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).
Paul Ward -
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