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by Jonathan Wills
UN-ACCOUNTANT as I am, it's an endless wonder to me that anyone bothers to go to the fishing. To hear the pierhead skippers speak, it's been on its knees since it started.
My first morning as a reporter began in Lerwick with a terse instruction from the late Hugh Crooks: 'Doon tae the fishmarket an' get the prices, laddie,' he said.
It was August 1969: according to the fishermen, prices were 'most hellish'; or 'nae bad, considering', if you asked a canny auctioneer.
The herring season was ending and the market busy. I knew what a cran was because, six years earlier, I'd spent a seasick night aboard the Burra drifter Venture, 13 miles south-east o' Da Bard. 'Robbie Newton' saved my teenage life when we shot as I went to spew over the side and found myself between the bush rope and the nets. He hauled me clear by the scruff of the neck - and offered me a piece of raw bacon.
At dawn we landed just three crans on Alexandra Wharf. Don't ask me to translate that into units. I know it wasn't a lot. Robbie gave me a fry for my mother but didn't ask me back. 'Jonah-than', they called me.
I've spent much of the past 28 years chronicling the price of fish on the Lerwick market - and the ups and occasional downs of Lerwick Harbour Trust. There've been big news stories about oilfield supply bases, new ro-ro ferry terminals, booming trade with cruise liners and visiting yachts - and now preparations for Cutty Sark in '99.
Detailed reporting of piecemeal developments, however impressive in themselves, clouds the bigger picture: the cumulative effect on Shetland's main industry. It's only when you compare Lerwick Harbour today with what it was when I first smelled the fishmarket in 1952 that the amazing scale of the changes hits you.
On childhood holidays and as a teenage Lerwegian I knew that only part of Lerwick's waterfront was in use. Beyond Da Nort Ness lay a wilderness of ruined herring curers' jetties and broken-down gutters' huts, decaying reminders of pre-1914 glories. We explored it all in Grandfather's Lodberrie punt, sometimes without his permission. Beyond 'Herringopolis Derelictus' lay Da Green Head which, I later discovered, was handy for courting. It never occurred to me that it would become one of the North Sea's busiest oilfield service bases.
My teachers would have given top marks for fantasy if I'd written an essay, as an Anderson Educational Institute sixth-former in 1964, predicting Lerwick Harbour's future: that one of Europe's most modern herring and mackerel processing plants would stand on Da Point o' Scatland, alongside a salmon factory, of all things; that a fiery Labour toon cooncillor, Alex Morrison, would have a new fishing boat dock named after him, next to Da Skibbidock; that locally-owned, steel trawlers would land at a covered, temperature-controlled market; or that Da Malakoff, where Grandfather worked as a shipwright, would have a floating dock to lift pelagics bigger than the 'Earl of Zetland', for Heaven's sake!
As changes came, Lerwick obstinately refused to die, unlike so many fishing ports around the British coast. Harbour trustees, whatever their other manifest and celebrated oddities, always invested in Da Fishin'. At times it seemed crazy. But who else would have dared?
A few years ago some misguided people in London decided that Lerwick Harbour Trust ought to be privatised. When it was politely pointed out that no private company's directors would have entertained the trust's dogged, long-term investment policy, and that this public body had invested millions to benefit private businesses - not least the fishing industry - the suggestion was quietly dropped.
I'm proud of Lerwick Harbour and I love it, not least because it's an endless source of news, the stock in trade at my lunchtime 'office' in the Fishermen's Mission. There's nowhere else that can boast of big-city facilities for the fleets working at the centre of Europe's richest fishing grounds, with overnight transport of Britain's freshest fish to mainland and European markets.
Klondykers came and went. So did drifters, seine-netters and pursers. With fishing in global crisis, who knows what comes next? Sometimes it seems the only sure thing is the tide, and even that swirls in new directions as the harbour trust deepens the channels.
Always there's been Da Fishin': the reason Lerwick Harbour began, 400 years ago, and still the main thing. The key to it all, as Hugh Crooks knew, is the price of fish. In 1969 it was a lot higher, in real terms, than today. That's the basic problem but, whatever solution the Eurocrats come up with, whether it's local fisheries management or new subsidies for eco-friendly techniques like auto-lining, you may be sure that Lerwick Harbour Trust will be there with the ways and means to do the business.