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Local Heroes: Hull's Trawlermen
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Could you phone home on the trawler? Mike Allison 2

Could you phone home on the trawler?
You wanted to call your mam at home, you came to me, you asked the Captain first and he sent you to me. I could tune radios right up in the artic and I could put a telephone call through for you and you could pick up the telephone and talk to your mam at home and tell her what the weather was like. You didn’t talk about fishing. You could chat away to your mam but we only allowed three minutes, it’s not very long, but it was very expensive. When I wasn’t doing that, I was doing weather forecasts. The Captain always wanted weather forecasts so we took weather forecasts from everywhere we could get it. We was always on radios listening, that’s what we was doing all the time.

How did you find the fish?
When you go fishing you had to look for fish. even with an experienced Captain, the fish goes where it wants. You’ve got to find out where that fish is going, in the old days there was a lot of ships, a lot of trawlers, and we had what you call schedules, we called them scheds. And some of these Captains had their own private scheds and we tuned in at a certain time and if a friend of the Captain was catching fish, he coded it and he sent his little codes and we decoded it and took it to the Captain. So if we was on no fish we could go to his friend, steam the ship to his friend and hopefully catch a lot of fish which he has catching.