set on a beautiful, sea-enthralled peninsula.



I here pronounce him the patron saint of Kayakers and Surfers.



The search for a suitable boat has taken me back to the Internet, trawling through kayak types, looking at carrying capacity, weight, stability, cost, and colour.


Websites are incredibly patchy in how they present information. Most kayaks are from USA, so that’s where you get most detail. The trouble is the range there is not always available here.

Colour does signify, if I intend to keep this boat on a cliff in a remote bay. The trouble is, its spec is that of a fun-boat, and they tend to come in colours that scream "look-at-me".
Cost is even more of an issue buying a second kayak. I suppose the children will love it in the summer, if it doesn’t smell too fishy.
Weight, because of pulling it up the cliff, and stability & capacity because of hauling and emptying a net. I reckon 40lb is handleable, or will feel so after the Prowler's 69lb.
There mustn’t be any ‘snags’ for the net to catch on, on you or the boat. This includes zips, buttons, toggles, even knots.

I suspect that the boat for my purpose doesn’t exist, so whatever I get will be a compromise.

It needs a big well, with a lot of buoyancy upfront. The seat should be far back, but with sufficient fish storage behind. It has to be ‘beamy’ -both for stability and capacity.
I actually prefer to kneel, both while paddling and hauling gear, so I want seat space sufficient for that.

The candidates I’ve come up with so far are the Wilderness Systems ‘Ripper’, the Cobra ‘Play’, the Malibu Mini X, and the Ocean Kayak ‘Frenzy’.

The going rate for this type of boat is £300, but you can pick them up secondhand, as they get hired out as surf-boats.

The Malibu Mini X costs too much, about £430, though its probably the most stable. I considered one before I got the Prowler, but it hadn’t enough deck for potting.
The ‘Play’ looks like a good boat, but I’d have to venture into that beauty-spot, Port Talbot to see one.
I like the lines of the Ripper, but suspect it hasn’t enough body to hold the weight. I have arranged to try one in Cardigan next week; but I’ll have to forego practicing with a net, as the Teifi is a major salmon river!
I only just noticed the 'Frenzy' which looks robust and stable enough, with ample weight capacity.
There’s a Surf Shop in Newgale who will have one, so I might be able to try one out.

When you look at the lines of traditional fishing boats, they reflect the kind of seas they meet: west-coast boats have higher raked bows and more free-board than east-coast craft; unless that is, they are beach-launched, like the 'coble', which has to battle through swells.

I suspect that the lines of the various sit-ons reflect the seas they were designed to encounter: Wilderness Systems from the East Coast, Ocean Kayak from the Gulf, and Cobra, from the Pacific.

The Cobra range appeal to me, as they have loads of free-board, unlike the Wilderness range, which seem a bit scanty for a choppy sea. The Ocean Kayak family are seemingly 'just right' for my coast, with a good girth, but not sitting too high out of the water.


If you fish, you are going to need to haul heavy things in over the side.
So the main considerations are STABILITY and weight CAPACITY. That means simply a wide, fat-sided boat
People rave about how stable the Tarpon range are, but to me they look too narrow and shallow in draft. They are probably OK for mackerel-fishing, but not this work.
The Cobra Fish'n'Dive XF looks like a perfect boat, in terms of girth, capacity, and price. It sounds a bit sluggish though.
I am an unrepentant Prowler Big Game owner (Don't all these boats have silly "I'm-a-real-man" names!) and am happy, apart from the footrests that are weak and snag things and the forward hatch & straps (the wilderness peel-off hatches are loads better).



The Ocean Kayak range is a mess, with lots of craft almost capable of the same things as others. The boats themselves are great though.
I reckon your boat has to be over 30 inches wide, with 300lb capacity once you are in it, which narrows the field to the Drifter and Prowler Big Game.
The Caper might be OK with a short net or single pot, but wouldn't deal with one laden or snagged.

Don't feel you need to get the 'Angler' version of any boat you like, as all you get is a couple of rod holders that you can easily fit yourself (if you want them), and less choice of colours.
"Outfitted" ones turn a perfectly good hull into a plastic clothes-peg, hung with of expensive toys-for-boys.


Reviews can be useful, though most of the ones online are from over-large, over-enthusiastic Americans.






In the end,
You just have to leap off your Cliff of Choice
blown by the Winds of the Spirit.

May St David be with you!!

17> Luck Management

I bottled out yesterday.

After poring over the forecast, I had set a net. It promised a lull in the winds, long enough for that.
I left it 24 hours, then went down. It was a lot rougher than forecast.
There was a thwacking surf hitting the beach, with a strong undertow. The biggest waves came in bunches, so I had to time when to slide the kayak into the sea to a likely lull . I got through, but one wave was just about to break when I rode it.

The net buoy was close in to the rocks. I had to pull in fast. There were fish alright. But also a mass of weed. The worst is the kelp roots. It was soon apparent the weight of weed and fish was too great to try and go through that surf with.

(A lesson here has to be only to set a net of a size that you and your kayak can handle in such circumstances.)

Luckily, there was a sheltered cove close-by. I decided to go ashore there to sort it all out.
There were 10 bass amongst the weed. It would take too long to clean the net of all that weed, and I was losing daylight. The tide would soon flood the cove’s beach.
I decided to tie the boat as far up the cliff as I could, stash the net, and climb the cliff with the catch.

I just felt that I had used up my quota of luck that day.

Luck is a big player in your life once you go to sea.
She should command your respect. She is a true, pagan Goddess. Give her heed.
Risk is a poor substitution: the invention of the industrial age of Fear and Reason.

Luck relishes our spirit of adventure. Encourages our bravery. She can bring success in seemingly impossible circumstances. She empowers us.

Risk muffles us in safe swaddling. Encourages doubt and inaction. He describes this world as an intrinsically hostile place. He disempowers.





His Executive are sniffing through our lives seeking to suffocate spontaneity wherever they find it, like a new Inquisition.)



I had got out through those waves.
I had recovered the net. I had a bag full of bass.
I was alive.
I decided not to push my luck.




