Andy Butler on Fishing
We worked from Battery Bay down as far as Blackgang Chine and we originally started with a 17 feet coble, a little open boat. Then we had an 18 feet dory built by Horn Brothers at Fishbourne and then after that we had a Coastworker which was back to a 17 feet boat. I think I was the first person to ever put a power hauler into a small open boat.
The Coastworker was the boat that we saved but that was the last boat. We fished … because crab is such … you don’t get much money for crab. I mean I keep in touch with Geoffrey down the front end, Justin, one or two others that do a bit of fishing. The prices for crab aren’t very much different than they were when we were fishing in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s and lobsters, that’s crept up a bit but it’s still not brilliant, but they are high value, easy to handle. Crab, you know you’d have half a tonne of crab to move off your beach and there’s no road, you’d have to get everything along to … we used to come down to Orchard Bay so it was tough work
Lisa And how many pots would you have out at any one time?
Andy: I suppose the maximum that we ever had out I think was about 120.
David: I was going to say about 110, something like that.
Andy: 120, but then we pulled that back to about 70 but nowadays you know some of these bigger boats they work 1000 pots but you can only manage them in one tide you see because your floats, on the smaller pots they’re called ‘Beckhams’ but on the balls that mark where your strings of pots are … we used to have strings of 10 or 14, which is a long line with 14 pots on, when the tide is running hard it pushes them under so you don’t know where they are. We used to work up to about two miles off?
About two miles out, 140 -150 foot of water and the tides off here are pretty strong and of course you would have to wait until you could see the ‘buff’ as we called them, this ball coming up. And I used to say to my wife, “Can you see it, can you see it?” “Yes” she said, “Can’t reach it yet” and the tide would be running like mad and I’d say, “Get the thing” and we’d hook it up and put it in the hauler, put the thing all in gear so you were pushing against the tide with the boat and haul them up and that was the beauty of a power hauler in a small boat ‘cos you could manage to do that. Yeah, the fishing was good. I don’t know what it’s like now. I wouldn’t have thought so good. And we didn’t mess around much with fish. We used to do a bit of netting but again that was time consuming. You didn’t really want to waste time on anything else other than doing your pots. That’s where your money came from, so that’s what we did.
