42 replies to this topic

[Young Knoxy]

WHAT IS THE MADDEST OR WEIRDEST THING YOUSE LOT HAVE TRAWLED UP. I WILL GET THE BALL ROLLING. MY DAD TRAWLED UP A WHOLE BODY OFF THE COAST OF IRELAND ABOARD THE VERALLA AR REG

[quiet waters]

a lot of us have stories like that, some a bit more personal than others, one of my earliest memories is of my father getting one of those drowned when the quesada went down, my future father in law was one of the few survivors, i remember him having to take the boat in to the new quay and being met by the police and an ambulance, i was three yrs old,

[restlesswave]

yeah on about personal. back in 1990 while crewing on the ranger we picked up a skull minus the upper jaw. not a lot we could do only keep it aboard and on the way ashore lay it to rest again on the hard ground s.w. of the stanton. if the teeth were there we would have taken it in but the way it was with not much chance of i.d.
   the sad thing was this was some body`s child. some mother gave birth and cherished the life entrusted to her and this person was obviously lost at sea maybe in pursuit of a living or service for their country- it was a humbling experience and something i will never forget. like the markings on some of our 39-45 war graves in our local graveyard-known unto god.

[johntar tt10]

Weird, came fast off the North Hole 70fthm, winched back and could'nt get net off bottom so started to tow her into Brodick Bay up and down like a hand line, kept sticking and then winching in as we shallowed, after about 4 or 5 hours John James in the Golden Years came and put a rope on us and we fared a bit better but still kept sticking and winching , so JJ's neighbour boat Golden Days came and put a rope on him and away we we went, wires came up, eventually we got doors to galllows but net was still very heavy but with the 3 boats on full power we could float the net to the surface but could'nt see as it was now dark, in past the pier at Brodick the 3 three boats were in about 2 to 3 fthms off the Douglas Hotel when bang whatever was on the net came off, boated the net expecting her to be in bits, only damage was the headline stranded at the crown and a fathon of tearing into the cover.
Never did see what was on the net but years later there was an article in the Arran Banner about divers discovering an American aircraft, if I remember correctly a Grunam Dive Bomber minus engine lying off the Douglas Hotel in 3 fthms of water, and not being able to find out when or where it came to be there.

[Adoration II]

goto be the star a man made obj 3ft lenghts o angle bar sharpened each side 6 lenghts each with point in it 2 damage nets boats trawlers really wont say names think ive got pics some where

[young ronnie]

We (the Old Man,Dougie "Sampson" MacDougall and myself) were taking the Storjen from Oban to Dunbar via the Calley Canal in 1972 to get her re-engined when round about the Broch the engine started to boil up with a choked sea-cock.We tried everything to clear it but no joy,so we rigged up the deck wash pump into the cooling system and away we went,reaching Dunbar about 14 hours later with no further bother.When we beached her to see what was causing the trouble,believe it or not there was a conger eel with his head stuck up the pipe,and when the old man took it out(I wouldnae go near it even though it was only a wee one as I hate the bloody things and always have done..wont go near them...big fearty!!)it was still very much alive(after nearly 24 hours by then),and when put back into the harbour swam away quite the thing.You wonder how it managed to get up the pipe in the first place when we were sailing along never mind survive a 100 mile steam,but it sure did.If ever a fish deserved to live that one did!!

[restlesswave]

seen another strangesone in the spring of 1990 whilst fishing bobbins for cod on the west aran grounds one of the burtonport boats  the irish 65`autumn glory picked something up in 55-60 fathom whilst towing off the side she got the bunts up to the gallows-but broke the quarter rope with sheer strain leaving them well and truly fast -she was on her beam end all day with the weight and absolutely solid-whatever she had was still attatched to the bottom. coming on dark something finally gave and made bits off the net. some of the boys here theorised it was a big anchor and chain still attatched to the winch-but 60 fathom of chain?

[young ronnie]

Myself and "Markie Dan" MacAllister were sitting in the fo'c'sle of the old Kittiwake having our dinner towing away at the west side of Colonsay,the Old Man up in the dookit,when a herring gull came flapping down the hatch right in beside us.It ended up standing on the seat locker beside me getting fed on bits of stew and tatties off our plates.It had no fear of us whatsoever and after a while we lifted it up(didn't make any attempt to nip us at all),took it back up top and let him go.He hung about for a wee while then flew away.Wierd how tame it was,whether it was somebody's pet that wanted a taste of freedom,or just a good natured shitehawk(that would be a first!!)I do not know.They do say that all fishermen come back as gulls,so maybe it was a relation popped in to see me ??

