I’ve been so excited trying to get everything that’s happening here written down that I forget to mention some interesting stories along the way. I’ll try to put a little bit of flow into what follows but it may be easier just to take each of these next parts as standalone tales, a quilt of tidbits sewn together from the last few weeks…

Finally with some of the madness of my first week of fishing now out of the way I am starting to feel more at home on the boat. I have never had issues of sea sickness and have never really felt uncomfortable when I’m on the water. What I realize now is that nothing I had previously done could really prepare me for working on one. It’s not that I was running to the side to vomit every time the swells got big, it’s that the swells didn’t stop when I get off the fucking boat. For at least a couple hours after each of my first few days every time I stood still it would feel like the room was rocking with the waves. I think I was somehow trying to compensate by leaning back and forth…hope Jamie didn’t catch me doing that in his living room. Football players could do a lot of good to their agility and balance if they spent a few weeks on a boat during some heavy waves. There is nowhere to sit when it’s rough save the tiny pull down bench in the one-man wheelhouse but if you were sitting during these rides you would be a corpse. There is definitely a major thrill when the boat launches off a wave and comes barreling back down in time to take the next one over the bow and plow on through, especially when you are the one driving.
Today was Monday and I was supposed to be at work at 7 to land the catch. We have been storing all the crab & lobster that we caught last week in cages in the bay and now we pack them into cases for the buyer to take. We are meant to separate them by size and also whether or not they are missing claws. Today was also the first day I was planning to take the kayak across the bay to my bike on the other side…never try to many firsts in one first session. As I set out paddling across the bay around 6:30am the sun was warm and the water completely still, now I see why my pops likes to get the morning paddle in. I pulled the boat onto the beach at the other side and started the mandatory dozen kick starts on the trusty Shenda. Only she was not planning to cooperate and had somehow sabotaged her own clutch cable during the night at the thought of having to start the day an hour earlier. I told her I knew how she felt and that it would be ok. It wasn’t ok. After some mild swearing I accepted the only option, kayak back across the bay and call Jamie (Remind myself to remind myself later why I like cell phones). The morning was breathtaking in a different way on the return trip. The upshot was that I had to kayak back across at 8:30, get a ride from the village van taking the kids to school to the bus stop and finally pay £1.60 to get the bus to the pier. After all that crap we ended up having the best day of the season for Jamie. We caught over 300 lbs of crab mostly in an amazing 100 pot set of fleets along the Berg. Every pot was teeming with brown crab and in almost all cases they were keepers. We ran out of keep cages on the boat and were down to the bait box when the skipper called it quits. The man just knows how to quit when he’s ahead. I asked about the creels we had over a small reef called the Boghmor in the mouth of the Loch but the waves had picked up as we got into the open water and it would have been very difficult hauling. I wanted to see what we had there because it was apparently good ground for lobster. Although it’s early in the lobster season in the Hebrides we got 6 on some of our morning fleets. I think we’ll have much bigger days but this was a really nice start.

In all the excitement and craziness of the first couple weeks I somehow forgot to mention the epic propeller-rope tangle rescue effort on my first day. I must preface that the effort and rescue were entirely by Jamie. We were hauling and setting creels in a small bay along the Loch when a stray rope made its way under the boat and jammed the prop. Jamie gave it a couple of quick looks and without a second thought stripped to his boxers and dove into the water with only a pair of flippers. He came up and first thing he told me was “lower me that knife doon wen I’m back there,” the second thing he told me was “ach, its no cold atall, quite nice actually.” Scotsmen are fucking nuts. After a few dives under he had the thing loose and was back on the boat getting dressed and making a hot cup of tea. I have no idea really but I’m sure I probably made a rookie mistake that led to the rope being where it was under the boat; Jamie never said anything and never seemed pissed off.


This is what was left of the rope Jamie cut from the propeller.

