A trawler, such as the _Vixen_ was, is fitted out very differently from a seiner or a hand-liner, the styles of craft on which Breeze had made his previous fishing trips. Instead of a large seine-boat, she carries from four to eight dories, and a crew sufficiently large to allow two men to each dory, besides the skipper and cook. The trawls are tarred cotton ropes the size of a lead-pencil, that come in lengths of about fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet each. To these are attached at distances of a fathom apart for cod, and a fathom and a half apart for halibut, short lines of from three to six feet long, to the ends of which hooks are made fast. About six of these lengths of trawl, or 1800 feet, are coiled in a tub, and each dory will carry out and set from four to six tubs of trawl in from twenty to two hundred fathoms of water. The lines contained in the several tubs are made fast to each other, and all are set in one straight line, from one to two miles in length. The trawls are anchored at each end, and buoyed by small kegs, so that the hooks shall hang just clear of the bottom. As the _Vixen_ was on a “salt trip,” the pens in the hold, instead of being filled with ice, contained several hundred bushels of coarse rock-salt. She had a crew of fourteen men all told, and on her deck, fitting into each other like nests of buckets, were six dories, three on each side. The next morning after reaching the Bank a fishing-ground was chosen, and the anchor was dropped overboard. Then the canvas was furled, the riding-sail was bent on, top-masts were sent down, and everything was made as snug as possible, and put in readiness for all sorts of weather. Baskets of frozen herring were got up from the hold, and cut into bait sizes with sharp knives on the bait-boards. These are heavy planks laid on top of the cabin. With this cut-up herring each dory crew baited the thousand or more hooks of their own trawl, and coiled the lines snugly away again in the tubs.