A career that sleeps with the fishes

MY OTHER LIFEIn our continuing series – in which Irish Times writers consider their alternative lives – Business Editor JOHN MCMANUSlooks back at his previous career as a marine biologist in the west of Ireland, a job that mostly involved cleaning dead fish out of cages at a Connemara fish farm

I CAN no longer remember the exact time I decided to change career. But I do remember the place. I can also remember the weather. The summer had turned into autumn in Connemara and with it, the sky from blue to rain-laden grey.

The exact spot was the bottom of a cage full of Atlantic salmon in the bay under Tully Mountain. My job that particular drizzly morning was – as it was every second morning – to collect dead salmon from the bottom of the nets holding thousands of pounds worth of fish.

It was filthy work and, although you did not know it until you took off your diving mask and exposed your nose to the air, incredibly smelly.

By the time you had cleaned the dead fish – or “morts” as they were called – out of 12 cages, you were covered from head to foot in putrefying fishy slime. It’s not a smell you forget and the memory of it returns every time I am confronted by a plate of poached salmon.

To this day, I am not entirely sure why such an unpleasant task had to done with such regularity.

“It’s for the insurance company,” we were told, in a manner that discouraged further questions. This rather cryptic explanation conjured the image of a man in an office somewhere – Dublin presumably – noting down on his ledger the numbers of dead salmon from each cage as they were phoned through every couple of days. The little that I have learnt about the insurance industry since then has not shed much light on why this might be necessary.

Part of me remains suspicious – as it did back then – that it was all some sort of ruse that lent a patina of scientific endeavour to the task, thus explaining why out of all the staff, the marine biologist had to do the job.

The other workers on the salmon cages were nearly all locals and many combined a labouring job on the fish farm with tending their small holdings and some fishing. In the time-honoured tradition of fishermen, many of them could not swim, and those that could were cute enough to keep their mouths shut for fear of being put into diving gear and sent into the cages to collect the rotting fish.

This ritual became a source of both amusement and bemusement. Two of the other staff were assigned to help me. One would hold the end of a stout rope that was tied around my waist to pull me out should I get into trouble.

The other took the net full of dead fish from me when I surfaced and then set about counting them for “the insurance company”.

That particular morning down amongst the fish was something of an epiphany for me as I mulled over my long journey from my boyhood adventures on the beaches and reefs of Kenya to my first real job as a marine biologist.

There had been a couple of false starts along the way, including a doomed attempt to farm prawns in Kenya, but this was it. I reflected to myself as the more adventurous of the live salmon bumped into my mask that, on balance, it was a pretty unsatisfactory outcome for the best part of six years of study.

Initially, I had been grateful just to have a job in something I was interested in, given that the backdrop was Ireland of the mid-1980s.

And the summer working on the farm had been enjoyable and enlightening.

Despite my years of studying fish and other marine creatures, the total stupidity of mackerel only became apparent to me when the workers on the fish cage showed me how to catch them with unbaited hooks as they swam around the cages eating bits of stray fish feed. We fried them there and then for lunch.

My green credentials were also somewhat tested that summer by the primal joy that ensued from letting fly with a shotgun we kept on the cages to fend off the seals and birds who were hoping to nab a salmon.

The job came with accommodation: a room in a somewhat shabby house on a fork in the road from Letterfrack to Tully. The house still stands and I regularly pass it on the way to see friends in Renvyle, but it has long since been done up.

My housemates also worked on the farm, which seemed to collect oddballs.

One still sticks in my mind. He was a very shy English man with an honours degree in pure maths who had somehow got stuck in Connemara during a cycling holiday in Ireland. He had the loose relationship with personal hygiene than often seems to accompany maths degrees.

The other housemate was from Galway and was desperately trying to keep a relationship going with a girl in the city. I had some sympathy for him, as the move to Galway had hastened the end of my own romance. Rather than struggle to keep the flame of our love alive, my then-girlfriend had met the news of my new job with the announcement that she was going to sail the Atlantic with her ex-boyfriend. It was a blow. To this day, I still feel a certain less than galant satisfaction over their subsequent arrest by the Senegalese navy for having stolen a yacht in the Canaries.

But one thing had become pretty clear to me by the end of the summer: that salmon farming was first and foremost farming, it was not marine biology – whatever that might be. And measured against the fellows who worked the salmon farm, I was no farmer.

It was also clear that the only guys who actually had a good job were the three owners of the farm, who at that stage had just agreed to sell it for what in those days seemed like a very large sum of money to Carrolls, the Dundalk-based cigarette manufacturer, which had just branched out into salmon farming.

They were neither farmers nor marine biologists. If memory serves me, they were actually accountants.

That morning it was clearly time for a rethink. It was the mid-1980s and almost everyone I knew, including my brothers, was in London, pursuing careers and living lives of the utmost cosmopolitan sophistication compared to what was on offer in Letterfrack.

So with the hope of a job in the City and some vague notion of doing some writing, I got on the bus from Letterfrack to Galway a few days later.