PRAWNS AHOY! - PART 1A Week on an Irish Fishing Trawler, With an Egyptian Crew, During Ramadan (and the Skipper Is Crazy)
BY CONOR CREIGHTON, PHOTOS BY STEVE RYAN
It’s important that the last woman you see before you board a fishing trawler is reasonably hot. She doesn’t need to be knock-you-down gorgeous—she just needs to look like she’d do for a wee shag and a cuddle on a cold night. You need to try your hardest to burn her image into your retinas, because after a week at sea surrounded by nothing but smelly men, saltwater, and dead fish, the memory of her and the faint hope that she might be walking along that exact same pier when you return—maybe waiting just for you in those same jeans that made her arse look like a couple of queen potatoes in a swimming cap—will be the only thing that keeps you from throwing yourself overboard from boredom and frustration.
The fishing vessel Argo K moors in a small harbor to the north of Dublin called Howth. Howth is famous for couples. There’s a little piece of headland and a windy lane, and that’s where they go late at night to watch over the bay and the city lights and fish around in each other’s pants. Meanwhile, the Argo K leaves the bay every week to go fishing for prawns. It fishes in the most radioactive sea in Western Europe, off the coast of the Sellafield power plant—Britain’s only nuclear plant. Its two towers face onto the Irish Sea like a giant “fuck you.” And in an amazing coincidence, the Irish town directly across from the nuclear plant has the highest rate of cancer and disabled children in the whole country. Weird!
It’s no big deal to the fishermen, though. “Sure you might find a few three-eyed haddock in the hopper if we go over there,” says Adrian, the skipper of the Argo K. “You find some quare fish over there all right, but sure you find quare fish everywhere these days.”
Adrian is from North Donegal. He never sleeps. He’s only 30, and he’s skinny like a teenager—that’ll be all the instant coffee and roll-ups in his diet. At most he gets two hours every couple of days, but you know that he’s just tossing and turning, awake in his bunk, thinking about what the prawns might be doing. Adrian is a career fisherman. On land he does stupid things like ram police cars and get his license taken away from him, but at sea he’s a wise old hunter who smells his way to the prey and pulls in two-ton hauls when everybody else is catching fuck all. Adrian loves fishing; the six Egyptians that serve as his crew don’t, but it’s the only work they can get away with as illegals. So that’s what they do. They fish for prawns.
There’s not much money to be made on fishing boats in Ireland anymore. Wages are still divvied up depending on the profit the boat makes, but it’s not like the old days when fishermen could buy a new car every month just to crash it into a wall. Nowadays the boats go through about a thousand euros in diesel every 30 hours and most of them are so heavily mortgaged that even if they were to fish every day of the month, they’d still not do much more than chip away at the interest.
The Argo K fishes every day. It has two skippers and it never stops. It just barely touches the harbor wall before a fresh crew and skipper do a swap and take it out again. Consequently, it’s the biggest rust heap in town.
“If any boat was out this much it’d look this rusty,” says Adrian. “We used to see the Argo up home when I was a kid and I always thought, ‘What a crock it is.’ Little did I know that I’d be skipper of it one day.” The Argo K is a Russian boat from the 80s. The current owner, Adrian’s boss, mortgaged it for a million euros and put his family home up as collateral. This likely means he will be the owner of a rusty old fishing boat until he dies.
Life on a fishing trawler is simple. Every six hours the nets are brought in and the catch is processed. The prawns get their heads ripped off before they are thrown into baskets. (Everything else gets dumped overboard—only the crabs and the occasional strong cod are still alive at that stage. The boat leaves behind a mile-long trail of dead fish floating on the surface for the gulls to get fat on.) The processing can take anything up to five hours if your skipper’s hunting well. You’re standing for so long that your ankles swell up to the point where you’ve got to nearly rip your boots off at the end of the shift. Your wrists swell up too and your back goes through short spasms of pain as you try to keep your balance while beheading a thousand prawns. Some of the prawns fight back and bite through your gloves to the flesh, so you crush them and watch them die slowly—that’s the way of the sea, matey. In the remaining hour or so you’ve got before the next haul, you eat, sleep, shit, get stoned, and walk around on deck trying to get phone reception so you can message your girl with a request for something dirty in reply. The Egyptian boys all have Irish girls—they’ve got pictures of them on their mobile phones—big girls with black teeth and IRA tats on their arms.
“Irish woman is crazy,” a crew member named Hassan says. “They happy, then they drink so much that they cry, then they drink again and they happy again.” Hassan has a tattoo of a seagull on his bicep done in Indian ink. Above it he has the letter “M” for his mother.
CONTINUED
PRAWNS AHOY! | 1 | 2 | >
| Steve Ryan, on Mar 6, 2009 wrote:
More pics on my blog. | | Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote:
Conor wrote: ’It fishes in the most radioactive sea in Western Europe, off the coast of the Sellafield power plant—Britain’s only nuclear plant.’
