LIVE LOBSTERS

Evening Star, Issue 19406, 15 November 1926, Page 3

LIVE LOBSTERS

FROM ORKNEY ISLES TO LONDON MARKETS 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 despatch from beds off 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 receive from Is 3d to 2s Cd, 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 boatmen in addition. “ You cannot make so much in tho summer that lobster fishing will keep you at home in the winter,” one put it. Lobster fishers always work in couples. Many of them live throughout tho summer months in little huts by their favorite creek or “ gio,” returning to their distant inland homos only for a Sunday. Take, your breakfast in the dark, and away you go in the grinding—the first of the dawn,” said a halo veteran, who has caught lobsters for thirtythree years without a break. “You must he hauling your creels by 4 in the morning, and baiting them again as quick as you can. It will take ten hours from shore to'shore again, and I’d think it a particularly good catch if you had ono lobster in every other creel.” If two fishermen have eighty creels or traps between them they consider they have a good “fleet” out. They may have another forty in reserve, ami in one 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. Repair gear is work for storm-bound days. Making it is a labor 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 eighty of them from fifteen fathoms of w is a job for men.