Mediterranean trawler

Last September I did a day’s work aboard a Mediterranean trawler. Evidently there was no comparison to be made with the experience described by Redmond O’Hanlon in his book Trawler. The work was easy, the sun shone, the crew were good-natured and friendly. It was a day trip in flip-flops with fantastic food and plenty of wine, coffee, and brandy. But I hadn’t gone to make comparisons.

At the time my near miss with a fishing boat, in the blackest hours of the night while sailing Onawind Blue to Ibiza, was still fresh in my mind. I wanted to gaze down from the bridge of a similar craft as it steamed at 8 knots through the dark. I wanted to try and judge how visible OB would have been and I also wanted to see what sort of lookout was maintained.

I rapidly concluded that a small boat sailor on the sea at night absolutely cannot rely on being seen by commercial fishing vessels. Unless, of course, a small boat sailor happens to be on said vessel. From the bridge of the fishing boat I couldn’t help but scan the sea as if every wave might hide a madman in a rowboat.


As the sun swept the night over the western horizon I left these considerations aside and got on with enjoying the day. We set the net and I helped prepare breakfast in the galley. (Well, I chopped a clove of garlic, covered the table with sheets of newspaper and laid out five spoons and five dented tin cups.) Breakfast was fried spotted flounder (citharus linguatula), dumbo octopus (grimpoteuthis) in a white wine reduction and fried monkfish (lophius piscatorius) liver accompanied with Catalan tomato bread, salad and wine. The cook plonked the frying pans on the table. The skipper poured the wine.

We spooned octopus straight into our mouths, took up the flounder with our fingers, broke the flesh away from the bone and stacked it on the tomato bread. We ate the liver like it was pâté and gulped the wine.

After clearing the feast away (one of the crew simply bundled up all the newspaper and scraps and threw them overboard), I sat on the bow in the sun and watched the water.

Over breakfast I’d been hard pushed to persuade the fishermen that, in sailing a small boat to Ibiza, I hadn’t passed the bounds of reckless lunacy. I’d explained about responsible preparation, equipment, training and waiting for favourable weather but although they nodded and grunted through mouthfuls of flounder I knew they weren’t convinced.

Sitting on the bow I felt very secure, but paradoxically the sea seemed bigger, and the waves steeper than they would have done from down in Onawind Blue. It would seem counter intuitive but being slightly more distant from the sea made it seem more imposing. For someone used to seeing the sea from this perspective the step down into OB might well be a big one. I wondered if the fishermen would view my voyage any differently if I took them (one by one, of course) for a sail in my boat. And knew they wouldn’t.

At mid-morning we turned around and trawled back the way we had come. I followed the manoeuvre then looked over the stern into our wake. To port and starboard the rest of the trawler fleet were also turning. Our speed was three knots. Deep down the trawl doors were slowly churning up the muddy sea floor, leaving great ruts in their wake. I imagined the cloud of disturbed mud, the lower lip of the net ploughing up the sea floor, the mouth of the net hungrily swallowing anything in it’s path. Everyday each boat was scraping clean 24 miles of sea floor. I turned away from the disaster going on below. Surely this too was madness.

Trawler

I recently re-read Redmond O’Hanlon’s excellent book Trawler. Redmond—writer, naturalist and academic—embarks on an Orkney Islands trawler sailing from Stromness. It is mid January and a Category One Force 12 hurricane is forecast. The entire North Sea fishing fleet is sitting snug in port but the Norlantean’s skipper Jason Schofield has a 2 million quid overdraught and can’t afford to miss a day’s fishing.

Nicknamed ‘Worzel Gummidge’ by the crew, Redmond, knowing little about boats except that their shapes are ‘as pleasing as a buttock’, is sick. But he immediately rallies and, fighting down his stomach while being hurled around the boat by the high seas, launches in to the work of sorting and gutting. Painfully aware of his soft-bellied, south-of-England background, he determines to work the same hours as the crew.

The crew can’t fathom ‘Old Worzel’ though, and at times you half expect them to sling him down the scupper-chute with the off-quota catch. Nobody can understand why anybody would willingly just come along for the ride, would want to go out in a Category One Force 12 hurricane. But as the force 12 arrives we realise that it isn’t going to take centre stage. It stays in the wings crashing and banging about like a drunken thespian doing a quick change. Not that there is anything comic about it, quite the reverse.

This book takes place inside a steel trawler. A male domain with flattened out cardboard boxes for carpet and a galley full of the fug of high calorie cooking and cigarette smoke. The feared sea is a dark presence beyond the rusting hull. It’s something that nobody wants to think about too much. The searing wind, the huge waves, the freezing depths are too terrible to be given quarter within the boat. Everyone knows somebody who’s been lost at sea. Only Redmond has the inclination to gaze at the horizon, but don’t expect a spellbinding description of wind, water and light because even he is too busy and sleep deprived.

Trawler is a manic, shouted text of enthusiastic monologues and sleep-starved harangues, reflecting the mad monotony of trawling. It doesn’t make for particularly easy or enjoyable reading. It’s disjointed, wild and edgy and there are more exclamation marks than in a teenager’s secret diary, but it does come over as an authentic recreation of what the north Atlantic deep-sea trawler fishery is like. As you plough through it, feeling pop-eyed and seasick, Redmond brings you face to face with the sleep deprived crew and you realise that the book is a tribute to the men who risk their lives fishing and to O’Hanlon’s guardian and mentor aboard the Norlantean; the marine biologist Luke Bullough.

