legends · 4 min read ·
Net Repair
A net maker repairs a seine that has been unpicked along its whole width, and then weighs the repair.
**Anstruther Net Loft — Job Sheets (net maker: Alasdair Rae)**
*Job. Boat. Damage. Work done. Charge.*
· · ·
**Job 211 · Mary Jane (trawler, 14 m) · Cod end torn, 2 m rip**
Work: re-meshed 2 m section, new twine, 80 mm mesh. Charge £140.
**Job 212 · Silver Spray (potter, 9 m) · Creel net chafed**
Work: patched with double twine. Charge £45.
**Job 213 · Gannet (gill-netter, 11 m) · Mesh stretched, 40 m panel**
Work: re-hung. Charge £210.
· · ·
**Job 214 · Wild Rose (skipper: R. Kemp) · Seine net, 120 m**
Damage: "Torn in the night. Pulled up clean through. Cannot say how."
Work: inspected net, laid out in loft. The tear is a single clean line across the width of the net, 118 m, cut from one selvedge to the other. The cut ends are neat, the meshes opened in a pattern I know, the pattern of a mesh unravelled by pulling the one running thread.
I have repaired many nets cut by rocks and wrecks and the propellers of passing ships. I have never seen a net unthreaded. This one was unpicked along the whole width, one knot at a time, as a woman would pick a stitch from a hem.
· · ·
**Job 214 (continued)**
Work: re-knitted the full 118 m, using new 4 mm twine of the same colour. Took two days. The net was returned on Thursday. Charge £480.
*Skipper's remarks: net seems heavy. Rae says it is the new twine.*
· · ·
**Skipper's complaint (R. Kemp, 23 October)**
*Dear Mr. Rae,*
*I took the net out on Friday. The first haul came up without a fish in it. We hauled it in the usual way, three crew on the hydraulic block, and it came up heavy. I mean really heavy, like a full net. The block groaned. The deck sloped. We had it on the rail before we saw it was empty.*
*I put the scales on it. The net, with no fish in it and no weed, weighed 80 kg more than the one I'd given you. I mean the whole net, hung from the scale hook. There was nothing in the meshes. The extra weight was the net itself.*
· · ·
**Net maker's reply (A. Rae, 24 October)**
*Dear Skipper Kemp,*
*I have seen the net. I have measured it. It is the same net in every way: the twine, the mesh, the floats and leads. But it weighs 80 kg more than it did. I have thought of reasons. Twine absorbs water. But I dried it in the loft for three days. I weighed the dry net. 80 kg.*
*I would like to examine it again. Please send it back.*
· · ·
**Job 214, second inspection (A. Rae, 27 October)**
Laid out the net in the loft. Took a hand lens to the knots. Each mesh is tied with a sheet bend, the standard knot, in my own style. But in about one knot in forty, there is something caught in the loop of the bend. A hair. Dark. Long. Wound three times round the twine, the way a hair is when it has been pulled from the head of someone who has been in a net.
Every knot of the net has been tied round something. The twine is not the weight. The net is full of people.
· · ·
**Job 214, third inspection**
I took the net down to the harbour and lowered it, empty, from the quay. It sank in the usual way. It spread. And then it began to hold its shape in the water, filling out, belly and cod end, as a net does when it is being drawn along by a tide.
There was no tide. The water at the quay was still. But the net was moving. It was swimming, slowly, towards the harbour mouth, like a thing that has had enough of being on land.
I cut the rope.
· · ·
**Job sheet (A. Rae, 30 October)**
**Job 215 · Wild Rose (skipper: R. Kemp) · Seine net, 120 m**
Damage: "None. Net lost overboard. Skipper says it left on its own."
Work: none required. No charge.
*Note: R. Kemp called at the loft this morning with a new net. He asked me to look it over. I laid it out. It is a good net. The twine is sound. It weighs exactly what it should.*
*In the corner of the loft, by the window, there is a pile of twine I did not put there. It is dark and wet. It smells of the sea. It has been knotted, with great care, into a fine round mesh about the size of a man.*