Chapter 266: Fishing

The Fishery Company's terms for selling motor sailboats were as follows: first, the buyer had to be a shaven-headed, licensed citizen of the Transmigration Nation — good things would naturally be kept for their own people. Foreign capital was not permitted to enter this kind of high-tech field, even if paying in full.

Once Yu Chengde and his band of rare capitalists scraped together the down payment, they could board the ship. Fortunately for people like them, pooling money to buy a boat and going out to sea together to fish was everyday life for coastal fishermen, so no one had any misgivings — they were all sturdy, honest men reeking of fish and covered in calluses, and they settled the matter over a single round of drinks.

However, the situation after boarding was not optimistic: it now amounted to the shareholders paying high prices in silver to hire the original captain, engineers, and other technical staff to work for them.

In this process, the shareholders needed to replace them with their own people and take over the vessel as quickly as possible. Only then could they bring down the exorbitant labor costs and pay off the loan early.

It had to be understood that, in order to quickly transfer the precious skilled workers back to other tasks, the Fishery Company had added a "Technical Extraction Fee" on these people. If Yu Chengde and the others wanted to make money, they had to rapidly master the skills and snatch the profits back from the company.

At this moment, Yu Chengde was under the Longmen Crane of the Fathead Fish, laboriously operating the hulking, crude winch to set the net.

Truth be told, from the instant he saw the coal-gas "ice cellar" on the ship, he had been utterly spellbound by this mysterious power.

Yu Chengde, who had fished for half a lifetime, would never have imagined, even if beaten to death, that such an outrageous operation could exist on a fishing ship: although he was a southerner, he still understood the principle that cold fish does not rot easily.

After this, once he boarded the ship, like Granny Liu entering the Grand View Garden, his entire worldview of fishing was overturned: the strange black box that could converse between two ships, the glazed slate that could see the schools of fish on the seabed, the winch that automatically laid iron nets into the sea, and those rumbling, clanking mechanical iron contraptions in the engine room.

The five major shareholders, along with the twenty-odd nephews and subordinates they had brought aboard, were all utterly paralyzed at this moment, at a complete loss, not knowing what to do.

Thus, they could only learn step by step, starting from the very basics.

His nephew Yu Chushui was dispatched to the engine room, while the others began by learning the simplest tasks of setting and hauling the nets.

Net-setting was divided into two types: purse seine and trawl net.

The purse seine was the simplest method for catching shallow-water schools of fish. The ship would cast the net while circling the school, and soon a spectacular scene of fish scales flashing as they leaped would appear on the sea surface.

The trawl net, however, was somewhat more complex.

The trawl nets of later generations were a thing of terror. One or two ships would drag a large net bag behind them, sweeping up all mid-to-lower-level marine life and the environment in one fell swoop — the seabed ecology was utterly destroyed, coastal fish catches of various nations plummeted, and they all turned to the deep sea.

But once the environment was destroyed, it could not be restored. Why did incidents of the Stick Nation arresting Rabbit fishermen frequently occur? Because there were no fish left in the coastal waters; the seabed was covered in broken nylon rope nets and dead, lifeless wasteland, all life scraped away by bulldozer-like trawl nets.

The trawl-net fishing ships that appeared in the 17th century operated in a different manner.

In later generations, the steel plate thickness of an ordinary fishing ship was around 2 centimeters. But a 17th-century wooden motor sailboat of the same tonnage was vastly inferior in efficiency — to achieve the same structural strength, it had to use very thick wood. Typically, this figure was no less than 10–15 centimeters.

It must be known that the double-layer oak hull thickness of the British Royal Navy's HMS Victory was a monstrous 46 centimeters.

Thickness meant heaviness and clumsiness. What a 2-centimeter steel plate could accomplish, a fishing ship needed to increase its own weight by at least five times just to barely meet the requirement.

The cumbersome structure greatly limited the power and functionality of a wooden ship like the Fathead Fish. It must be known that the most common 240-ton trawl-net fishing ship of later generations had a fish-carrying capacity (including ice) of 983 tons. And what was the fish-carrying capacity of the Fathead Fish, with a displacement of 400 tons? 85 tons.

Yes, the displacement was over 100 tons more, yet the payload actually decreased. This was partly the fault of the low-efficiency, large-volume Coal Gas Power System, partly the fault of the crude, heavy timber used from hull planks to beams and pillars, and partly the fault of the rigid sails and cables.

Under these circumstances, the power system, already somewhat strained, could not drag too large a Steel Wire Fishing Net — the heavy net plus the fish inside it meant that, never mind the bottom layer, even catching mid-layer fish was a struggle.

Today was the first time Yu Chengde and the others had carried out a trawl-net operation in the ten days since boarding; before this, they had only used simple purse seines. As the captain, watching the instruments in the cabin, gave an order through the loudspeaker, Yu Chengde's group, standing by on the deck, hurriedly burst into activity.

Yu Chengde's task today was to operate the winch. As the motor-driven winch slowly began its work, the pulley on the Longmen Crane also started turning, and the trawl net behind the Fathead Fish began to be slowly pulled toward the stern. At the same moment, the engine room received the order, and the ship's speed began to decrease.

Twenty minutes later, the large steel-wire net bag, much smaller in area than the trawl nets of later generations, was hauled up over the iron slipway at the stern.

Seeing the fish ceaselessly struggling and thrashing inside the Fishing Net, all the Crewmen threw themselves forward at that instant: the hardest work had begun.

Yu Chengde and the others had to, in the shortest possible time, first throw the small fish and sharks back into the sea. "Small fish" here meant fish shorter than the elbow — anything under 40 centimeters counted.

Evolution over hundreds of millions of years had caused fish to populate every water layer under different pressures in the ocean. And historically, it was not until the 20th century, when humans used nylon on a massive scale, that fish in the middle and lower layers of the ocean were truly caught in large quantities.

But in this plane of the Transmigrators, due to the antelope engine and steel-wire nets, the mid-layer fish of the Taiwan Strait were being hunted for the first time in hundreds of millions of years.

Although the mesh of the steel-wire net had been enlarged to a degree unimaginable to fishermen of later generations, many "small fish" were still trapped in the net, and at this point, everything depended on manual labor.

Yu Chengde and the others not only had to throw the small fish out, but also had to process the big fish. Fish as thick as an arm, as thick as a thigh, as thick as a waist — schools of fish that had never been caught since ancient times were of supreme quality. All kinds of thick, stout sea bream, yellow croaker, and Pacific Salmon stuffed the Fishing Net, and deep-water species, including tuna, were often incidentally scooped up as well.

These large fish, no smaller than the fishermen themselves, would be quickly gutted and, incidentally, subjected to the punishment of beheading — when fishery resources were too abundant, the fishermen naturally upgraded product quality, thereby reducing voyage costs.

Large quantities of high-quality, pre-processed fresh fish were stacked into the Coal Gas Cold Storage, while the stern of the Fishing Ship ceaselessly spilled blood, entrails, and fish heads into the sea. The bloody feast even drew a trail across the ocean surface, attracting countless fish and seabirds, and as a result, the grinning, broadly-smiling fishermen, their harvests brimming, were soon covered in bird droppings.