Seven days. Six Egyptians. 10 tonne of prawn. One skipper from Donegal. No shower. One fridge full of bacon. Two hours sleep a day. A grand adventure on the 80ft rust heap that is the trawler Argo K.
I can't decide which was worse the claustrophobia of living in a tiny box with eight other men for all that time, the smell of fish guts everywhere in spite of the presence of air fresheners in every corner, or the fact that everything you touched felt like chip shop curtains.
Smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and getting our first introduction to Nuts and Zoo and Egyptian porn, myself and Steve Ryan went working on the trawler. He has better photos than me on his site: http://steveryanphotography.wordpress.com/ Steady-handed bastard.
We wanted to write an article sure, but also to see if we could cut it amongst real men. Mohammed, Hassan, Said and co. were real men. Tough bastards from Alexandria with a combined experience of about 100 years at sea. They showed us pictures of their girlfriends back in Drogheda and Tallaght. They were scarier than some of the fish we pulled in.
Every six hours an alarm rang around the boat and we dragged another tonne of fish in. Most of it got thrown over. Quotas don't allow the fishermen to catch certain fish, but certain fish have a wide-on for nets and can't help themselves. Dead haddock, dead cod and dead sole all had to be pitched over the sides.
Anyway, I'm going to post more on this later but for now I've got to grab another shower, and then one after that, and one after that...
1 comment:
i thought you were jokin' with the "gone fishing".
still scrubbing?
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