Catching fish - a good catch and bad catch

The following are taken from various oral archives which have recorded the thoughts of old fishermen. This article features quotes about good catches and bad catches. How the fishermen tried to catch fish - it was never easy - some times they could come back with nothing.

YOU NEED A BOOK: "You've just got to take a chance trawling, where fish is ... you just mark down in yer book year by year, where you think it will be. Where you had a haul this time last year, you go again. Sometimes it does pay off" - Fred Normandale

JUST LIKE A PARADE: "You can go go one day and get a ton of fish... you can go t'same place next day - there it was gone. Everybody chases you that day 'cos you had a good day the day before. Like a parade - all after the one that caught the most fish. But they sometimes come unstuck because you caught that yesterday - you can't catch it twice." - Fred Normandale

SNIFFING THE HERRINGS: "Every boat had a sniffer. He would be a bloke who... well I've never had it proved, but he could smell t'herrings... when you were steaming out on a night, he would be laid on t'bow o' t'boat, you know, and he would say 'There's herrings here' and he would be reckoned to smell the oil what the 'errings give off." - Colin Messruther

SHINING LIKE SILVER: "Herring fishing in the old days, they used to throw a piano wire to find the herrings, and mebbe two or three men laid over the stern of the boat looking down... you used to see the herrings turning over, shining, like silvery, and you could see how thick the shoal was. You used to tow this piano wire with the herrings knocking the wire" - Fred Normandale

NO COMPLAINING: "There was no swearing on Filey boats or anything like that, no complaining, no. If they had a poor catch and somebody complained, they said 'Thats what the Lord said we've got to have and that's what you've got, so you might as well shut up grumbling... they all had to go to Ebenezer Chapel on Sunday, a lot of them were lay preachers." - Captain Sydney Smith

OVERFILLING THE BOATS: "Of course some of them got greedy and overfilled the boat with fish. Some boats could be lost because they were filled to the gunnels" - A Bayes



OTHER ARTICLES
• Ranter Chapel revival in Filey
• Losses amongst Filey fishing cobles
• Characters of the Filey fishing industry
• The history of Filey Lifeboats
• The history of the Scarborough fishing industry
• 1000 years of fishing
• Sea Urchin Stall on the West Pier at Scarborough
• Luggers and yawls in the filey fishing industry
• The early trawlers - Yarmouth and Barking and Brixham
• Trawling and overfishing - Filey fishing
• Filey fishermen in 1862 - yawls and cobles
• The character of a fisherman
• Migrations of fishing families - Filey - Yarmouth and Ramsgate
• A preachers trip on a Filey Herring yawl
• Theakston's guide to the Scarborough fisheries 1866
• Scarboroughs Fishermen versus Firemen Football match on Boxing Day
• Filey and the gales of 1860,1867,1869 AND 1880
• The Allen and Truman Scarborough fishing families
• Church Tithes in the early fishing history of scarborough