I will have to do that
another day.

16> Discards

When I first set a gill net I was unaware of the stuff other than seaweed and fish already tangled up in it.

By law, it is illegal to set a net that might impede the movement of migratory fish. A Water Authority/landowner inspired rule to protect King Salmon and Prince Sewin.
The Sea Fishing Authorities resent this somewhat, for interfering on their pitch.
Under this law, potentially any net set at sea is illegal.



Obviously there has developed a compromise on this.
There are seasonally forbidden zones around river mouths. "Red" areas. This is based on the belief that salmon tend to lurk around the mouth of their home river, waiting for conditions to be right for migration upstream.

If you do catch Salmon, you have to throw them back.

DEAD OR ALIVE.





Should you be caught with a ‘naughty’, as the fishermen called them, all gear that was instrumental to the offence could be confiscated: As well as net and boat, they could seize your car.
Where I was fished, we had a water bailiff of the highest order. His patience and persistence in pursuit of miscreants was legendary.

I have left a fine dead fish for the gulls on a drizzly beach miles from anywhere, at three in the morning, in the belief that he could be lurking behind a bush.

I still mourn the fish I had to “discard”.
I hated the waste.
If they were in nets I’d set at sea, I tried using them for bait. I even ate some raw. I threw back live ones, only to be told that they would probably die later from infection in the net wounds.
I was caught in a moral tangle.

I wrote to the Water Authority, pointing out how immoral and counter-productive the situation was. Netsmen discarded ‘naughties’ surreptitiously, in case the Water Authority extended the forbidden “red” zones to embrace that spot.
It was a classic ‘policemen and plunderers’ scenario.

I suggested a ‘tallybag’ scheme.
Under it, netsmen would be issued with numbered, sealable bags. If they caught a salmon, it was their duty to take it to an agreed location; perhaps the local shop’s freezer. From there it could be collected by the Authority and auctioned. The money could go to help restocking. The netsman would be paid a token amount for participating.
If bags went missing, they would have to account for them. A salmon not in a bag would be contraband.
I couldn’t see any serious flaws in this plan. It would stop the waste, remove the moral dilemma, and reveal the numbers being caught.

The Authority would have none of this, dismissing my idea without any detailed discussion.
Poor law encourages "authoritism'> the blind, unquestioning enforcement of Law for Law's sake.

Once I caught such a fine cock salmon I hadn’t the heart to waste him. It was a blustery day, but there was a solitary figure on the beach. I went in close with my boat, and flung the fish at his feet, shouting that it was a present, and not to say where it came from.

That night, he held a barbeque, and word of the generous grey boat was broadcast wide.
If news of it reached the bailiff, he left me alone. There would probably have been a salmon-eaters revolt if he had intervened!

Law should encourage individual morality and group co-operation for the greater good.
Regulations that encourage 'discard' discourage both.


Law has to embody respect for the spirit of Life.

Even when that life is lying stiff in my net.

15> Beachcombing

Went to Mwnt
on a short walk and was amazed at the amount of debris on such a small beach.

The principle drama was provided by the scattered remains of a set of homemade prawn pots. The main strand-line was the usual tangle of seaweed and green, braided twine and trawl net, indispersed with countless plastic bottles.
We have seemingly invoked a God of Plastic, who has decreed that all our food and drink shall touch his lips.

There were some pretty useful lengths of pot-rope and salveable twine amongst it all.
I set to work.

What does the sheer quantity of discarded fishing material signify?

-That plastic is just too cheap. I can remember buying thin, twisted polyprop net rather than chunky braided stuff on account of the cost.
-That fishing effort has increased. This could be true both in the sheer amount of gear to be lost and mended, and the more extreme conditions and risks it is subjected to.
Also, if you have paid for a license, you maybe feel a need to maximize return by fishing longer.

The key choice a fisherman makes is how long to fish for.

I am dabbling. I would hate to lose my pots but it wouldn’t threaten my income. I will fish until it’s too late & I’ve lost them, or they wander around so often and catch so little, that I bring them in until the Spring.

Many ‘day-boats’ used to just fish the summer. From March, say, to September. The amount of gear and ground they worked did not offer a good enough return in the colder, wilder months.
The share fishermens’ dole was a safer bet. They would gladly pace out the long winters mending and making-do.
If it were still like that,I would have had competition for the pickings on Mwnt beach.



Now though, they fish more lobster pots, and winter prawn potting has become viable. Now there’s no time to make pots, and even if there was, not the number they now work.
Fishing is a more industrial, specialist activity. Time is money.
If its broke, sling it.

Well, it makes things easier for a small fisherman.
We don’t have to buy any rope or buoys.



The next trick would be to work out a way of rendering all that plastic down into a form we could mould our boats from!

.

14> Losing the Plot

Things shift. Conditions change. We glance away and lose the plot.

We had two blows from the Northwest last week.

Quick howlers, that piled up a lot of spectacular surf, and threw loads of plastic debris up on the beach.
Northwesterlies never usually last long enough though. On the second and third days of one, after the plastics tide, rich pickings of sawn timber can come in.

I still had four pots out and feared for them.

There was no sign of one pair when I first looked. It was the afternoon.
(I use “litre” buoys, that are the best for our scale of things. You can see them, they are cheap, and they don’t ‘bolero’ the pots on in a surge. They don’t affront the full-timers, either by their grandeur or invisibility.)

If you want look out for pot buoys on the western seaboard, do it in the morning. The light is shining on them.

The pair I found were empty and had had a good scraping.

I found the lost pots after the second blow.
I went out early and saw both pairs a long way out to the east.

That fisherman had told me gear got pulled towards Dinas Head.
Every now and then you meet someone who’s every word proves to be a gem.

I set a net yesterday, with little expectation.
The wind has gone southerly which is offshore here.
Offshore means dead fishing.

It was in a cove that I feel is special. I went back to it this morning.
I had caught two wrasse, three bass, and a doggie.

I send my thanks to the cove.

