1/ Preparing the
fishing hole in sea-ice |
 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.
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2/
Send a diver, or two, down the hole with a handy rope |
 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.
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3/ Go on, stop
stalling, get down the hole! |
 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.
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4/
Great relief! the divers surface at the other hole |
 It's a very eerie place to
be even before you go under water. On this day, there
was no wind at all, the visibility was crystal clear for
tens of miles around and the world was a monochrome of
blues. Then the divers go down the hole in the ice and you
really totally alone and silent. It really is a great relief
when you see them appear at the second hole! They didn't
stay in any longer than necessary as there was simply
nothing nothing to see. Two divers rather than just one
helps here as they form a visual cue for each other while
swimming through the blue. |
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5/ The view
from one fishing hole to the next |
 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.
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6/ When it is very cold, the fish freeze pretty much straight away on
contact with the air |
 Fishing through the
sea-ice like this was always a risk. Once deployed, the
net would start catching fish, if you didn't retrieve it
every day and remove the fish, they would die in the net and
this would attract various scavengers. After a short time it
would be a horrible deadly mess - and completely useless for
the purpose it was set for in the first place, to capture
live fish.
If it was very cold, fish
would freeze immediately on contact with the air - or almost
so. A way around this was to pull the net as quickly out of
the water as possible and into a bucket of water which would
be then driven quickly back to the base where the fish were
removed in balmy temperatures of -5C or more instead of -15C
and well below outside (sea-water freezes at -1.8C, so the
fish live their lives at this temperature irrespective of
what the air temperature was - if it gets colder, the ice
just gets thicker).
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7/ Feeding the net into a bucket to take back to base and get the fish
out |
 It was always good for
some nice atmospheric pictures though, fishing in this
manner. You can just about see a pointy thing about
knee-high to the left of the black bucket. This is a harpoon
head taken from Grytviken whaling station on South Georgia
that we used to get people to collect if they called in
there on their way south. These very heavy iron tips to the
harpoon would be filled with explosives and screwed onto a
harpoon that would reach to about a mans shoulder. We just
used them as weights to keep the net down on the sea-bed.
If it wasn't too cold, fish
could be removed from the net on the ice and then the net
re-set immediately. If it was too cold, the net would have
to be taken back to base and then taken back out to be
re-set. The difference about 2-3 hours work! We used to
avoid taking the net back to base if it was at all possible.
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8/ Juvenile
Notothenia neglecta |
 One of the common inshore
species is this one, Notothenia neglecta, the subject
of my particular studies. It was sometimes called
"Antarctic Cod", but then I've seen that label attached to
several other Antarctic fish species. With no native human
population and a fish population that is pretty much totally
unique to Antarctica, very few Antarctic fish actually have
anything like a common name. The people who deal with them
with any regularity are scientists rather than fishmongers
as it would be anywhere else in the world.
The result is that Antarctic
fish tend only to have a Latin name. For reason I have never
been able to fully understand this can greatly irritate some
people. The conversation goes something like this:
"So what kind of fish
did you catch out there?"
me - "Quite a few types"
"Like what?"
me - (ok here we go again) "They didn't really
have common names, just scientific ones"
"Like what?"
me - (I know where this is going) "Notothenia
neglecta, Chaenocephalus aceratus,
Trematomus
bernachii, Champsocephalus gunnari"
"Well that means nothing to me! Didn't they have proper
names?"
me - "Well you could call them Antarctic Cod, or
Icefish"
"Oh that makes more sense, I can imagine what they were
like now"
me - no you can't! (but I never say that)
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9/ Getting a fish out of the
net |
 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.
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10/ Summer fishing isn't as cold, but can still be very uncomfortable |
 Fishing in the summer
months means from small boats. While it wasn't as cold
as winter fishing, the sea keeps moving about in a way the
sea-ice doesn't. Sea-sickness is fairly quickly overcome,
unless your job was to coil the rope into the rope bucket as
it came in, which could be difficult in a heavy swell.
This was a calm day
wind-wise, but there was about a 12ft (3.5m) swell and we
really shouldn't have been out in it, but it was fun,
especially as we would power up the waves as they came in
and took off over the top of them.
It meant getting the net in
was easier too. Pull in as much rope as you could when the
boat went down into a trough, then hold onto it for dear
life as the up-swell came and lifted the boat and net with
it, that way the swell did the work and you didn't have to.
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11/ Small boat fishing means pulling the
net up manually |
 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.
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12/ The net is then brought back to base where it can be laid out |
 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.
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13/ Releasing fish from the net can be
fiddly and uncomfortable! |
 But a necessary part of
the job unfortunately.
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14/ It
can take a long time to go through a 30m net |
 So the more people you
could recruit to do this job the better. The problem was
that you then had to help them in return when it was
time for them to do their unpleasant job.
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15/ The net then needs to be straightened and stored neatly so it can be
easily deployed again |
 After all the hard work,
getting the net in, extracting the fish and putting them in
the base aquaria, the last job was to sort the net for next
time. Quite gentle and therapeutic after all the recent
effort. The net had to be stored correctly as next time it
was going to be used we'd be bouncing about in a small boat
with hardly any elbow room setting it at dusk.
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