Another Life: The slow heave of surf across the reefs and around the islands gets to be quite hypnotic on the morning after a storm, writes Michael Viney.
"That was a big one!" High Island, out beyond Cleggan, puts up great white wings of spray. Once, I'd have been itching to get out on the strand, splashing through mirrors, blinking through wind-tears, leaning on last lurches of the gale. Now, with more trawler-balls and fish-boxes than I know what to do with, I can wait until it all calms down.
I think instead about trawlers themselves, pitching and rolling somewhere infinitely beyond the horizon, bouncing their nets across slopes and ridges a whole kilometre beneath them. Such fantastic fish, sometimes! And such extraordinary men! I've been reading Trawler, Redmond O'Hanlon's new book, and part of me is still out there on the Noratlantean, trying to keep my balance in its slippery, mad, mad world. What was it doing up there at the northern edge of the Atlantic in a Force 12, with a crew that daren't take proper time to sleep? What freak of capitalist enterprise lands a young Orkney skipper with a £2 million overdraft, so that he must grab so desperately at the ocean's furthest, deepest layer of life?
Redmond O'Hanlon has made his name with beautifully-written travel books (Borneo, Congo, the Amazon), at once hugely entertaining and oddly and memorably profound. He's a naturalist who's also in love with human nature, and the chance of observing the stressful extremes of such a voyage was worth the many months of persuasion. A plump and quizzical man in his fifties (the crew called him "Worzel") he was summoned at last to get seasick and gut fish in their company.
Trawler is full of facts about deep-sea fish, facts delivered in torrents of speech, buoyed up by delight and excitement - from, in particular, Luke Bullough, the young marine biologist doing research for his PhD. The enthusiasm of a scientist with the urge to share and explain can be endearing, even moving, and Bullough is a credit to his kind. Information in quotes, complete with idiomatic emphasis has its own mysterious potency and one of the book's passing mysteries is how O'Hanlon records it.
One learns happily about the electro-receptors and poison spines of the rat-tailed rabbit fish, the bacterial flashlight of the roughhead grenadier, the fearsome dentition of the wolf-fish. These and other weird and wonderful creatures come tumbling out of the net, mixed up with the skipper's target species from 1,000 metres down. Along with yard-long Greenland halibut come shoals of little "redfish", spiny scorpion fishes with gigantic eyes, a staple food of sperm whales and now, suitably filleted or fish-fingered, of the European housewife.
The halibut and redfish catch has also been targeted, west of the Shetlands, by the small but efficient fleet of larger Irish trawlers, whose deepwater hauls are now worth upwards of €20 million a year. They voyage far, like the Noratlantean, trawling over the deep peaks, or seamounts, for orange roughy (in this drawing) or on the "flat grounds" of the continental slopes for mixed hauls of orange roughy with roundnose grenadier, black scabbard, siki shark and blue ling.
Almost nothing is known about most of these fish, except that they live very long lives (at least 100 years for orange roughy) mature late and at a large size, with a low rate of reproduction. This makes them especially vulnerable to overfishing. In the unregulated free-for-all of the 1990s, some 50,000 tonnes of orange roughy were skimmed off the seamounts in a single year and all the key deepwater species suffered huge declines.
Ireland's Marine Institute played what part it could in the difficult deepwater research of the EC FAIR project but it was not until 2002 that an EU management regime came into play, restricting access to most species and putting observers on board the trawlers.
What the skipper and crew of the Noratlantean thought of the EU's system is lurid, even by the manic, surreal standards of their sleep-deprived dialogue. Even Luke Bullough couldn't find a good word to say for EU quotas, compared with Iceland's "brilliant", closely-monitored system, in which there are no discards: "Anything you catch, you land."
Trawler needs to be read by anyone who cares remotely about the ocean and the men who go out to keep fish of some kind on the human menu. For all sorts of reasons - enjoyment not the least of them - it is a book you will never forget.
Trawler, by Redmond O'Hanlon is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20 sterling).