[restlesswave]

na ronnie- i think in this day an age its all fishermen are gulls lol!

[young ronnie]

If that's the case Mr.G then we should all fly over our respective Parliaments and show our solidarity by doing the same to them as they have been doing to us for years !!

[johntar tt10]

When I was a lot younger and taking a spell in the wheelhouse I would hear Charlie Horne in the Silver Crest LH316 tell Jim Wilson on the Wilsonia LH19 he was up at the Steak and Kidney tow, thought it was code but funny thing was could see Charlie out about the Big Peak in 50 to 60 fthms. Anyways it turns out that when Charlie first towed out to the Big Peak when he lifted he found 2 or 3 flat tins with no labels in the cod-end, on opening them they were perfect steak and kidney pies like the Fray Bentos kind. So fired them into the oven and they were declared best ever.

The yarn is, It seems a Destroyer collided with Queen Mary during the war and the bow of the Destroyer was sliced open, hence the Steak and Kidney Pies seemingly the boats would head there when they wanted a change of grub mid-week, so they would tow away out WNW on the Steak and Kidney.
It was still called that for the years I was in the wheelhouse,  but don't know if the younger loons use it.

[Jammy]

have heard of that john but never knew the history about it lol
think i'll give it a try see if there any big clonks going on monday hahhaha
if not we'll have some diff for dinner lol

[quiet waters]

when  was in my early teens we used to get fed up hangin about the street n a saturday night so wid head for the quay, doon aboard the boat and stick a frey bentos in the oven, mingin!! mind you the cans of beer and cider that a mate of the older brother had liberated fae the local offie where he worked and stashed below the seat lockers helped it go down a bit better, if my own son got up to that kind of game he'd get a damn good battering, thats the hypocrite in me coming out. never caught any pies but did get a tin of ham, half a doz eggs in the box, all intact and half a pun of chopped pork still wrapped in greaseproof paper in a plastic bag in the same tow, or even better towin up the soon my uncles glesses that he'd lost ower the side fae the girl zena about six months before, in the intervening period he'd sold the boat and came aboard with us and immediately identified them, "n'aye, fine my boys, born lucky, thats your uncle for ye" he said, after he'd swung the bucket ower the side and rinsing them out and sticking them on his face in place of the spare pair held together with sellotape that he'd been wearing for months, " your auld uncle will be getting his hole this weekend, top notcher!!!" proceeding to shovel away, my cousin duggie has one of those laughs that you can't avoid joining in, we were in convulsions for nearly an hour, the old fla in the wheelhoose calling us the biggest shower of useless b astards he'd ever set eyes on, i do believe i might have even wet myself, i couldn't look at him for days afterwards, my faither resorting to threatening the next laugher with the sack, the amazing thing was that during the time his specs were lost doogie had sat and passed his driving test first time, we were mending a net on the quay when he arrived to pronounce his pass with the immortal line "did ye ever doubt me brother?" worse still a few weeks later when he took the wheel of my transit van the band used, we'd taken it to the west loch on the sunday night to take a net up, on the way down the road on the following friday doogie hit a cyclist just before kennacraig with the big side mirror, i watched as the man careered into the ditch, "you hit that man" i said having the window seat on the passenger side, "ach he'll be alright, i only clipped him" he might have killed him for all we knew but all we could do was laugh all the way to the town.

[restlesswave]

the destroyer john that the queen mary hit was the hms curacao-she zigged when the queen mary zagged and the queen mary ran over the top of her-but that happened of the donegal coast somewhere-out to the west. during the war beside kincasslagh-a lot of badly decomposed sailors bodies came in just beside kincasslagh. the second load of them heading for the graveyard in cruit island the smell was so bad that the horse drawing the cart made of for the grave yard on it`s own. and did so again with the subsequent load. local legend has it that these remains came from the curacao-which would be probably true as i don`t think there was another royal naval warship lost of this coast.

[johntar tt10]

Frank, probably some of the old fellas spicing up the yarn by including the Queen, but there was a collision of some kind and a destroyer was always mentioned, and it is a fact about the Steak and Kidney pies and Wee Charlie firing them into the oven. Probably never heard of salmonella in those days and had stomaches like Kelvin crankcases.

[restlesswave]

yeah the northern approaches ,john, was probably one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world with inward and outward bound convoys-heavily defended by destroyers based in derry and  the liverpool based destroyer escort groups all sailing about in blackout-no wonder there was collisions!-i remember reading about one destroyer ploughing into another over your way and one sunk on a training excercise somewhere on the west coast in wartime-but god knows how many sank-there was as many as 250 destroyers based in derry alone. great story about the pies it must be a generational thing as my old lad as well has a titanium stomach-no virus could survive him!!- by the way i found out the stella maris i was on about that was here came from cn-and was stella maris there also.

