After surviving my first experience on a trawler and my gambling experience in Hull, we set off on our second fishing trip into the North Sea. In those days all crew members of a trawler were paid a percentage of the catch on top of their base salary. This included me. On top of my radio duties, I had to make cod liver oil in order to get my percentage of the cut. Once the fish were landed and gutted the livers were thrown into big wicker baskets which I had to drag to the stern of the ship, where there were three huge vats in which I would make cod liver oil. The better the oil, the bigger the financial reward, so I had to learn quickly. In essence though, all I had to do was throw the cod livers into those vats, where we steamed the livers under high pressure until it became liquid.
We headed towards Iceland and successfully caught twice as many fish as the previous trip.
The Peter Cheney was a manually hand-operated trawler, therefore double the catch meant double the work for the men and often this was done in heavy seas. During this second trip, we ran into a huge hurricane and experienced swells of up to 40 feet, of which I have photographic evidence! We had to dash for the nearest port which was Ísafjörður in north-western Iceland. Following that experience, I’ve met several men in my life who I would gladly send on a fishing trawler for a few weeks and I’m sure it would do them a world of good.
The next morning, in Ísafjörður, there were about 400 trawlers from many different countries sheltering in that bay. The most painful reality became clear to me on that second trip, when we noticed everybody was running back to port with their fish. On docking, we found that the price of fish had almost halved. So, we had done double the work for almost the same money. The system was flawed.
After the second trip I decided that I had fulfilled my fishing trawling experience and wanted to look for new opportunities.
On leaving Hull, I got on a train stopper to London, and this was back in the good old days when the carriages had a walkway that connected carriage to carriage, and individual cabins that seated six people. I found an empty cabin and at every stop someone slid open the cabin door to join me, but they immediately shut it and left in search of another cabin. Unbeknownst to me, the smell of fish had permeated my skin and I was a walking, stinking cod. I, therefore, had the cabin to myself all the way to Kings Cross and when my mother greeted me on the platform, she said, “I could see you from a long way off because nobody was around you.” The smell was that bad!
Just to mention, it took some time but the smell did eventually go away.
