'Trawler': The Life Aquatic
By BRUCE BARCOTT
... With the help of a marine researcher named Luke Bullough, O'Hanlon made arrangements to join the Norlantean, a deep-sea commercial fishing trawler, in the highest seas in the roughest weather at the worst time of year. The two board the ship as it pulls out of the northern port of Thurso into the teeth of a Force 11 wind. (Force 12 is a hurricane.) ''Welcome aboard, boys,'' one of the crew says. ''You've picked one hell of a time to come.''
The ship's captain and owner isn't concerned about providing thrills. Brutal economics compel him to go out in all weather. Refitting the Norlantean has left him $3.8 million in debt, which means he must catch $95,000 in fish every 10 days. ''And the bank?'' explains the young researcher Bullough, who plays Virgil to O'Hanlon's Dante. ''Do you think they know or care about the weather? Does a Force 11, or a Force 12, a junior hurricane -- does that appear on your statement? Of course not!''
Though it takes nearly $4 million in gear to do it successfully, deep-sea trawling operates on a simple idea: troll a wide-mouth net through water 3,000 feet deep, haul it in and see what comes up. Once the captain starts fishing, he won't stop until the hold is full. Trawlermen typically go days without sleep, dodging heavy equipment and spiny, sharp-toothed fish on a slick deck in bucking seas. Their odds of being killed on the job are greater than those for any other workers in England. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/books/review/23BARCOTT.html?oref=login>
Carl
>From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
>>
>While we are romanticizing fishing in the afternoon,
>the BLS reports that in 2003:
>
> Individual occupations with particularly high
>rates in 2003 included logging workers
>(131.6 fatalities per 100,000 workers), fishers and
>related fishing occupations
>(115 per 100,000),
>
>http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm
>
>jks
>
>--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Also, fishermen do not all have such a
> > happy-go-lucky life. I recently read
> > a fascinating book, _Trawler_ by Redmond O"Hanlon,
> > about life on a Scots
> > fishing boat, the Norlantean K. 508. The
> > Norlantean's skipper was so
> > encumbered with mortgage payments on his vessel that
> > the crew had to work
> > around the clock for days on end to keep current
> > with debt servicing. Much
> > of the story was about the hallucinations that crew
> > members typically
> > experienced because of sleep deprivation.
> > Capitalism has a thousand faces,
> > and just about all of them are ugly.
> >
> > Carl