TWO black, beady eyes glared up at me as I shoved the trawl net to one side. I gazed back, transfixed. Time stopped, whiskers twitched and the rat bolted. ‘Shut the door! Shut the door!’ bellowed skipper Nick Rich, as the rat bounded for the wheelhouse. Once in the bowels of the trawler, there are umpteen nooks and crannies to hide in, together with many vital cables to gnaw. I lumbered after it in my ‘oilies’ and slammed the door just in time.
After a rat hunt that saw the creature shooting back and forth across the deck, it exited through a scupper in the half-light of dawn. It must have swum across from Brixham breakwater in the night and clawed its way up the mooring rope. We were a few miles out, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it made it home—the sportsman in me hopes it did. Indeed, this hair-raising incident is only one of many experiences and challenges I’ve encountered in my new role as a crewman on an inshore trawler.
Change only happens when we instigate it—or, in my case, when it’s forced upon us. I’d spent the past 25 years as a magazine photographer, but, in truth, I’d been in denial about the decline of the print industry and the rise of digital photography for a long time. Now anyone can take a half-decent photo on their mobile phone, a profession I’d taken for granted was collapsing like a giant digital soufflé. Work was getting harder to find, budgets were being slashed and I can’t remember the last time anyone bought me lunch. I knew I’d never leave photography behind, but another income was desperately needed.
I mulled over my fate with a friend, who knew a trawler skipper who might need some occasional help. ‘You’ve done heaps of boat fishing, don’t get seasick and can identify sea fish—call him,’ he counselled. A blend of photography and fishing was alluring— what could be better?
Denne historien er fra May 27, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra May 27, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
