How You Grapple a Net
If you have never done it, grappling for a lost gill net is about the slowest and most tiring work there is on the lake.
You know roughly where the gang was set, from your numbers. But a net 1,500 feet long lying on the bottom 90 feet down is a thin thread on a big floor, and if the anchor lines are cut, it can move.
So you drop a grapple on a long line, and you drag it slowly across the bottom, at right angles to where you think the net lies. You go back and forth like mowing a lawn.
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And you wait for the line to come tight.
When it does, you stop the tug and pull the grapple up by hand, hoping. Most of the time it is a rock or an old log. Sometimes it is somebody else’s anchor from twenty years back.
Toivo ran the tug in slow, careful passes. Pete and I handled the grapple line. We started at two that afternoon, in bright sun, the lake so still I could see the reflection of the island in it.
At four-thirty, the line came tight and stayed tight.
“Easy,” Toivo said. “Easy now. Bring it up easy.”
Pete and I pulled together, hand over hand. Ninety feet of wet rope coiled at our boots. And then the grapple broke the surface with a long gray curtain of our net hanging off its hooks.
I could have cried right there. I did not, because there was work to do.
We got the net end in through the side door and onto the lifter. The lifter is the machine that pulls a gill net in, a big wheel that grips the net and draws it up from the bottom.
And then the fish started coming.
Whitefish, dozens of them, dead in the mesh. Some only a day gone, firm and silver, still good. Most of them two days, soft, their eyes gone cloudy, the scuds already working on them.
We picked every one. The good ones went in the totes with ice. The bad ones went in a barrel. By the time the end of that first gang came over the rail, the barrel was nearly full.
That was one gang of four. It was past seven and the sun was still well up, the way it is up here in June, but Toivo said we were all done in and he was right.
We ran in. I wrote down where we had found it, and how far it had moved. A quarter mile southeast. The current had dragged it once the anchors were cut.