These guys deserve a special
mention, they are professional divers and here they are about
to do something partly at my request that I'm really glad I
didn't have to do myself.
In the winter as a marine biologist
I still had to carry on catching fish - in fact it was more
important then than in the summer as it was far more difficult
to get the fish then and far fewer people had ever caught them
in the winter months or been around to record it for science.
The technique was to cut two
holes about 100m apart as this was the length of a standard
trammel net that we used. We drove a skidoo several times between
the two holes to flatten any snow and to try to make the line
obvious from beneath the water (and ice). The divers tied onto
lines then dropped into the water and down to about 10-15m in
50-200m depth of blue-water, they had no points of reference
other than the surface and each other, they swam the 100m to
the next hole under the ice, following the skidoo trail before
coming back up with the line at the second hole.
The line was then used to set
and recover nets until the ice broke out. It always worried
me that I might let go of the line and have to ask them to do
this again - fortunately it never happened.
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