The dogfish is welcome as bait. They look weird in the net, their mouths forced open like gargoyles.
I kept one wrasse, for fish-pie, and let the other go. I regard them as caretakers of a place.

The bass are culinary silver bullion.
I sacrificed some meshes to get them out. If there’s any chance, try and squeeze them through rather than take them back. Loads of net can bunch up in their razor-sharp gills.
I wonder whether to set nets again in duplicate conditions.

(Offshore calm/waning tide/overnight/before a forecast blow. I must get organised and write notes of catches and conditions on my tidetable)

Am wondering as well about those prodigal pots.
If I let them wander further, where would they end up?
South of Aberystwyth, there is a trench in the seabed they called ‘The Gutter’ that absorbed a lot of lost gear. A fleet of pots would get bunched up by a storm, and then drop into this deep gully.
They eventually came in as tightly wound as footballs

Does Dinas host a similar black-hole? Where does the stuff from it get cast up?
I need to go and find my fisherman guru.

My fingers are cold. My pots wander.
Perhaps I am losing the plot.

It doesn't take long to do so with the sea. Things change so fast.
That's why you feel so good when you get it right.

We had a bass for supper tonight.
I remind myself,

that is the real plot.

13> Reality as what Works

I picked up a wide variety of theories about the movements of lobsters amongst the fishermen of Aberystwyth when I hung round there, hungry for such morsels.



The principle debate was whether lobsters were nomads or settlers.

The Nomadists saw them migrating with the seasons to appropriate places, for food and reproduction. They fed on what they chanced upon.
The Holeists saw the availability of a territory, with an appropriate safe lair, as main goal of a lobster. When established there, they would venture out to feed when they were hungry.

Because that was the crux of it. A hungry lobster is a customer.

There was even one fisherman would believed that lobsters travelled around clinging to the underside of icebergs.
He never really made it clear how that worked in Cardigan Bay.
That didn’t matter; the intention was to understand the movements of lobsters so as to catch them, which he did. Very successfully.

He had a working reality.

That’s what marks some people out. They don’t take current versions of things verbatim.
They work on the fringes of current information.




These quite often happen to be the nearest to the Nature of this world; for Civilization is, by definition, urbo-centric.

Farmers have always laughed quietly at the experts who came to advise them.

I used to see new marine biology students plotting species in the same, trampled group of pools on Castle Rocks every year, while my living as a winkle-picker took me to a twenty-mile territory of wild and diverse rock habitats that I got to know as intimately as if they were my back garden. Which in my need to understand them, they were.

Is it worrying how wide the gulf is between people in working, and those in data-based, virtual realities.
Parcels of the planet’s surface are identified, with all the best intentions, as having special status, and become prescribed zones.
All too often, they deteriorate even faster, lacking any close human relationships: any concerned, local attention.
People enter them as policemen or plunderers.

I think that indulging in guilt about what we have done to the Planet threatens to perpetuate our estrangement from it, and some acts in the name of conservation smell to me of guilt and blame.

Let’s remind ourselves that this is a loving, and abundant place to live.




That we can acknowledge its generosity by not taking more than we need.
And that others can, and will, do the same.

A new working reality.

12> What's it For?

There are 4 million bloggers in Britain now.

We are probably all too busy writing our own to read anyone elses.
Is it merely a new form of vanity publishing or a vent for stress?

I know I'm enjoying writing these pieces, and they do have a noble intent.
- I see a time coming shortly when we will need to settle into living more closely with the actual piece of Earth we are living on.
Not just as oil supplies shrink, but because present detached lifestyles are killing our spirit

And the Earth.

Part of that new-found intimacy will involve working on a 'peasant' scale again, on the land and sea.

A paddle-powered fishing fleet is a serious suggestion.


I am living in a valley that has been a hot-bed of such thinking.




A lair of dissent.

It was the home of that guru of self-sufficiency, John Seymour, and is the setting for Brithdir Mawr, a low-impact community.

It's so beautiful here, with the sea a few miles away, deciduous woods and old field patterns still in good heart, that it's relatively easy to envisage a positive future.


What we have to do is imagine it into being in places that have been damaged and sanitised by present practices.

I notice though how quickly things respond to our intentions once we express them. First we have to dare to imagine them.



This blog is hopefully part of that imagining.

11> Brothers Grim

The sea sets its mark on you.

Maybe, being at the whim of forces so immense, makes us more aware of how special and fragile our life is.



I went up to the Isle of Man on an old Lowestoft sailing trawler, the Keewaydin, recently, on the back of a near-gale, and noticed how the people back on shore looked as if they were only half alive, compared to the crew.

That old word ‘landlubber’ aptly describes the blobby formlessness of many non-sailors. Mall fodder.

I used to notice that local fishermen were more likely to be original in their thinking than most folk.

There was something fundamental about their pronouncements.
Perhaps their lonely hours at sea, one slip away from the fathomless, made them weigh things more carefully.

If you have an encounter with the sea that is more dramatic than most, the mark is emblazoned on you.
Like Harry Potter, you carried its vivid scorch.

A fisherman in Aberystwyth carried this mark as a pale intensity. His boat had run aground in a winter storm and he’d only escaped by by swimming ashore clutching a fender.

Even I got it.
I had tried once too often to sneak between some July gales, and got swept out on a sudden south-easterly.
The lifeboat from New Quay got me out of that predicament.

It was days later that the impact of the experience truly struck home.


There is another kind of mark that you need not let stain you.

It is easy to take on a grim callousness as you strain hard against wave and tide.
Fishing for a living, with its contradictory mix of human regulation and willful weather, can make fishermen surly and impatient and cruel.

The dictum of uncertainty is to take as much as you can get.
Our culture has never encouraged the economy of its smaller farmers, fishermen, or foresters.

Also the crabs and lobsters who crunch each other blindly, and the fish who eat any other if they will fit in their jaw do not set an example of natural kindness to follow.

I am a different man from the one who first fished off a beach in Llanrhystud. I cannot justify greed by need to provide.
More than that, my connection to natural places feels stronger.

