Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1933)

u Oh! Can't it? ft 236 DORIS DAY \ N O woman ever went out on one of our fishing boats before. It can't be done." "Oh! Can't it?" said I to myself but not to the tall, handsome man towering above me. "You'll never cut through fog and mist with a 2X yellow filter. It can't be done." "Maybe," said I to myself but not to my photographer friend. Well, this is a story of the explosion of those two "can'ts." I've listed them backward. The first one was flung down to me one misty morning last summer when I landed at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and confronted the local agent of the steamship line which had sent me to that beautiful province for photographs. His "can't" was in reply to my eager question about a trip on a fishing schooner. I was naive in having expected him to arrange for this trip on a banking schooner. When I was planning the excursion to the Maritime province, back in New York, suddenly I knew that I must "go down to the sea" in one of its saltiest ships and get some really significant pictures of Nova Scotia's foremost industry. Hardships and difficulties I knew there would be aplenty, but I felt that if I was willing to put up with them certainly I'd meet no opposition. That was a bad guess as I soon found out once on the ground. Fishing boats, I was informed, are built for the stern and arduous business of fishing, with no accommodations for passengers — particularly women — handicap number one and a bad one. Fishermen all have pet superstitions and many cling to the idea that a woman is bad luck on a fishing boat. That was pointed out, too, and emphasized and so were a lot of other reasons why I couldn't make the trip. But, to make a long story not too long, there was a boat sailing from Yarmouth whose captain would take me along. I was able to accommodate myself to the meager but hospitable facilities of the ship and I never was treated better anywhere by any group of people, men or women, than on that fresh fishing trip off Brown's Banks aboard the schooner Melbarlena. Overboard, then, with that "can't." We'll approach the next one, but first a word about this hard and dangerous business of fishing — it's romantic, too, but to the men, it's mostly just hard work for which they are unmercifully underpaid. Take an average day at sea: it begins at four or four thirty in the morning when Cookie routs out the crew. "Come on outa the peak, you guys up ahead!" he yells to clear the fo'castle. The men roll out of their bunks rubbing their eyes and hauling on their rubber boots. Half of them stagger out on deck and the others tumble to folding stools around the breakfast table. While the first half "mugs up", the other men are chopping bait and arranging their trawl lines for the day's work. When the first bunch has finished gulping down a hearty breakfast, they change places and, in a few minutes after Cookie's first call, the dories are overboard and the fisherman's hard day has begun in earnest. After an introduction of the boat, my first few feet of film show this activity— the dories going overboard and the men jumping into them. Then, as the ship swung around to tow the dories to the fishing grounds, I was able to get a nice shot off our stern with the little boats following in a path of the early morning sunlight. Movie adventures aboard a Yarmouth fishing schooner Each dory carries two men. When they leave the mother ship, the captain instructs them where and how to set their lines. By the most careful calculation he has estimated the precise location where they are likely to get a good haul of fish. But the most careful calculations are at the whim of tide, weather and fish. Sometimes the dories are towed to their positions, as on that morning, and sometimes they are rowed, but they always scatter over a wide territory and usually, but not always, keep within sight of the mother ship, though they may be a couple of miles away from her. Once over the designated fishing ground, one man stands in the stern of the dory, baiting the line and tossing it overboard. His dory mate rows so that eventually they will have stretched on the bottom of the deep perhaps a half a mile or so of trawl line with hundreds of baited hooks awaiting their harvest. Great, clumsy looking hands dexterously grab the hooks out of the coiled "skate" of trawl line, bait them and toss them into the water with a marvelously graceful movement that is in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the dory mate at the oars. What a shot! I was lucky to be able to get it in slow motion! The trawl is left hopefully on the bottom for a couple of hours during which the men sometimes return to the mother ship for a "mug up" and a short nap before the hardest part of the operation — hauling trawl. It's a big man's job to haul an empty line of the length of these trawls from the depth of water in which they are set. In this case it was seventy fathoms or about 420 feet. But consider that sometimes several hundred pounds of fish have attached themselves, and that weight has to come along, too. This haul is done by hand by one man while the other rows the dory. Sometimes he is aided by the use of a gurdy or roller apparatus, but that eases the pull only slightly. It's a fine sight and a fine shot when these strong men bend oxen like shoulders to the task. Their brawny hands grip the line until the muscles in their arms stand out almost as big as the trawl line itself. To get a shot from a low angle, to emphasize the power of this action, necessitated getting down in the bottom of the dory [Continued on page 250] Photographs by Doris Day, corrtesy Eastern Steamship Lines, Inc.