Fishing in winter

Winter days are more often cold, short and dark but necessity meant fishing off the Irish coast never stopped. Fishermen who ventured out during the winter months often did so to fish with long lines. The longline fishermen were exceptionally hardy and were regarded with awe and respect by the inshore fishermen-farmers.¹

Taking bream on lines. Ag togáil breim. Inis Oírr, Co. na Gaillimhe. © National Museum of Ireland.

Long line fishing is a technique which involves attaching several short, baited lines, known as snoods, to a lengthy main fishing line, also known as a spillet line. Séamas Mac an Iomaire described baiting the many snoods as slow work. Sand eel and lugworm were effective bait at attracting cod, haddock and pollack, which in turn could attract skate or halibut.²

Two men twisting snood line, Inis Oírr, Co. na Gaillimhe. © National Museum of Ireland.

When long line fishing, the main line is fed out of the boat to reach deep water. After a couple of hours, the line is hauled by a fisherman back into the boat while another takes the fish off the hooks and a third man rests the long line in a basket and fixes corks to each hook and leaves them on the rim of the basket.³

Long line for cod fishing coiled in basket with hooks resting on rim, Teileann, Co. Dhún na nGall, 1957. © National Museum of Ireland.

After the mid-nineteenth century, improvements to currach design allowed that boat type to become larger and stronger which enabled fishermen to travel further out from the coastline to better fishing spots.⁴ Off the Connemara coast, gleoteoga and púcáin hookers fished with long lines and all along the south coast fleets of small boats travelled far out to sea to catch a huge variety of other fish on long lines and hand lines.⁵

Fishermen often made their lines themselves, twisting pieces of thread into longer lengths using a line twister.

Line twister. Árainn, Co. na Gaillimhe. © National Museum of Ireland.

Line twister, also known as a cairt. Liscannor, Co. Clare. © National Museum of Ireland.

The lines were kept in specially made long line baskets of unpeeled willow. Ciarán Bairéad, a collector with the Irish Folklore Commission who obtained one such basket on Inis Oírr for the National Museum in 1957, recorded that it was used for holding and carrying spillet lines and that its Irish name is ribh, pronounced like the first syllable in ‘river’. Other names for a long line basket were sciath, or ‘scuttle’.⁶

Long line basket, known locally as a ribh. Inis Oírr, Co. na Gaillimhe. © National Museum of Ireland.

When the fishing was over and the catch removed from the hooks, sometimes by women, the long lines were hung to dry on a scoilteán.

Scoilteán, a device for holding long lines while they dry. Inis Oírr, Co. na Gaillimhe. © National Museum of Ireland.

When using a scoilteán, the points of the hooks are stuck in the channel on each side and the smaller rod is tied down upon them to hold them in place while the lines dried. To effect this tying, the larger rod is pierced by a hole about halfway down its length through which a cord is pushed and which is prevented from slipping through by a knot at each side.

With the fishing hooks resting on the small rod, the scoilteán is tied together. Inis Oírr, Co. na Gaillimhe. © National Museum of Ireland.

The scoilteán was set high into a gable wall to allow the hanging long lines dry faster.

Long line fishing could be very productive and it was possible to catch seven or eight dozen mackerel in half an hour fishing.⁷ The selling of the long line catches during winter and spring brought welcome income before the summer fishing season began.

¹ Evans, E. Estyn, Irish Folk Ways, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1957, p.252.

² Mac an Iomaire, Séamas, The Shores of Connemara, Galway: Tír Eolas, 2000, pp.53, 92.

³ Ibid, p.36.

⁴ Mac Cárthaigh, Críostóir (ed.), Traditional Boats of Ireland, History, Folklore and Construction, Cork: Collins Press, 2008, p.541.

⁵ Mac an Iomaire, Séamas, The Shores of Connemara, p.36 and Cormac Levis, ‘Working Boats of the South Coast Fishery’, in Traditional Boats of Ireland, History, Folklore and Construction, p.233.

⁶ Mac Cárthaigh, Críostóir (ed.), Traditional Boats of Ireland, History, Folklore and Construction, p.544.

⁷ Ibid, p.545.