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These doubts were solved anon; for after a terrible long interval of heaving round the windlass, at which Mr Strong groaned greatly, declaring that his back felt broken from having to stoop nearly double so as to keep out of the way of the swinging boom of the cutter, which swayed to and fro as she rolled about in the tideway, the end of the trawl-beam once more hove in sight alongside, bobbing up endwise out of the water.
After trying in vain to get the net and trawl up the rope would be buoyed, and the next day another attempt would be made to raise the net, the boat being assisted by three or four others. The loss of a net was a serious one, as it took ten pounds or more to replace it and the trawl-beam and its belongings.
At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on her deck. "Aie! yeou little man-o'-war! We'm done with trawl. You can take us home if you know the road." "Right O!" said Moorshed. "We'll give the fishmonger a run for his money. Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe." The next few hours completed my education.
Two hours and a half it lasted, until the great trawl-beam came to the surface, and was got up on the vessel's side, after which these indomitable men proceeded to claw up the huge net with their fingers, straining and heaving with might and main. "Yo, ho!" cried the skipper, "heave her in, boys!" "Hoy!" growled Peter Jay, the mate, giving a tug that should have torn the net to pieces but didn't!
Thereupon he and the barrister leant over the side of the boat as before; and, catching hold of either end of the trawl-beam, they lifted it over the gunwale. The Captain then swished the folds of the net vigorously, so as to shake what fish might have become entangled in the meshes into the pocket at the end, Bob and Nellie, and likewise Dick, watching the operations with the keenest interest.
The mouth of this apparatus is kept open on its flat side by means of a pole some ten or twelve feet long, termed the `trawl-beam, which floats uppermost when the net is down; while the lower side is weighted with a thick heavy piece of hawser styled the `ground-rope, around which the meshes of the net are woven. A bridle or `martingale' unites the two ends of the trawl-beam."
That night I was over the rail on to the trawl-beam twice; I was at the pumps an hour; I pulled and hauled with both arms raw, and the snow freezing with the salt as soon as it came on my ulcers, and then I got the smash. And all for about eightpence. And that screeching gentleman told me as how his Mother Baubo, as he calls her, drives a broom and two horses, or a horse and two brooms I'm mixed.
On wet nights when the deck was like a rink, he would make a rush as the boat pitched; then he would pick up his rope unerringly in the dark and, in another second, you would see him over the side with one foot on the trawl-beam in an attitude risky enough to make you want to close your eyes.
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