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Updated: June 26, 2025
The long, slick-looking, lively seine-boat in tow and the black pile of netting on deck told what they were, and they came jumping out of the mists in a way to make a man's heart beat. There was a man standing on the jetty. He was master of a three-masted coaster, he told me. "You come off one of them Gloucester mackerel-catchers?" he asked me. I said yes.
Clancy himself stood to the wheel with his head ever turned over one shoulder, until he saw the flare of a torch from the seine-boat. "Good!" he exclaimed. "What there is is safe now, anyway." After that his work was easy.
There's no stiffness to 'em," he was complaining. And then, "Sock it to her," he would call out to our fellows in the seine-boat. "We've got the porgy crew licked that's the stuff," came from the skipper. From on top of the seine he was watching the fish, watching the gang, watching the other boats, watching us in the dory watching everything.
"Good luck!" we called. "Never fear we'll bring 'em back!" said Clancy. "Or stay with them," we thought. But he didn't stay with them. It was a ticklish job, but Clancy got away with it. He didn't dare to go too near the Flamingo, for that meant that the seas would pitch the seine-boat up and dash it to kindling wood against her hull.
We were doing pretty well, what with plenty of wind and the Johnnie buckling down to her work like she was a steamer, till the hawser parted and back toward the rocks went the Flamingo again. "No use," said Clancy, "sea's too much for any line we got. We'll try it with the seine-boat. Who'll go in the seine-boat and try to take them off? Think quick, but mind what it means."
Those who were going into the seine-boat had already picked out in what positions they were going to row, and now there was an overhauling of oars and putting marks on them so that they could be picked out in a hurry. Clancy and I were to be dorymen. We made ready the dory, and then Clancy went to the mast-head with the skipper and Long Steve, whose watch it was aloft.
Then, as the sailing vessel lurched upon them, the boy noted that the seine-master and the fisherman at the stern of the seine-boat leaped for the martingale shrouds and held them. But that instant's delay, as the bark had seemed to be poised upon the wave, had been enough for the Shiner.
They were trying to bail the water out of the dory, after hauling it across the bow of the submerged seine-boat, when we got them in our seine-boat and picked up what was left of them. Nine of them were lost, her skipper among them.
It took some nerve to make that jump from the rigging of the Duncan we watched them saw them shiver and draw up these were men accustomed to face danger reckless men but the shiver was over in a breath, and then over the rail and into that sea a game fight and they were hauled into the seine-boat. Some of them we thought would never make it, for it was an awful sea.
And then we felt like cheering her, and her skipper Wesley Marrs, too, as he stood to the wheel and sung out, "Couldn't scare you, could I, Maurice. I thought you'd haul your seine-boat in. I've got your extra seine," and swept by.
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