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Updated: June 26, 2025
Four laid hands on the dory in the waist and ten or a dozen heaved away on the stiff painter of the seine-boat that was towing astern. Into the air and over the starboard rail went the dory, while ploughing up to the vessel's boom at the port fore-rigging came the bow of the seine-boat. Then followed: "Put the tops'ls to her sharp now."
And such a fuss as we made hauling ourselves through the water! We'd have scared away a whole school of sharks. Before we could get to the seine-boat that, too, was under. "Jump!" called the skipper, and "Jump everybody!" called Clancy, and themselves both hanging on to a last handful of twine.
But both of them bobbed up, the skipper saying nothing, but Clancy sputtering like a crazy man. The dories coming loose gave a few of us a chance to climb up on the bottom of them, and when the seine-boat came bobbing up most of the others climbed up on the bottom of that. And there was some swearing done then, you may be sure!
"And if we see fish, Clancy'll stay to the mast-head to-night as good a seine-master as sails out of Gloucester is Tommie better than me," he said. "I'm going in the seine-boat, and Eddie Parsons, you'll take Clancy's place in the dory." And buttoning his oil-jacket up tight, he put on his mitts and went on deck.
And the seine-boats! If there is anything afloat that sets more easily on the water than a seine-boat I never saw it, unless it might be a birch-bark canoe and who'd want to be caught out in a blow in a canoe?
Two dropped into the dory and thirteen jumped from the vessel's rail onto thwarts or netting or into the bottom of the seine-boat anywhere at all so that they get in quickly. As extra hand on deck I had to stand by and pay out the painter. In the middle of it came the skipper sliding down from the mast-head.
That's the stuff. Turn her in now again, skipper. In the dory there show your lantern in the dory and be ready for the seine-boat. Good enough. Now cover your lantern in the dory and haul away when you're ready."
The men in the seine-boat jumped and struck out for the vessel, which was now quite close, with the cook, the only man left aboard, throwing over keelers, draw-buckets, the main sheet anything within his reach that was loose and would support a man. The skipper and Clancy hung on to the last. "Jump you, Tommie!" called the skipper. "Not me till you go," answered Clancy.
They were glad enough to be in the dory, I know, to get hold of the buoy, and you can be sure there was some lively action aboard of her when Clancy called so fiercely to them to hold the buoy up to the wind, so that the efforts of the crew of the seine-boat, racing to get their two hundred odd fathoms of twine fence around the flying school, might not go for naught.
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