Moving to Pembrokeshire was me forcing to change.




I appreciate the sea, the coast and the forest as magical and sacred.
If I catch a lobster or bass from a particular place it is a gift.

Part of us knows this all along. Expedience lets us deny it.

All the time though, that old grimness is there.
Like a worn spanner, it is probably worth keeping to hand.

Just in case.



If you're looking for work,
Try and find something better
Today you can't shirk
-What's tomorrow's weather...

You're better as clerk
Typing a boring letter

Than dreading the dark
Will shorten your measure.

[the winkle song]

10>Baptism

Don’t laugh.
I fell in.

After a summer of north winds, we settled into a long, calm spell.
It’s been useless for netting, perhaps because the sea is so clear; anyway the fish seem to go quiet.
I have been watching windguru for a nice little blow: one not too long and hard to risk the net being lost or unreachable.

A net left too long is a stuff of nightmares.
Fish go in, die and the net sinks down. If that wasn’t waste enough, crabs and lobsters are attracted to the carcasses. Crabs are nigh impossible to extract from a net in one piece. So more carnage.
Don’t set a net without doing all you can to predict the weather. Make sure you can jump to it if the forecast changes, which it often does.

I saw a perfect window: a day of westerlies, due to die back after 24 hours. I went down that morning. The sea had picked up nicely.
In my excitement, I had forgotten my wetsuit, but went for it anyway. I wasn’t going out for long; it was already too rough to go further out to check the pots.

Now part of this exercise was to try myself and the kayak in some big waves.
I am still programmed to fear them. Going out through the surf was suitably hairy, but I was amazed at how quickly the cockpit drained of the water that crashed over the bow.
I was shaky though by the time it came to put out the net, as waves loomed around me as if threatening to break.

I leave some net anchors out at sea. They are net bags filled with stones on buoyed ropes. So the task was to tie the end of the net to the rope near the weight and feed it out of the bag, untwisting it as it paid out.

I muffed the first bit, and the buoy got caught up in the net, and went under. So when I got to the end of the net, I was concerned to make sure that didn’t happen again: so concerned that I toppled in when a bigger wave reared up!
I had been paying the gear out on the lee-side (not a good idea) so wasn’t braced for such an event.
Though getting wet is not something I do with relish, it was surprisingly pleasant. It only took two lunges to get myself back on board, though my clothes were very heavy.
I had to paddle quickly to pick up my sandals that were floating away, then headed back in feeling foolish.

Coming in is even scarier than going out, as you can't see the waves coming up behind you. You surf in with a wave, but then lose it, going sideways, to be capsized by the next one. Not only did the Prowler stay pretty straight, she didn't flip when I eventually got caught sideways by a wave.

I went back out to the net that afternoon, with the wetsuit this time.
The tide was out, so the surf was much worse and extended further out.
I certainly wouldn’t have gone out if it wasn’t for the net.
That kayak is amazing. It went through wave after wave; hardly hesitating under the shock of each deluge. I thought I’d made it when a wave like a shed appeared. I paddled into it and shut my eyes!
We were through.

As I worked along the net I saw a seal at the far end. Unless you are going to move a net in, there is no need to bring it aboard - just pull along it, lifting it up occasionally as you go. (Unless its a very deep one, you will see any fish in it. You can often feel their weight as well.)

The seal was having a go at the only fish in the net: a bass. I just shouted Oi! and he looked up, amazed, and dived away.

It was a perfect, milky sea by now, and I’d overcome some of my fears, so left the net there overnight.

It was well worth it. The sea had abated by morning, but I had 7 fine bass, a size lobster and two fat pollack.
The seal had had a chew out of one of the pollack, but I couldn’t begrudge that.
The worst scenario is when you come back to a net containing nothing but a bass-less head!

I pulled the net in. Enough is enough. Anyway, the sea died that day back to a clear calm.




That’s the first time I have caught “school” bass. I gutted them on the beach, and their stomachs contained soft crab, pipefish, some other small fish, and a prawn.
I could imagine them as a pack, rushing through the rough cloudy water, grabbing prey blinded by the turmoil.

It has fired me up into the idea of actively net-fishing the surf.

The beach I launch from isn’t ideal for that, as it collects a lot of weed that hangs about close-in.
It’s worth tuning into how much seaweed is floating around before you put out a net. Just after rough weather is bad. Neaps are best, as the weed gets ‘stranded’.

Stripping the weed out of a net is a thankless task, and the additional weight of it is no joke in a sit-on.

The occasional silver beauty makes it all worthwhile though!

9> Loose Ends

To set the pot you need a float, and some rope.

Two floats are best, so the tide has got something to pull on, leaving the other exposed. Check if there are any local fishery bye-laws about colour etc.



The amount of rope depends on where you intend to set the pot.
If you are ‘rock-dodging’ - setting the pot in gullies close inshore, you need only a few fathoms. (A fathom is an arms’ stretch) Too much will leave floating line to catch in unwary outboard props.
Off Llanrhystud, where I fished, the water was nine fathom for ages out, and so 12 fathom of rope was sufficient, but here the water is deeper and the tidal pull stronger, so I need more. I have been mean so far and am using 6mm rope, which might have a hidden advantage as it is pretty hard to pull up, so might discourage interference!

Setting pots singly is good for targeting favourable looking spots, and means you can fish amongst a load of other peoples’ gear without crossing their lines. The disadvantage is a single is more prone to move in rough weather.
The commercial inshore boats fish 20 fleets of 20 pots, with buoys at each end.

I aspire to fishing 20 next year. If I rig them in pairs, that will give me 10 fleets, and I’ve identified enough local ‘ground’ to work them in three areas with 3 fleets on each, with one extra fleet as a ‘kamikaze’, to set in crazy places. Even with 2 pots, you start exploring!

Once they are there, I expect the pots to stay out. One of the hardest decisions used to be when to bring them in. Bringing 150 pots in onto a beach was always a messy affair. There must have been about 2 miles of rope, all well-encrusted with weed by the Autumn.