[quiet waters]

you might find a pic of the stella maris your on about on the other place if you look up frank stacey, he is dennis meenans grandson and has posted pics of at least three of the boats of that name his granda had at one time or another, the last was decommed and put on display but i think its either lacking finance to restore it or was recently scrapped due to lack of money? can't remember which!! theres a good pic from 1952 of his great grandad and grandad, his mother's uncle and cecil finn at the ring net in west of ireland i think?

[young ronnie]

After reading John Tar's story of how the "steak and kidney" tow got it's name I thought about the "pillar box" or "pill box" as it got shortened to,which was the tow along the face of the reef at Carsaig on the SE shore of Mull near Loch Buie,so called after Big John Fairnie of the Fisherrow Fragrant,who when asked one day where he was going as he towed in towards the reef, replied "I'm away in tae post a letter"...after that it was always known as the "pill box"....great how the names stick.(mind you,I was called a greetin' faced bast**d many a time but that name never stuck !!)

[quiet waters]

see you buggered off elsewhere ya greetin faced bar stand!!!! cood ye naw suffer the crash like a man the same as the rest of us? that wiz just me demonstrating one of the things i'm passionate about, keeping old traditions alive, if i'd known about that particular one i'd have worked harder to revive it earlier, like get Tshirts with your face superimposed on mcCaigs folly with "i went to Oban and all i saw was a crumbling wreck" thats better, think i'm back to normal service noo, had a wee mini breakdown earlier when the site went down, so did my team, i was actually shouting at a tickertape on my laptop as the game wasn't one of the two NFL games i was watching, onto games 3 and 4 now with no5 to follow till 4.30am, if its dry i might get my tripod i got for my birthday out and take a walk doon the pier and see if i canna get a nice pic of the boats going out, canna get the sunrise as i'd need to go doon the shore road oot past davaar to see it, oh this is supposed to be aboot weird things, weird the site goin doon efter a conversation i had wae someone this mornin?
i actually wiz going to say my old chart oh colonsay had the pillbox marked on it and i had wondered what it meant, never got out that way till after the old man died and nobody aboard to ask, in fact only ever got out that way twice, funny how we never went out there and it so close to where we worked six months of the year? we'd rather steam all the way to the clyde, even seen me steam all the way from the north end to brodick rather than go to colonsay, we used to get threatened with it two or three times a year but never went, likewise only ever been into bunessan once and oban once, naw the adventurous type, plannin to remedy that next summer if your cuz gets roon this way tho, get the feckin job oot my system once and for all, ye get to feeling guilty aboot talking aboot it when your so far removed from things, i've only been doon oor local pier once since i came ashore to see boats land and even then i just caught ricki's ropes, took a few pics and went home, too many eyes boring into the back of my heid for my liking, muttering of "whats he thinking aboot going back to the job for? he was feck all use at it the last time!!!" and the merr i hear and read, the worse i get, lucky to last as long as i did!!! what we really need fae you ronnie is word of that auld bugger of a cuzzin oh yours, naw that we don't appreciate you, we do, especially your recent bravery of posting that pic of you in those flares, i'd much rather post a pic of me naked, gut and all than one of me wearing the claes i did between 1972-1977, after that no problem, it was denim or leather any colour as long as it was black, then again you can still get into yours, i'm a weeeeeeeeeeeee bit off getting into my leather jeans wae the 26" waist, i asked the wife why she'd thrown out all my jeans with a 32" waist that i'd put in a cupboard, she just laughed hysterically for half an hour, every time i opened my mooth, she'd start again, hurt me to the core so it did, she'd also thrown out all my american football shirts from when i used to play in the late 80's, naw so funny when i told her they'd be worth aboot £500 on ebay noo, still you'll naw need to worry aboot wit to wear if you go to the pictures to see mamma mia, they were all dressing up here last weekend to see the singalong version,  "do you want to come?" she asked as they were going out the door, "how long have we been married?" i replied.

