For example, just a few days ago I learned how to estimate the age of a fish. We were using sheepshead heads for bait at the time. All day I was finding little white circles that felt like hard plastic or bone on the deck. I looked everywhere trying to find some plastic gear that it could have chipped off of, but to no avail. Finally, I asked Cap about them. He pondered it for a minute, then came to the conclusion that they were fish ear bones from our bait. All that remained of the old heads that had been munched by lobsters and various other critters was bone and cartilidge. The earbones easily could have fallen out of the fish skulls. He showed me that you can count the concentric circles on the bone to determine the age of a fish, just as you can count the growth rings on a tree to estimate its age! I found this fascinating.
Cap is a wealth of juicy little marine factoids. I like to think of myself collecting them, in the same way that I used to collect marbles or stamps. In fact, just yesterday we caught a good-sized flounder, maybe 16" long. Flounders begin life in this world with an eye on each side of their body. Eventually, the eye on the bottom migrates to the top of the fish, so that both eyes are on top, but you can still tell which eye was originally on top. I'll call this the dominant eye. Cap told me flounders can either be "left-handed" (with the dominant eye on the left) or "right-handed."
However, these marine factoids are only little snippets of my education on the boat. How could I ever explain to a casual aquaintence all that I have learned from fishing? How could I convey that when you first step on a boat, you have to learn everything anew in this strange, aquatic dimension? It's like being a toddler again. First you learn how to stand, then to walk, then to actually get work done on a plane that is in constant motion.
The fishing industry is a world in which paper resumes have no use besides maybe absorbing engine oil spilled on the deck. You "qualify" for the job of sternman only if you can repeatedly lift at least 50 lbs, work efficiently on the boat without puking, and do fast, hard work all day long. How many "overqualified" Smithies can spend a day on a lobsterboat without barfing over the rail the whole time let alone bait 200 traps with rotten fish?
I survived fishing through the 6 hardest months of the year. Yet I'm still a mere "greenhorn" by a real fisherman's standards. I have worked up to a decent speed at the redundant duties on deck (baiting, banding lobsters, etc.). Upon watching my video of us setting traps, my father, an ex-captain of two draggers, remarked that I am an "efficient worker," which I found very flattering. However, I still have much to learn as a sternlady.
Probably the biggest challenge of working on a boat is learning 1.) how to not be in the way and 2.) how to be useful. One can only learn these things by observation and experience. Only recently have I felt more competent at knowing how to be useful when we get in predicaments. For example, in my early days working with Cap, when we came to a snarl (our lines tangled with those of another fisherman) Cap would give me verbal directions such as "Hold this," "Coil that line," "OK, you can throw the buoy back now." Sometimes he would find difficulty in verbalizing what needed to be done or I didn't do it in time. This could be frustrating for both of us. By now, we have done this routine enough times, that I can predict what needs to be done and I can be of assistance without needing direction. I have also learned little tricks like how to hold the weight of a line over the rail while Cap reties a knot. Simple properties of physics. But there's always more to learn. Although Cap is wise and experienced in my eyes, he too learns new things every day from encountering new challenges.
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