A rope in the propeller was definitely a wild way to start but I have quickly found that the world of fishing on the Ross of Mull has more than its fair share both of excitement and even drama. It was on the second or third day when we began moving some of our gear over to the Berg that I noticed Jamie was feverishly texting back and forth with someone. This was strange as he was not usually anywhere near his phone while we were on the boat. After I while I think he noticed that I was aware of the number of texts he was exchanging and he told me that he’d been receiving texts from a number he didn’t recognize. The texts were telling him in no uncertain terms to keep clear of the Berg fishing grounds as they were taken and to “stick to fishing Ardtun where you’re used to”. Ardtun is the name of part of the shoreline on the opposite side of the Loch from the Berg. Was this for real? Where we getting ourselves into the middle of a turf war? Fucking awesome!

As the texts kept coming in Jamie worked out that he knew the person sending them but that they were suing a different number that he didn’t recognize. They weren’t exactly threatening us on their own behalf but rather saying that they were already in a turf battle with another fisherman and that we’d be better off steering clear. Nevertheless the tone was aggressive and I could see the hairs bristling on the back of Jamie’s neck. I like to think that my first response helped Jamie make up his mind as to what to do. “Ah fuck ‘em,” I said, “You’ve got the right to fish here, what are they going to do?” “Ach aye, I do,” Jamie replied, “We’ll no be bullied around.” We had already put down 50 creels along the Berg the previous day and the next executive decision from Jamie set the tone on how we’d be dealing with the threat…we promptly loaded the boat with another 50 creels and steamed them straight to the Berg. Not only that but we extended our foremost fleet even further around the point to give us coverage over more ground. There were still no other boats creels to be seen anywhere and so we felt that we’d established ourselves early enough to have a fair claim to the ground. A few hours later I noticed Jamie taking out one of the many sea urchins that we pull up in the creels and placing it down in a bucket on the deck. Seeing me eyeing him quizzically he replied shortly “Ammunition”. I laughed and nodded to which he said “I hope you’ve got a good baseball arm, because if they get close enough you’ll need to land this right on their deck.” “Oh I’ll land it on the deck,” I replied. I seriously like the way this man operates.

Just as a quick update, we’ve not had any run-ins with the threat makers but every day I watch Jamie set aside one or two urchins just in case. The only boat we really have any contact with from time to time is a bigger boat called Scara Tang (meaning “thanks to the Scara” in Gaelic, “tang” means thanks and “Scara” possibly referring to Scara Brae, which was an ancient Viking settlement that had been forgotten and covered by sand for hundreds of years). They fish mostly for prawns and as such we pose little threat to one another. Shortly after receiving text the text messages Jamie got a call from them on the radio asking to borrow some twine. As we started heading towards the Scara Tang I gathered and coiled some twine to throw them. “Friends not enemies, I guess?” I asked Jamie. “Bit of both really,” came the reply. The world of fishing is surely more complicated than one can understand in a week or two, ask me about the politics again in a few months and maybe I’ll have them down a little better.

Its 11:31pm on Wednesday and I have just finished a marathon 4 hour crab bisque making session. I had left over mussel stock from a dish I made at the weekend (Moules Marinieres, for the connoisseurs among you) and was wanting to use it up. Since starting work I am also suddenly inundated with more crab claws than I can possibly handle. Every time a crab drops a claw on the boat we put them aside and I bring them home, usually about a dozen large claws each day. I decided the best way to use the ingredients I had was soup and so Bisque it was. After much slaving and substituting (its really hard to have all the right fresh ingredients on an island where the closest legitimate shop is a solid 2-3 hours travel away) the bisque was finally completely. The soup came out wonderfully and I’m using most of it for a dinner I’m making for some people from the village tomorrow. Despite the success it’s a little depressing as I’m looking around the kitchen now and it’s like a small nuclear device went off, only this device had a casing made of crab shell…what a mess. I think that’s my cue for bed, I’m sure someone will clean it up by the time I get…shit.

