Fishing through the sea-ice
like this was always a risk. Once deployed, the net would
start catching fish, if you didn't retrieve it every day and
remove the fish, they would die in the net and this would attract
various scavengers. After a short time it would be a horrible
deadly mess - and completely useless for the purpose it was
set for in the first place, to capture live fish.
If it was very cold, fish would
freeze immediately on contact with the air - or almost so. A
way around this was to pull the net as quickly out of the water
as possible and into a bucket of water which would be then driven
quickly back to the base where the fish were removed in balmy
temperatures of -5C or more instead of -15C and well below outside
(sea-water freezes at -1.8C, so the fish live their lives at
this temperature irrespective of what the air temperature was
- if it gets colder, the ice just gets thicker).
Paul Ward -
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