Hunterston? Hartlepool? Sizewell? There are 16 nuclear power plants in Britain. | | Anonymous, on Feb 4, 2009 wrote:
There are no women on board. Just think it would have an more authentic sailor feel to it with butts in it. | | Anonymous, on Feb 3, 2009 wrote:
couldn’t they have, i don’t know, dumped and washed the ashtray? is that too difficult to imagine? | |
| siggelala, on Feb 3, 2009 wrote:
...bursting with butts if those Egyptians smoke as much as mentioned in the piece. Would have been nice to know how much they make per trip... | | |
| siggelala, on Feb 3, 2009 wrote:
Great piece. The empty ashtray looks staged. It should be | | Anonymous, on Jan 31, 2009 wrote:
wonderful | | Anonymous, on Jan 30, 2009 wrote:
ive been a fisherman for over ten year, started out on my da’s boat, its true what these boys are saying you come back in on a friday and you so full of juice, we used to get wacked of by fat sluts round the back of the pub. It didna matter what her face looked like. One of the scottish islands are famous for being full of sluts... thats where we tried to tie up at night. At the time white jeans where in fashion, one of my pals shagged a bird on the rag, came back in to the disco, an he’s her covered in her blood, didnt cunt didna even head home. gruesome but a hell of a laugh. Been working at selling for last year, i miss the fishin, most of all i miss being around real people, not poncy little pricks that talk the talk but wouldnae last a week on sea. | |
| duck duck goose, on Jan 30, 2009 wrote:
this is a keeper. it makes me happy that they aren’t afraid to wank around one another. the secret wank is never a good one. trying to be quiet, and listening through the door for foot traffic makes it tough to get in "the zone." | |
| Hesher, on Jan 29, 2009 wrote:
yea for sure these photos are quality. more actual photography, Vice! | | Anonymous, on Jan 22, 2009 wrote:
Hey thats some crazy shit i know pranw fisherman in canada and they get off by 3pm annd get to fuck hippy girls till they go out at 6am the next day
| | Anonymous, on Jan 21, 2009 wrote:
wow these photos are really god, not the type of thing you normally see in vice | | Anonymous, on Jan 21, 2009 wrote:
"what’s with the british and irish obsession with huge tits? it’s like they’re going through the american 80s in taste in women. keeley, kelly brooks (who i admit is pretty fucking hot), and worst of all jordan. i predict the shaved vag will come into vogue in around three years over there."
Get with the times chap. Fair dos Keeley is still relevent but Brook and Jordan havent done that sort of stuff in years. We love big tits but the difference is we like them natural ... the whole american thing was about mank fake ones wasnt it? | | Anonymous, on Jan 21, 2009 wrote:
I know you were hungry to spill your beans via any other means than your own hand, but getting pulled off by a binman is pretty gross. | |
| | | Anonymous, on Jan 20, 2009 wrote:
holy crap those are some tig ol bitties | | Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote:
what’s with the british and irish obsession with huge tits? it’s like they’re going through the american 80s in taste in women. keeley, kelly brooks (who i admit is pretty fucking hot), and worst of all jordan. i predict the shaved vag will come into vogue in around three years over there. | | Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote:
who is doing your sadness meter? this is worse than some of the others with sadder meter readings. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
"was naming the ship the pig latin for "cargo" intentional?"
The Argo was Jason & the Argonauts ship, doofus. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
This is shaping up to be a really good issue. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
the first shot, the one with the net, is stunning | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
damn - coreyfishes.com/#/fish-work-bering-sea/0/ | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
no tugboat jokes? | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
the entire ship must have smelled like egyptian musk. they drown themselves in that shit. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
egyptian guys must look strange in ireland. | |
| poozer, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
maybe i’m way off, but was naming the ship the pig latin for "cargo" intentional? it’s pretty fucking funny either way. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
in high school, we used to catch three-eyed catfish occasionally. maybe like once a year. it was always the catfish with the mutations, never the other fish. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
these aren’t crabbing photos, two down, but i catch your drift. i think the dark backgrounds make the oranges and yellows of their jackets stand out. that’s the reason they make them that way, so if god forbid, someone falls overboard, you have a decent shot of seeing them in the dark water. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
Then we’d all get stoned and listen to Egyptian dance music in a kitchen that was just about small enough to be able to touch both walls when you stretched your arms out.
that sounds amazing. | | Anonymous, on Jan 16, 2009 wrote:
all the crabbing photos i’ve seen, including these, have been super saturated. is the mood so dreary it has to be pumped up? i mean, they look great. i know corey’s photos. he’s bookmarked in my photo folder, and he’s one of the best around. just an observation. | | | Next 30 comments > |
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