The seas get wilder and colder, and your pots more at risk and less likely to be fishing. The choice used to be forced on me by the demands of other work, but now I’m tempted to leave my gear out there and see what happens.
It’s good to have a mission for the kayaks anyway. I intend to set the net every so often, so want to keep the boats on the beach.

We paddled along to Fishguard last Saturday, and it was magic. There wasn’t another boat in sight. Checking the pots added to it, even though this time they were empty.

Last night was wild, with a North-Westerly gusting away like a train. I went down to see the sea this morning, to try to pick out my buoys in amongst the white-horses and see whether they had moved.

A good, bracing walk that I wouldn’t have undertaken without that incentive!


Just listen to this man, trying to justify his addictions... .

8>The Making of Pots, Part 3 > Blind Eyes

I see the standard current parlance for ‘blind-eyes’ is ‘soft eyes’ but I’ll stick with the local name as it has an unblinking “trappiness” about it I like.

The one that’s been adopted as the norm since their manufacture moved onto industrial estates looks unnecessarily deep and expensive to me.
It is so deep, it needs a door to empty and bait it, rather than just reaching in through a pocket.

If you knit your own entrances, you can vary their accessibility.
I tend to make one of the entrances larger and shallower; both to allow big crabs, and my hand in. You then rope the pot to present that side to you as you pull it into the boat.



Having netted the frame, cutting holes in it for the blind-eyes is traumatic. I thread polyprop round the hole to define it, then run a line of twine round half-hitched to it that sets the number of meshes the entrance will have.(Start on a bottom corner.)
I see no point in the entrance having smaller meshes than the rest of the pot, so copy that. When you’ve completed your circle of half-hitches, it’s time for your net-knot.
Remember to leave enough sag in the twine to allow for what gets lost in the knot.
Also, try to make the meshes slightly bigger on the sides of the hole.
Carry on netting round a few times.
I make quite shallow entrances: only two full meshes deep, and they work.
Stop the netting as you come round off the top. Pull the twine tight up to the end of the side-bar opposite (the middle if you’ve made the pot left-handed) and tie it tight back onto the pocket.
Thread the twine through the bottom meshes until you feel you have sufficient span to the entrance, then tie it off & take it round the side-bar opposite and tie it off.
You should have a good tight, sloping bottom of the blind-eye for your trouble.
Now weave the twine through the top meshes, and tie off, trying to leave the top flap loose enough to let in the catch, but basically meeting the bottom entrance when it’s shut.



It’s an art. The beauty of it is every one is slightly different.

I use bait-strings rather than net tubes etc. Make sure they are in the centre of the pot, and cut old inner-tube to elasticate them.

You have a pot.
You need either to put a splodge of cement in it, or devise a bag of old net to build in or some-such to fill with stones when you set it.

Setting the pot gets us back out in the sea, so let’s do that in another blog.
It'll be good to get out after three days in this virtual, cold , smelly shed...

7>The Making of Pots, Part 2> Materials

Making a trap and setting it appeals to something deep within my nature.




I am not a great one though for sitting over a line, waiting for a bite and feel that as a personal shortcoming. Patience, boy.
If anyone wanted to write up a simple guide to jigging for mackerel say, I would gladly link it to this blog.

Techniques must effective though, and have food in mind, rather than being that often hopeless ritual called ‘angling’, devised I suspect to allow men a break from their families .
I want to hear things that will help me really tune into the habits, temperament and movements of a particular fish.
What’s obvious to you maybe a revelation to the rest of us.



Lobster pots are a classic example of ‘design as solution’, and at their best, make use of materials to hand.
There’s a cove on Strumble Head we walk to (Porthsychan), where the willows in the scrub I’m sure are a traditional basket variety, which leads me to imagine them having been used to make pots by a fishing community long vanished.
As a post-industrial hunter-gatherer though, I see the plastic boxes, bottles and pipes around us as a valid equivalent to devise traps from.
Alkathene instead of hazel, and bakery-tray bases replacing wooden slats. These materials are resilient in sea-water, flexible, light, and have ‘negative buoyancy’, which means they need little weight to assist them to sink.
It’s the same basic stuff as sit-on kayaks are made from.

We are in a culture where every other sentence is mitigation of potential litigation, so I hasten to discourage you from stealing and jig-sawing up perfectly good bakery trays!! When I was fishing a lot of pots though, I must have got through quite a few hundred.

There are always a few grubby ones knocking around a locality, and I would feel no compunction about using them if you reckon they are out of the active food-chain. It is classic recycling.

Net is an unavoidable cost. If you buy a bale, you will have enough for life. There’s no point making-do with inferior garden netting. Also poly and nylon twines.. You will need to buy a netting needle, unless you want to be flash with the jigsaw and make one.

I found some trawl net crammed under a rock by the sea recently and have already had four pots out of it, and bits of large rope that wash in are sometimes worth untwisting for their twine, so you could make a cash-neutral version if you’re patient.



The main feature to look for in a base is a good set-back edge. This will protect the long-edge from chafing if the pot rolls. I don’t cut an entirely flat base, but keep an inch of side-wall all round, with more on the corners, as this keeps rigidity and helps the pot grip the seabed & to stack. I drill holes to secure 3 or 4 bent water-pipe hoops, and fix on 3 pipe top bars, though if you are short of that, you can jig bits of waste tray up into suitable sections. I use galvanised nails, though always dreamed of finding a suitable plastic fixture. In reality the nails last for years. Don’t try copper nails instead: they are too soft and you end up with bars hanging off pots in mid-season.

There are countless tricks to learn if you are going to make a batch of pots. A piece of wood to tuck under the centre bar and another longer one for when you come to nail the sidebars are invaluable. Get nails long enough to clinch, but try not to squash the main hoops. Once the frame is wrapped in net, that holds it all in place, so don’t get too fussy. Though it’s worth making sure you don’t leave nail ends proud, or they might puncture your gloves or scratch your kayak.

