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 The entrance was a cane-on-wire basket, though these were superseded by plug-in plastic ones.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)
