The hooks are baited with squid, herring or other small fish, if they
can be secured. To bait a trawl requires from an hour and a half to two
hours. When it is ready it is placed in a tub made of a half barrel. The
long line is coiled up in the center and the bait lies next to the sides
of the tub. One man uses from two to six trawls, which are usually
visited in a dory very early each morning and once or twice during the
day. When one buoy is reached the end of the trawl to which it is
attached is drawn up, the hooks examined and the fish taken off. By
means of trawls a man may catch more in a single night than by a week's
hard work with hand lines.
Each man keeps tally of his fish as he hauls them in to the dory by
cutting out the tongues--the number of tongues giving the account of the
fish taken. As soon as the day's catch has been taken aboard the
schooner the crew divide themselves into throaters, headers, splitters,
salters and packers, and the operation known as splitting and salting
begins. The business of the throater is to cut with a sharp pointed
knife across the throat of the fish to the bone and rip open the bowels.
He then passes it quickly to the header, who with a sudden wrench pulls
off the head and tears out the entrails, passing the fish instantly to
the splitter. At the same time separating the liver, he throws the
entrails overboard. The splitter with one cut lays the fish open from
head to tail and with another cut takes out the backbone. After
separating the sounds, which are placed with the tongues and packed in
barrels as a great delicacy, the backbone follows the entrails
overboard. Such is the amazing quickness of the operations of heading
and splitting that a good workman will often decapitate and take out the
entrails and backbone of six fish in a minute. After the catch has been
washed off with buckets of pure water from the ocean the fish are passed
to the salters and thence to the packers in the hold. The task of the
salters is a most important one, as the value of the voyage depends
upon their care and judgment. They take the fish one by one, spread
them, back uppermost, in layers, distributing a proper quantity of salt
between each. Packing in bulk, or "kench," as the fishermen term it, is
intrusted only to the most experienced hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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