After Monday, when we had the best catch of the year, I said that I thought there were better days to come. Given I’d only be working a week and the fishing season is still in its infancy that was clearly a safe bet. There was, however, no way that I expected that the very next day out would make Monday look like amateur hour crab fishing at McGilvry jetty. This afternoon we brought back over 4 fish boxes full of brown crab, 2 baskets of Velvet crab, a box of green crab and, wait for it now, 19 Lobster! Finally I feel like an actual lobster fisherman because we caught more lobster than dogfish (only 4 today). I realize that in the stats I have just delivered to you there are no common units of measurement so it doesn’t really help that much but hopefully some of the pictures will put it in perspective. Just to give you some reference, 2 fish boxes (usually brown crab) or 2 baskets (velvets) combined roughly equal 1 keep cage, which is what we transfer the catch into daily until we land it on Mondays. Lobsters are so rare and valuable they are only measured individually, 30 would be an amazing day and anything over 10 is decent.
In the foreground is a keep cage, in the background is a fish box. You can see Jamie’s hand in the left side as he cuts the crabs claws so they can’t hurt each other or us when they are in the keep cage.

We’ve been starting to get some real beasts as well, Jamie calls them “crackers”. So as the pots are coming over the side I’ll hear an exclamation of “ach, here’s a right cracker,” or something to that effect and I know it’s time to get back over to see what we’ve got. Today I was working as usual stacking a pot at the stern of the boat when I heard “Oh my god, that is the biggest fucking crab I’ve seen in my life!” Such an exclamation warranted my swift investigation and as I leaped back to the side Jamie was just pulling an absolute monster out of one of the creels. This was a crab so large that upon being put with the other crabs he promptly disposed of two with his massive claws. For the protection of the rest of the catch we had to put him into Solitary confinement in his own fish box with a lid on it so that he wouldn’t simply scrawl out over the side (which would have been a small step for him). It’s very typical for the crabs we catch to get a bit feisty with one another and there are always claws and legs littering the bottom of the box when we empty it but there are very rarely crabs that die from it. The shells on their bodies are so thick that they don’t typically puncture through. King Kong crabby simply crushed straight through the middle of his victims heads and they were dead on impact.


Meet King Kong Crab! Notice the size of the crabs under the carpet beneath him, the carpet was mandatory as we ran out of fish box space and solitary confinement was no longer an option. I know that you are all thinking you’ve seen much bigger crabs on Deadliest Catch or something like that but this guy would have a field day with those spindly, all-legs-and-no-body crabs you see on TV. This is about 5 lbs of pure power and aggression; those gloves wouldn’t protect you in the least if he latched onto your hand.

I’ve been mentioned the basking sharks we’ve been seeing and we had several more sightings again today, only this time they were in a small bay with us and we were able to get very close. The size of these guys never ceases to amaze me. Unfortunately my little camera does not do justice to what the eye can see. We have had the shark counter going for the past week and until yesterday (Friday) we had seen them every day with a peak of somewhere around a dozen sharks on Monday. For their size it’s amazing how close they get into shore, much closer than we dare in the boat. Jamie is great about humoring the tourist within me and giving me a chance to get some photos. He has even started pointing out photo opportunities and steering the boat into better position for me to stand on the side and snap pictures. I’ve Here are a few of the resulting shark shots.

This one came right up near the boat and was easily between 20-30 feet in length. I tried to get one looking through the water so you could see the body but my camera doesn’t really have the gonads to do it.


If you look closely below the dorsal fin you can make out the dark and light mottled looking skin, closer still and you start to make out the outline of the body.

This picture is actually from pretty far away. The dorsal fin is at least 2 feet above the water so you can start to picture the length of this guy. When they were close to the boat we could even see the little cleaner fish (can't remember what they're called) hanging on.

After posting these pictures I am now fully in nature photography mode, so I’ll leave you with some shots of the various animals I share the island and sea with…

These sheep definitely have the right idea on a sunny afternoon.

Caught this guy trying to shed his skin in peace, needless to say I harassed him for a few minutes.

I call this one "Birdset" and comes with a special shout out to Marty, makes me think of l'Art.

Can't help but to slip one in of my chooks...

Some very fat and happy seals lazing around on the rocks, they weren't much bothered as our boat chugged in and we lifted creels around them for 30 minutes...

Finally while we are on the theme of laziness I give you "dead sheep"...just for the record this lamb is not dead, just really really tired...but aren't we all?