Fishing

Preparation of an ice-hole to set a fishing net under sea ice. The snow has been pushed back from the surface and this saw with a special ice blade is being used to cut a hole through the ice. Once cut, the floating square is cut into quarters and the then each quarter pushed under the ice where it's buoyancy keeps it in place. Not too bad a job until you hit the sea, then the blade sprays you with exceptionally cold water.

Two holes like this are cut slightly further apart than the length of the fishing net that will be used here. This is a fairly shallow net, set in about 15m of water.

Once the hole has been cut and ice removed if possible (as here) or pushed down under the surface if the blocks are too heavy - it's time to send a diver from one hole to the other with a rope. Usually two divers are sent down, in this case one of these guys has done it before and for the other it's his first time.

A skidoo drives from one hole to the next, so the tracks can be seen through the ice as a lighter strip. The divers follow this at a depth of 5-10m and surface through the second hole. The rope is then secured at both ends to a stake hammered into the ice.

This only needs to be done the once, these holes can be used until the ice breaks up.

Swimming between two ice holes in the relative shallows isn't too bad as it's quite light and you can see the bottom, but this was out in much deeper water 60m+. The sea-ice cuts out a lot of the light reaching beneath it and in such deep water there is nothing to see as a visual cue. The diver in this case is dependent on his depth gauge to stay at the right level and the line "drawn" by the skidoo on the surface that he is following to the next hole.

Eventually, the next hole comes into sight and light shines down like a beacon.

It's probably one of the oddest jobs I've ever done, a combination of where it happened and what I was doing. It was always a help if it was a little windy I felt as if it was flat calm, you were aware of being in a vast landscape and rather more exposed than was entirely comfortable.

The rope that the divers had placed had a net tied onto it, the guy/s at the other end of the rope would pull the net through the hole until they saw the end of it. At this point it would be hanging like a curtain underneath and against the ice, you'd pull it taught and then let go at both ends so it would fall slowly to the sea-bed. It was better for the ice blocks from the hole to be taken out of the hole as in this case, so that the rope and/or net didn't get tangled up with them.

A rapidly grabbed picture because I was supposed to be involved here in getting the fish out of the net and the fact I was taking pictures instead meant that I was having a break instead of doing the same uncomfortable job that my friends were doing. As our fish needed to be alive and in good condition we had to take care in extracting them from the nets and they seemed to have an awful lot of little hard protrusions and bits for the net to get caught on.

It was a skill that you had to develop as a fish biologist, removing a sometimes very tightly caught fish with fingers that were at least half numb and getting worse. Very unpleasant at first, but of course, you got used to it and it was usually better to just carry on with fingers that at half worked than to keep warming them up which just made it worse.

Pulling a net up by hand can be hard, but not too bad if spread amongst a few of you. As driving along in the boat with buckets full of water isn't a great idea, the net was laid into an empty bucket and then we got back to base as quickly as we could before taking the fish out. The cold temperatures and wetness of the net kept the fish alive and well.

We did have a small fishing launch with a powered capstan for hauling deep nets, but it was more a question of what mood you were in as to which was best to use as the capstan turned very slowly and you felt very sea-sick when watching the rope slowly coil into the bucket. We used the launch on nets that were further away from base rather than necessarily deeper.

A fairly miserable day to get fish out of the net. Note the two skuas waiting patiently to pick up any tasty tit-bits that have also been brought up with the net.

You often hear of how skuas are hardened criminals with no sense of decorum and will mug small children and old people for the slightest hint of food. However, ours were far more refined and would sit and wait like this, if nothing was forthcoming they would go on their way again.

We had two pairs of base-skuas, the Reds and the Blues named for which side of the base they lived, there was a skua-landing pad outside the kitchen window, painted red on one side and blue on the other. One side was uphill (red) the other side downhill (blue). The skuas would fly the couple of hundred meters from their nest to the pad and get fed. If they were very fully fed, rather than make the effort to fly home, they would sometimes just flap down to ground level and walk home instead.

But a necessary part of the job unfortunately.