You need twine equivalent to your net for lashing (3mm). If you want to make your own net entrances, you will need a floppy, nylon twine for these. Entrances knitted from polyprop are too stiff. If you are short of nylon, or your source is too expensive, knit the ring and first row or two in poly.
I am rubbish at learning knots, and made up my own. The net knot is easiest learnt by unpicking a bit of existing net. and then retying it. I use a slip-knot for most tying, knotted at both ends to keep it tight. It is quick and disposable.

I start covering the frame by cutting a section of net that spans it both ways. The old way was to net up the top and ends separately, but this is a weak point if the pot rolls. (It did save net though.)
Also, if you bunch the net at each end and secure it to the frame, you will have an easy way to open the whole end by cutting one knot if you need to. (Try getting a bull-huss or conger out any other way!)
I then weave twine through the bottom of the net all the way round, and tie it with a series of slip-knots through holes I drill in the frame. If one fails then it is not the end of the world.



To get good ideas about how to make a pot, look up "lobster pots" in Google images.

I’ll describe how I make the “blind-eyes” and bait-strings etc in the next blog.

6>The Making of Pots, Part 1>General

For a full-time fisherman, the making and repair of gear is a never-ending task.
Most do not have money to throw at it so compensate with ingenuity and time.

I came to regard harbours where the habit of making pots had been lost as lacking some essential moral connection to their livelihood.
Though lobstermen are potentially furtive, paranoid loners in the summer, the winter brings them together as friends, comrades-in-dreams, helping to shorten the long months of pot-making in cold, bait-redolent sheds.


Like most apprentice fishermen, my first gear was pots I had found and repaired, having washed up in storms. We all carry a bit of wrecker mentality in us, that regards anything washed up as fair game, and this was to rebound on me years later when someone tried to claim my pots, when they had just washed in.

I didn’t much like the pots I had found: they were the ‘French’, inkwell type, that is with tapered cylindrical top entrances. Galvanised versions of these were the Aberystwyth standard design in the 80’s. They fished fast, but didn’t hold their catch once the bait was gone, so they didn’t suit a part-timer with meagre bait supplies.
It was a winter industry in Aberystwyth making these, cutting rolls of mesh with bolt-cutters, and bending this mostly to form square crates. The entrance was a cane-on-wire basket, though these were superseded by plug-in plastic ones. One major chore and cost was sending them to be galvanised in the Midlands. They were very un-romantic, minimalist pots, with as little embellishment as possible, as that all had to be stripped off if they survived long enough to warrant re-galvanising.

The traditional Cardigan Bay design was more to my liking. These were hand-made, with a wood-slat base, a netted bent hazel frame, and two “blind-eye” net entrances.


[an example in aberystwyth museum]

These were ingenious nylon pockets, with the top half laying loosely, enabling a lobster to enter but then find his exit blocked. One of the fishermen told me he had hung around over a pot once and watched a lobster go in backwards. This makes sense to me, as lobsters can move most effectively and through constricted gaps by swimming that way. The reasons for two entrances were so if the pot landed badly, one entrance was still available, and likewise if there was a lobster in there already, sitting on one of the pockets.

It was the ‘smaller’ fishermen who fished these pots. They took longer to empty and bait, but held their catch for days, were self-righting, cheaper to make, and if black net was used, were more ‘cave’-like, so better suited in bright, shallow water.
What seemed silly to me was that the polyprop net could last for years, but the hazel rods tended to go after two seasons, which meant much extra work unstitching old nets to use on new frames. Also the wooden frames had positive buoyancy, so need a good dollop of concrete to hold them down.
I’ve always been a sucker for design, and so it struck me that I should try and make an all-plastic version of the pot. More later...

Pots, creels, traps: the names are as various as the local types.

A general trend has been for people to buy-in more ready-made gear. Though this might have freed them to fish for other species, or even do other work entirely, it misses a main point of fishing for me, which is to be able to tune into your intended prey, empathise with its ways, and adapt to match it.

Pot quotas also might have made lobstermen cautious about risking different or local designs that might not seem so immediately effective, though the gear might prove itself better in other ways. For instance, if it cost a tenth the price, and is easily repaired, you can fish it with a bit more daring! Those are the days that give you the biggest catches you ever get.

I’m waxing lyrical here, but I can’t help but think that we weave some hopes and a bit of ourselves into a creel when we make it. That you won’t get in a batch of bought ones.
I made a batch of six from scratch in the early days from home-made net that I’d made from twine from a washed-up piece of green braided trawl, squatting one year by the christmas tree, and they always fished well...

The other effect is to hook fishermen yet deeper into specialisation; so they end up having so much money tied up in a particular way of fishing that they have to pursue it to the bitter end (and to the detriment of the recovery of a fishery).

By that time anyway, everyone is likely to be in the same boat.
All that second-hand ready-made gear is just like everybody elses', and is worth nothing like what the Bank thinks it is.

So the guy goes down to the harbour and starts the engine and just carries on fishing...




We're going to town
With fish for the selling,
The van-springs are down
-The weight it is telling.
Be glad to get home
Through the dark we are feeling

-You're out on your own
With sharks, when you're dealing.
(The Winkle Song)

5>Paddle Power

I went to check my two pots one day to find they were tagged with plastic labels, declaring that as they were not correctly marked, they were liable to seizure. I was it seemed bumping into the world of grown-ups and regulations! It was a fishing authority tag, and I rang their office the next day.

It seemed that, as a 'recreational' fisherman, my buoys should be yellow, and marked with my name. Also it was pointed out, there were other restrictions. There was a recreational 'quota' of five pots, and a 100 metres of net. I thought that the chance of a lobster in five pots was pretty remote in the winter, and my experience of the seals meant that I was attracted to the option of 'actively' fishing more nets but for a shorter time,- perhaps even working them in the surf, so I asked about buying pot quota.
Well, it seemed pot quota was scarce and expensive, and anyway, what boat did I fish? I replied a kayak...

"You must be mad!"

