Trawler
A Journey Through the North Atlantic
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Redmond O'Hanlon describes his extraordinary three-week trip on an Orkney trawler as it journeys far into the north Atlantic in search of its catch. Young skipper Jason Schofield has a 2 million pound overdraft on his boat, the Norlantean, which is why he has to go out in a Category One Force 12 hurricane when the rest of the Scottish fleet has run for shelter. O'Hanlon may not be much help when it comes to seamanship - in the words of one of the crew, he doesn't know his a**e from his tit - but he is able to wax lyrical on the amazing deep-sea fish to be found north of the Wyville Thomson Ridge: greater argentine, flying squid, blue ling, the truly disgusting hagfish and many other exotics.
Combining humour with erudition, O'Hanlon has written a vivid and compulsively readable account of a journey that for sheer terror beats all his previous adventures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deviating from his usual excursions into the world's rainforests, O'Hanlon (No Mercy) finagles his way onto a Scottish deep-sea fishing boat headed into the North Atlantic waters in January, "the very worst time of year," when storm winds are at their most forceful. The captain and crew seem to like O'Hanlon well enough, even if he is a "mad, seasick writer who's no use to anyone," prone to staring off into the distance when he gets distracted by his thoughts, and he conveys a genuine affection for them as he records their stories. Since there's little to do aboard the ship other than help his marine biologist friend catalogue the various fishes they pull up, and no real scenery to describe besides the wind and the rain, O'Hanlon gets into one long conversation after another or maybe just one long conversation with intermittent interruptions, as a certain degree of sameness creeps in. O'Hanlon and his shipmates are equally excitable, especially under their sleep-deprived conditions, leading to dialogue peppered with exclamation points and fevered theories about near-total homosexuality within the 19th-century British navy and the possibility that women find trawlermen attractive because fish smell like human pheromones. Though the unrelenting, incongruous manic tone may be off-putting to newcomers, fans of O'Hanlon's trouble-filled sagas will feel right at home. Photos, illus. not seen by PW.
