Wind.
We were fishing out of Staithes one summer day about 25 years back. Beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky, flat calm sea and everyone enjoying themselves. Our boatman Harold Armstrong was of Viking stock. Long jawed, sharp nose, family history dating back a thousand years and born for the sea was sat at the stern watching his 'flock' when all of a sudden he started sniffing the air and the expression changed on his face. "Wind in lads. A squall's coming." Before we could get our heads around the situation he's turned the starter handle on his old diesel engine that had been scrounged from a scrapped combine harvester and knocked it into gear.
It had taken us about forty minutes to get to the fishing spot and we had drifted for about 2 hours. Before we had travelled half an hour the sky was black and we were cutting through waves that caused the little wooden cobble to ride like a cantering horse. There were five of us fishing, one in the bows seat, three amidships and me at the stern one up from Harold. Every time the boat dropped into a big trough Shep who was in the front seat chucked a bucket of sea water over Jim who was in the centre of the middle seat facing backwards. Jim became more and more paranoid and gripped Tony's arm like a kid on a fairground ride. Shep kept pouring water over him every time the boat dropped into a trough and to be fair it wasn't a good situation to be in as to get into Staithes harbour the boatman had to zig-zag over the reef known as Penny Steel and it was getting rougher by the minute. We knew that Harold would not have an easy task despite his long experience. He'd run away to sea at 14, served on trawlers, done Atlantic runs on Liberty Ships during the war and spent the rest of his working life in the Merchant Navy. Now he fished for lobsters and took fishing parties out on his cobble Mizpah.
As we crossed the shallow bar of Penny Steel the boat was bucking like a bronco and Shep cruelly kept up his water torture of chucking water over Jim who was huddled up, head down by this time gripping the arms of both his compatriots neither of whom were aware of where the water was coming from.
At one point Jim turned to Tony and said, and this is imortalised in our fishing club archives: "If owt happens to me and I don't make it tell our lass that its all under the bed in a biscuit tin."
Jim was the Crime Prevention Officer at Barnsley Police Station
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