[westword]

cauht the wing of a german warplane how weird is dat

[quiet waters]

got a plane once too, towed it into the shore at the high rocks up the soon, it was pretty much intact and was luckily only hanging on the net not in the net and we managed to get clear of it without too much trouble, i'd forgotten all about it, must have been shortly after i left school back in 78-79, there was only one "plane" marked as a wreck anywhere close to where we had been towing so somebody else must have had a grip of it recent to us and it had broken free, we weren't within 10 lanes of the one and the grips, even further from the one at the bottom of the flat, SW of the broon heid, another local boat the breadwinner got one of the wheels, complete with undercarraige in the area at the grips where the wreck was marked on the charts, must have been the same plane, if i remember right it was plain silver aluminium, no visible markings.

[young ronnie]

Talking about planes...we lost a net on one of the sea-planes in Ganavan back in the early 80s and were dragging backwards and forwards with the creeper for ages and in the process got the Oban to Mull power cable(don't know if it was an old one or was still in use,I was feart tae ask).Managed to get it half way to the surface in 20 fathoms of water (could see it on the meter as well) and fortunately for us it broke the prong off the creeper before it pulled the boat over.Some bloody weight in it,good job it was a quiet day.Couldnae have done it any harm as there was no news of a power cut on Mull that day,so all was well. We finally did get the net,but not before we had filled the deck with lumps of plane including the whole nose complete with a length of anchor chain(but no anchor)shackled to it,which as it was a sea-plane was no real surprise I suppose,it would need to anchor sometime.What was surprising was the stainless steel shackle between the plane and the chain(obviously they hadn't heard of electrolysis back in the 1940s) It was only hand tight,and unlike the chain which was rusted to buggery,was only very slightly pitted on the pin(no bad for something that had been lying on the bottom for over 40 years),and was used on our gear for a long time after that.

[johntar tt10]

The boys got an Albino nurse dogfish during the summer, it had pure white skin, pink eyes and about a foot long, they managed to keep it living aboard till the Sealife Centre from north of Oban collected it for their Aquarium.
Anyway they let us know it survived and sent complimentery tickets so we are taking the grand-daughter up to see it tomorow.
Keep you posted

[quiet waters]

i've got pictures somewhere of a weird fish we caught, james legge who was FO at the time took them and they were up on the wall in the fishery office till my mother  retired from her job there, it had a tail on it like a shark and a head not unlike a monkfish, it was brown in colour and about five or six feet long and the head about two and a half foot across, we only landed it as a curiosity but it got sold and ended up on display in the window of a fish shop in greenock, if i mind right we got £189 for it.

[young ronnie]

That sounds like an angel shark or guitar fish the artist formerly known as QW.I've only seen one once before.We got it in Ganavan when I was with the Old Man,and hadn't a clue what it was.Chae Milne of the AH Summer Rose told us it was what they called a fiddle fish.One that we got that I haven't heard anybody say they have ever seen was a "cross bred" skate.Got him on the Seagull at Colonsay.He had the white belly and spikey tail of a thorneyback,with a smooth back and pointed nose of a blue skate.I doot his mammy must have "strayed" one night !!

[quiet waters]

name sounds about right ronnie, noo adays two meenites on t'internet wid gie ye an answer but this wiz in the early 90's and information harder to come by, the old hands claimed it wiz first they'd ever seen landed into CN all the more weird as we caught it "up the soon" had it been out west it might have been more common, i've heard of sun fish being caught there, even seen the odd turtle and aye your crossbreed skate too, away doon towards port ellen or MAKRO as i christened it, a place you'd go a couple of times a year to get sh!te in bulk!!!

[restlesswave]

aye ronnie that`s what they are called here as well-fiddlefish. they seem to have been more plentiful here as they were common enough in the nets one time-although i haven`t seen one in a lot of years-seen a few of yer funny skate here but i don`t know what they`re called-here skate are either stars,blondes, or rough-every thing strange going into the latter box.

[quiet waters]

a bit like the membership here frank, which box do you reckon we'd get scutched into, star, blondes or rough? apart fae the princess there'll naw be many blondes and she could aye go into the star box and replace the blondes wae greys!!!

[restlesswave]

probably the rough box  greys,balds and just down right strange-could just do away wi the blonde box altogether   as for your three degrees of stupidity was trying to figure out which one suited me best and just had to accept probably the two former-although it seems to be the older i get-the latter option is becoming more applicable- i shudder to think about some of the stupid tricks i pulled-my cunning plans have caused much mirth over the years-born stupid and probably die stupid lol

[quiet waters]

choosing the born stupid option by default puts you higher on the ladder IQ wise as the other two, as you've known your limitations from the outset and acted appropriatly, entry into the remaining two is more often than not conferred upon the subject by others, all the while they blissfully go thru life believing they belong to none of the categories yet feel free to place others in the first with wreckless abandon, usually by way of an enquiry, "Were you born stupid?"