Newly re-registered Asteria PW377 up on the slip...
showing off the very full hull lines...
as the sheathing that once protected the wooden hull from half-ton steel trawl doors during hauling and shooting from her previous life as a trawler...
it won't be long before she is hauling and shooting pots off Lands End...
the new market...
is a beacon of the way Newlyn is catching up with the times as the port's infrastructure begins to match up to the quality of the fish landed...
another feather in the cap for Tony and the team at Project Link...
piled on the quay are the 30 odd pots that the Radiance managed to 'catch' in her trawl...
trawlers never relish tangling with a string of pots and judging by all those chopped up pieces of backing rope in the stern of the trawler the crew were keen to get the mess sorted as quickly as possible, plenty of sea-coal on the grounds too it seems...
meanwhile the pots are being baited on the quayside...
before being hooked up...
and lowered...
on to the deck of the Silvery Sea...
and the happy-chappy that is PJ despite being on his second t-shirt owing to some bursts of Cornish sunshine overhead...
which may prompt the question from some of why not wear oilskins - but in this hot, humid weather oilskins are as wet inside as they get outside...
up from the Radiance's fishroom...
comes another five boxes of fish...
another happy-harbour-chappy, all smiles as his better half in the World Cup sweepstake drew that country most famous for Shakira, coffee beans and um err that stuff...
stones this big don't usually end up arriving on deck after being picked up by a trawl - normally they simply roll over the groundrope and sit on the belly of the trawl which then begins to split - resulting in a huge tongue of net being ripped from the trawl - if the crew are lucky the tongue remains attached somewhere at the stocking end - if not a piece of net has to be 'shot' in to replace the missing meshes - all of that repair carried out in the confined deck space available and taking anything from five to fifteen or more hours of mending...
the Silvery Sea leaves the fish market with her pots aboard...
and heads back to her berth on the pontoons...
for the harbour staff the day's work is about to begin...
for some it's still too early...
for others, there's a long sail ahead in an uncomfortable forecast.