I replied about how stable and seaworthy it was.
But, no, it seemed I couldn't have a license, as the boat hadn't got an engine.

That wasn't fair, I started to protest, but hang on, it meant I didn't need a license...
Did that mean I could sell my catch as well? There was a pause. Hmmm. Well, as long as I didn't start coming up the beach with wheelbarrow loads, it seemed that, yes, I could.





This is a glorious, enlightened loophole in the law, that allows unmechanised fishing to prosper without restriction, the actual physical limitations of rowing, paddling and sail-power being seen as sufficient rein.

I find this fact has an uncanny relevance in an age when we need more than ever to source our food locally,as sensibly as we can, with as little fossil-fuel input as possible.
The availability of sit-on kayaks means we have an effective means to fish wisely,and on a modest scale. Let's not blow it.



There are laws that apply to all fishermen.

The size limits are there to allow species sufficient life-span to breed, so we have to respect them: I actually wouldn't land a crab as small as the legal limit. You don't have to land everything you catch just because it's legal! I don't bring in berried females anymore, and lightly squeeze the size lobsters that I catch to see how solid they are. - What's the point of killing one that is half water as its only just shelled!

Before formal regulation of pot numbers, lobstermen used to have local 'gentlemens'' agreements about what they should fish and I'm sure that if a community of kayak fishermen developed, similar informal rules would develop.

If there are too many pots on a limited bit of ground then the lobsters will inevitably get scarce. So your fishing effort has to reflect how much ground you have within paddling distance, and how well fished it is already.

One ambitious lobsterman I knew declared once that you 'should never create a niche'
That meant in stark terms that his intention was to keep the locations where people were likely to start up over-fished, so they couldn't get successful enough to get sufficient gear to compete with him. It is such attitudes as his that have depleted our common fishery.





Let's not go down that road again.

4>Out There

When you start fishing, you are in unexplored seas, venturing into a New World. The next headland is a great Cape to be skirted cautiously exploring. Keep that feeling around you at all times, because that is something that kayaking pays you for your physical effort. Those “effortless transports” such as the car that we structure of our lives around mean we usually never arrive anywhere... . When you are paddling, you are getting there.

But for others, you are like a stray cat on their bird-table.
If all fishermen are territorial, lobster fishermen are positively paranoid.
When I was a child, we went on holiday to Burton Bradstock in Dorset, where there still some beach fishermen. They were after sprats and mackerel, for which they set beach seines. This meant rowing a boat round out off the beach, hopefully surrounding a shoal, then dragging the net ends in to land the catch. My dad was a good size, so was a welcome heaver on one of the ropes. This way of fishing meant the fishermen co-operated, taking it in turns to sit up ion the cliff watching for the bait-birds diving that marked a shoal. If they missed a shoal, it was gone.
Lobsters meanwhile are territorial. They move into a hole and sit tight.

(Now the movements of lobsters have been the subject of debate and dissent for years amongst fisherman, though they only talk of such matters unguardedly out of season, but that is for another time.)
Lobsters are also aggressive, as you will see from the number of ‘cripples’ in the process of growing new claws that you will catch. They are well armed warriors.
Once a lobster is caught, that territory does not seem to get filled straight away. So if someone else has got pots on choice ‘ground’, they might be catching lobsters you could have had, damn them!

No one really wants the others to know what they are catching and where.
In Aberystwyth there were glorious moments of truth when there was a shared “landing” to a wholesaler, and fisherman saw the number of baskets of lobsters their rivals hauled up the wall. Sometimes a fisherman had chanced upon a new bit of ‘ground’ and would land some unusually large lobsters. A fevered atmosphere would develop, as the others tried to work out where that ground was.

I wouldn’t say that fishermen are misanthropic, but the sea does attract loners; whose tolerance of other human-beings in their space is often on a short fuse. Don’t forget it attracted you too, so you probably have a lot in common. When you see a speed-boat cavorting around your pot buoys, you'll feel as they do.

The worst reactions I’ve noticed to anyone moving onto 'their pitch' come from the younger or newcomer professional fishermen, keen to mark themselves apart from those bloody ‘part-timers’.


Part of the special nature of the sea is its lack of intense human presence and policing, so if you have trouble with other fishermen, try to sort it out by talking rather than involving the police etc. They haven't got a clue about sea-law anyway, but you'll have difficulty getting them off the case if you do involve them, as they love an excuse to hang around by the sea.

You have AMAZING rights as a kayaker-fisherman that I’ll probably go into next blog, but that won’t do you much good if you don’t get on with the existing local community of fishermen and anglers.

The sea is a lonely enough place without lacing it with enemies.





Just remember that they felt the same as you all those years ago, going round that headland for the first time into unexplored seas.

3>Rough Start

The kayak went straight to the water.
We have had a bruising summer, with lots of rough weather.




I always expect July to be a well-disguised write-off. It's probably changed now with the sea warming, but July the 1st used to be the trigger day when the lobsters would march into the pots with their hands up. Invariably the weather would break. I remember one July when I only got out six times. A day's fishing in July was worth more than a week in May, so the lobstermen in Aberystwyth would gnash their teeth in frustration.
What's different is the number of northerlies we get now. On this coast they are the only onshore wind, and they are truly savage. I'm only learning about their strange force now. A fisherman from Fishguard pointed out their strange habit of washing pots along the coast and out, rather than in onto the beach as you'd expect: not a bad characteristic if the alternative is to be crushed into the rocks.
Anyway, we were in a run of northerlies when the kayak had its maiden voyage, straight out into waves I wouldn't have dared enter in the perception dancer.
I had bought a couple of new 50metre gill nets from Advanced Netting
Gone were the days of rigging them myself, as it was only marginally cheaper to buy the sheet netting etc. Another innovation was the floatline, now an integral float-rope, so with no bubble floats to catch up the net.