This is O’Hanlon’s great achievement. Despite the erudition, the fascinating details of deep-sea species, the comedy and self-depreciation the winning feature of the book is the sense that you are getting the real story. It might not have been his original idea—about two thirds of the way through the book the crew rant about the various injustices facing trawlermen on land. In one of the most emotive passages in the book Robbie Stanger implores O’Hanlon to, if ever he does write the book, “tell the truth; then—we can give the book to our wives, women, our girls, whatever, that’s the point, that why Jason had you aboard…So we can give the book, if ever you do it, whatever, to our women.” Robbie goes on to ask, “Can you get our women to understand what happens out here? Can you? Because we canna tell them ourselves, that’s for sure, because they wouldna believe it—and no matter what, every last one of them seems to think that we want to be out here, that we want to be with the boys, whatever, or that we love the sea…So maybe your book, even if it’s a piece of shite, maybe she’ll read it and understand a peedie bit and love us, and aye, maybe she’ll let us sleep straight out for two days and nights when we get home—and then we’ll have sex!”

Here’s Redmond explaining why trawlermen have no front teeth. 

The last catch of the year

The trawler fleet return to Vilanova harbour in the watery afternoon light.


The more elderly wooden boats have a distinctive sheer and pleasing proportions.

The more modern boats have the aggressive features of natural predators.

Not all returning boats trail a cloud of seagulls. Please tell me that this is because they have already sorted and stowed the catch and not that the nets came up empty.

The Mediterranean this morning

Looking over the water in the dawn light, breathing the sea’s salt breath. 

Rowing to the brothel

Despite inauspicious beginnings with the local rowing team I’ve continued, training when ever time is available. I even participated in a couple of races over the summer and just about avoided spewing my guts into the bilges.

Interest in training has flagged but there are a few of us that are still sufficiently keen to go out in the evenings. Sometimes there are only four or five of us, sometimes the full eight plus cox. But if the weather permits we always row out of the harbour and along the coast in the dark.

Our destination tonight, announced by Pegleg the cox, is the local brothel.

In Spain houses of ill repute are not discreet affairs. They scream their presence in flashing neon. They make a fine landmark at night and a useful navigational aid. A captain of the Spanish merchant navy once explained to me that cargo ships on coastal passages would measure their progress by these colourful lights. In one Spanish port the pilot would give transits that included the brothel.

Outside the harbour the sea is slick and inky. The boat twists on the remains of a particularly vehement northeasterly swell. It’s too dark to make out the oar blade and you can only tell if it’s angled correctly by how the pull stroke feels. There’s a risk of ‘slicing the ham’— tallar el pernil . This is when, through lack of awareness and control, the oar blade becomes angled forward, a perilous situation that often leads to ‘catching a crab’. Interestingly the Catalans chose to highlight the moment that the blade becomes horizontal with a colourful phrase, rather than the moment that the badly angled oar dives as we do in English with ‘catching a crab’. The Catalan slicing the ham leads to the English catching a crab.

Over my shoulder I can see the brothel lightshow two miles up the coast. Of course having such a landmark to aim for promotes bawdy talk. Once when still a beginner, resting on the oars amid cackling laugher at bow oar’s crude joke, Carpet Slipper—still considering me a complete wuss—leant over and warned, ‘Things are said in this boat that would never be said on land.’

Away from the shore the stars are brighter and the cold is biting but Pegleg drives us hard with series of 10, 15, 20 long, strong strokes. Our only navigation light is Pegleg’s head torch. We all move as one, powering the boat through the oily waters. We reach our destination and turn. The distant pulsing pink nubile silhouettes and the green lights atop the bawdy house ladder up and down like, ahem, well, like a whore’s drawers.

By contrast, over to port, a more traditional navigational aid hangs huge in the night sky. Orion. There’s a sharp edged beauty out here, the scattered constellations above and more immediately the boat, the pale bow wave, the heaving rowers. A shooting star arcs over Rigel. It would be enough to bring a tear to my eye if I weren’t concentrating so hard on not ‘slicing the ham.

Slowly rotting

I can’t go to a neighbouring beach without stopping to look at a particular boat and firing up a little pipe dream. Rationally I’d be better off avoiding the beach altogether but I’ve found myself making excuses to wander in that direction whenever I’m in the area with a few minutes to spare.

The boat was apparently built on the Costa Brava assuring her pedigree as a traditional Catalan llaüt or llagut or, being fairly small, gussi. Carvel built of thick pine, distinctively vertical at stern and stem and bathtub beamy amidships she looks to be on the precarious cusp between restoration and rebuild. The name painted on the side is Rocamar (literally ‘rock-sea’) a name often given to houses built on cliffs overlooking the sea.

But I’m in no position to entertain plans for restoration. Onawind Blue is the largest, most complex boat that I can afford to maintain and own. However, I can’t help feeling a genuine desire to take some positive step to save a piece of Catalonia’s maritime heritage.

I couldn’t resist leaving my name and number at the sailing club though, in case the owner comes by. Just to find out more about the boat’s history and to know if he has any plans for Rocamar.

Empty world

Late autumn in Catalonia can bring some beautiful days. After a week of cold, roof-tile-flinging winds and crashing swells with fierce undertows that move more sand in an afternoon than a regiment of bulldozers could in a week, a Mediterranean jewel of a day is conjured from the chaos. And it begs to be lived to the full.

Dutiful as always in the face of fine conditions I pack the boat and go for lunch on a little beach that, during the summer months, is inaccessible due to buoys and bathers and rules and regulations. I see no other sailing boats on the three-mile reach and there are no people on the beach. Feeling luckier than a lottery winner I give a OB a salt water clean out and cook a simple lunch. I wonder why people round here use the coast seasonally, why they pack their beach towels and boats away in September. But I don’t wonder for too long, I don’t really care. Today I’m just glad they do.