LIVE LOBSTERS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XLVII, Issue 10805, 28 December 1926, Page 7

LIVE LOBSTERS.

FROM ORKNEY TO LONDON. ' \ The train which leaves Thurso, the ; northernmost British station for London, daily carries boxes in which live lobsters travel in seaweed for Billingsgate, writes Charles E. Turner, in the “Daily Mail.” They have been taken by the fishermen on the morning of dispatch from beds elf the inner and outer coasts of the Orkney Isles. London, the Orcadians claim, gets most and the best of Its lobsters from the Orkneys, and the fishermen reeeivf from is 3d to 2s 6d, and, rarely, 2s 9d per lobster. It is estimated that 500 Orkney fishermen. send lobsters to London and that their individual sales average about £BO per season. Most of them are small farmers too; others are fishermen in general and boatsmen in addition. “You cannot make so much in the summer that lobster fishing will keep you at home in the winter,” one put it. . Lobster fishers always work m couples. Many of them live throughout the summer months in little huts by their favourite creek or “gio,” returning to their distant inland homes only for a Sunday. “Take your breakfast in the dark and away you go in the grinding—the first of the dawn,” said a. hale veteran who has caught lobsters for 33 rears without a break. “You must be hauling your creels by 4 in the morning and 1 baiting them again as quick as you can. It will take: ten hourts from shore to shore again, and I’d think it a particularly good catch if you had one lobster in every toher creel.” If two fishermen have 80 creels or traps between them they consider they have a good “fleet” out. They may have another 40 in reserve, and in on© night’s storm the Atlantic, lifting the tackle from its fifteen fathom: bed, may wreck half of it upon the jagged Orkney coast and all the profits of a season are gone. Repairing gear is work for stormbound clays. Slaking it is a labour of the winter months. Each creel has a wooden base about 2ft. square weighted with a flat, rough-fashioned stone for ballast and the whole weighs no less than 401 b. Hauling 80 of them from 15 fathoms of water is a job for men.