The last two days I have been at sea, out on a fishing trip with the Adenia LK 193, one of the large Pelagic trawlers. I have so many images from this trip that it will take a few days for me to get through them all. It felt like an initiation test in some way, I don’t think I passed, I was sea sick the whole time and only managed 24 hours but I am so glad I went, it was incomparable to any experience I have ever had and an insight into the world of modern fishing. I feel it has opened my mind in another way and even in that short time I had a sense of leaving and coming back to shore, the feelings associated with, it gave me a new perspective. As I sit here writing this I can hear the winds blowing outside, it is dark and there were strong winds forecast tonight with rough sea, just glad I am on land and not out there rolling around on the sea. While my trip was very, very brief and a minuscule taste of what it can fishing at sea can involve, it was big for me and I was nervous. I would have liked to have been able (without feeling poraamos – Shetland dialect for unwell, poorly ) to have more in the way of conversations with the men on board, to find out more about their lives, maybe I will have to go and meet some of them on land.
There are so many stories to tell for the short time, I will have to do it in episodes, so today we have the sea, pretty calm but it is the North Sea, tomorrow it will be fishing and the men who work on board, then there is also the amazing radar and sensor equipment, visually intriguing, digital imagery, as well as the huge, industrial sculptures that are the ships themselves. The Adenia had recently been lengthened, which meant cutting the boat in half and inserting a prefabricated section in the middle, then welding her back together a truly impressive piece of engineering. I would have loved to have seen her in cross section. As it gets dark so early most of these photos were taken as we were leaving land, sailing south around the bottom of Shetland and over to the West, by the time we were out in the open sea and when they made their catch it was pitch black, an all enveloping darkness.
