Haul Back at Night

There is a phone next to my bunk. When it beeps I wake up and the captain will say, “we’re going to haul one back” and I say, “alright.” I put on my XtraTuf insulated boots and go down stairs through the galley to the gear room. My raingear hangs on the first hook to the left of the door way. I shove my boots through the legs of the orange pants and hook the suspenders over my shoulders, I put the jacket on and squeeze my hands through the neoprene cuffs. Then I don the lifejacket and hardhat. I take my clipboard with a blank form on it and a pencil and the tape measure.
I walk though the factory, every one knows that the only time I have to wear the hard hat is when I am going up on deck to measure the codend when it is hauled on board, but the ask any way, “Haulback?” and I tell them Yep, three or four different times as I walk to the other end of the factory. I have to go through a heavy door into the generator room with its car sized yellow CAT generators and then up a steep staircase. At the top I turn the big wheel on the hatch.
Some times the door swings open to grey clouds and occasionally I am dazzled by the sunlight, but usually it is black night. There are lights shining on the deck but over the back end of the boat is a void. There is no difference between sky and water it is all black. The void is populated by the white shadows of seagulls. It is disorienting to watch them, there is no perspective so one that is on the wing near the ship will appear to fly right underneath another one that is resting on the water farther out.
I stand with my back to a wall and there is a partial deck above my head. A steel cable is also running past above my head. Then the trawl doors come up; big, blue, bulldozer blades banging against the stern. There is a flurry of activity as the deck hands hook them in place and connect the cables from the doors to the net reels on deck. Then they stand around again while the cables and chains are dragged across the deck. Finally the net comes up. The deck hands are busy again hooking heavy ropes to the main winch so that the heavy codend can be brought out of the water.
I grab my measuring stick and take several readings of the height of codend, usually it is between one and two meters high, I find the length against tick marks I made on the side of the trawl alley with spray paint and finally one of the deck hands takes an end of the tape measure and holds it out over the fish so I can get a width measurement. The captain will come down to see what he caught and then they pull the zipper. The Zipper is a series of knots like a crochet stitch that holds the end of net closed. Every one watches the fish fall into the tank.
On my way back through the factory I will get asked about six times “How did that last tow look?” and I will shrug and say, “pretty big,” or “kinda small” as the case may be, and if I am feeling generous I might give out some additional information like, “there was quite a bit of cod in this one,” or “It was pretty clean, nothing but rock sole.”

Pictures: 1, Looking towards the stern, the trawl doors are hanging at an angle, the gate in the center of the deck will open so the fish can be hauled up the ramp behind it. 2, Looking toward the bow with a full codend on deck, That is about twenty five tons of fish in this picture.