Sea debris
I read with interest the article by Paul Heiney in PBO 630 about his tangle with a fish net outside Harwich. I understand from listening to recent yarns in anchorages and marinas that sightings of fishing gear adrift are not such a rare occurrence as we’d like to think.
We too caught a large net when sailing north across the Bay of Biscay recently. We were motoring in fickle winds and a slight swell when our engine suddenly stopped. I saw part of a trawl hanging off our stern. It was roughly 20m long and acted very effectively as a drogue. I put on mask, snorkel, and fins and got in the water. A hard lump of polypropylene net covered the prop and filled the aperture. It took me over an hour to free the prop using our sharp bread knife.
It was a job that had to be done considering our position 100 miles north of the Spanish coast and our vessel’s inability to move forward. But the job was not without problems. I had no wet suit and got quite cold. I also could have done with a bicycle helmet to protect my head from the stern that moved up and down in the swell. I also risked getting caught in the net, but I had tied a line around me and my wife Marion kept a close watch on me while holding on to the line.
We were lucky that there was no damage to the prop, shaft, or engine. Our conscience did not allow us to leave such a nasty plastic trap floating around in the ocean. Instead we stowed the smelly net on the foredeck and disposed of it when we reached port some days later.
We’d not like to believe that a damaged trawl net had been left in the ocean deliberately, but who knows? Anders Johnson Penryn, Cornwall