The footrests on the kayak were, and are a nuisance, and I keep meaning to take them off, as I am forever catching the net on them. I had plans to make some neat, ash peg footrests to screw in their place, but have a far simpler plan (always the best) now, which is to tie a rope loosely between the side carrying handles to rest my feet on. Not only will this not snag on the net or pots, but it might prove a useful rope to hold in an emergency!
So I set a net. However I noticed a seal watching me very closely, so saw netting was likely to be a hopeless exercise. Then I paddled out to check my pots.





The kayak was all I had hoped for and more! She was rather sluggish after the Dancer, but then there was a bag of net in the hold.
She is a boat, not a surf-toy, and my mind reeled on the way in through the waves with the implications for inshore fishing of such a stable, unsinkable craft...

2>What happened next...

There was something inevitable about what happened next.

I started the next spring with two pots. The need for bait, plus increasing excitement about this new, more fertile shore (I had caught my sixth lobster) tempted me to set a net.
Now this was a ragged affair, well holed from its former use as a beach net in Ceredigion. I had rigged it shallow, with only a four foot fishing depth, for setting at low tide on a wide, rocky shore, so had little expectation of it here.

My son was visiting, and stood by in the other kayak as I laid the net. I then returned along it to check that I hadn't left it twisted. There was already a fine mullet in the end!

I left it out overnight, and returned to it to find six mullet, and a few rainbow wrasse. Justine, my partner, was in the other kayak, and received the fish.





I realised that potting was one thing, but netting from a sit-in kayak was an accident waiting to happen. There was nowhere to put anything, and no stability.
I blame my years as a more conventional fisherman for the fact that I instinctively avoided getting wet, and had never even learned to do the "eskimo roll", so was on borrowed time anyway venturing out in a traditional kayak at all.

Having posted a notice in the local boat club, trying unsuccessfully to track down owners of unwanted dinghies, the behaviour of the increasing flotilla of sit-on kayaks caught my attention. They went out in seas that I wouldn't have dared paddle through, even if I had managed to get through the surf without capsizing.
Not only that but they seemed to take pleasure in such seas. Admittedly a lot of them were probably foolhardy, but they seemed to survive it.

I trawled through the different makes and styles on the internet and was attracted to the Ocean Kayak Big Game Prowler. Not a nice name. People have been locked up for less. I took my internet quest seriously. I have done with the bit in my life labelled bad boats. Never take pity on a boat or a puppy.
It was wider than most, but its real advantage was a large weight capacity: a necessity when hauling nets potentially stuck with seaweed, or pots that have bunched together.

There seemed few sit-ons available secondhand,and very little serious discount to be found shopping around. I could manage to get 10% off, but that still meant paying over five hundred pounds for a plastic boat. If I jigsawed it up it would fit in a binliner.
I decided to go for it, praying to the god of male pride that it would perform well!

1>To the rocks I must go..

To the rocks I must go...

The sea is my living,

Though a cold wind does blow,

-Sometimes I don't know

How we keep on surviving;

The sea's like a cow,

Can't always be giving.

[the winkle song]

My first living thirty years ago was picking winkles. It meant that I was tied to the tide, so my mistress was the Moon.
Once you have picked winkles ANYTHING seems easier: the worst bit was keeping your body-heat up in the winter, and your attention from straying to catching prawns in the summer. It was an exercise in patient application.

It was also an attempt to do sufficient to 'pay for the day', not taking too much.

I started to fish a small wooden boat as well, launching off the beach, setting some lobster pots. I rowed out for two seasons, until I felt justified in buying an outboard.
Launching and coming in were potentially hazardous. Timing was critical, as a small boat that has shipped water is as gainly as a bath-tub, and can soon suffer damage on the stones. A lesson was to avoid actual high tide, as there is often a shelf of shingle to hump the boat over.

The next ten years saw me up my fishing effort to where I was setting about 150 pots, from a fibreglass 15 foot boat. I was always short of bait, so set gill nets to catch dogfish. These I 'pickled' in a digusting liquor of accumulated fish juices in a bait-bin.
Lobsters are 'gourmets', preferring stinking bait. If you use fresh bait, you are likely to catch crabs, and picking dozens of small ones off the meshes of your pots soon tests patience.

Once lobstering is in your blood, you're done for.



There is always a reason to go out the next day. If you did badly, you must move the pots to better ground, if you did well, you must reap the rewards while the lobsters are crawling.

The sense of responsibility in being the dad of four kids eventually made me feel I had to concentrate my attention on my other source of a living, that was picking moss etc for florists for a more reliable income, so I gave up fishing.
It was also getting boring. I called it "fishing by numbers", which meant you had to set a large amount of gear just to be sure of a viable catch.
Also the catch permutations were limited> nothing/undersized lobster(s)/undersized crab(s)/size lobster/crab, with a few prawns and fiddlers crabs (green shore crabs if I'd set the pots in too close). There were occasional surprises, like a big dogfish, conger, spidercrab, or octopus, but not enough to feel the sea a prolific and bountiful place.

I got to feel that I was participating in the ruination of the sea.

I had to keep away from the sea, particularly in the summer, when it smelled of seaweed and fish, for two seasons, but eventually bought two sit-in kayaks, on the assumption that they would be impossible to fish from, so I wouldn't be tempted back into old ways.

Some chance!
A big factor was moving from Llanrhystud, in Ceredigion, to North Pembrokeshire. From a shallow, rather muddy sea, with few bays etc, to deeper, clearer waters with hidden coves.
I started keeping my canoes on a local beach and venturing out. There didn't seem the same industrial scale to the fishing effort here, but more smaller craft with less pots. I made and set a lobster pot. I make small, light pots, based on plastic bread tray bases, so it was just about OK to haul it, though what I'd have done if it had wedged under a rock, heaven knows. I eventually caught a legal sized female lobster. I had no other means to carry her, but to put her between my legs while I paddled for the beach!

My hunting genes were fired into life.
I was a born-again fisherman.

To the rocks I must go,
The sea is my living.
The sun it shines now,
The beach it is shimmering.
The seals wallow,
The cormorants diving,
The gulls make a row
-The mackerel are coming.

[the winkle song]