Spring and Winter

I fished all my lifetime here. I started fishing, I think, in ’22. I fished all my life. Lobsters. Smelts in the winter on the ice. I loved it. I only quit two years ago, and I miss it a fright. Getting up and going out in the boat. Expecting to get a fortune. Every day I was looking for a fortune. Never made it.

Well, the smelts. We had no shacks. I fished right down below the farm here, see. Right down below it here. It was not far to go. We fished bag nets; you’d leave them setting. Just go down when the tide’d be running in and set them, leave them then for three hours and go back and haul them. There were traps in them. Just when the tide was turning to come in — that’s when you’d set the net and she’d funnel right out.

There was a fella used to come down the end of the road — there was no causeway there — he came down the road there and he’d buy them, in the wintertime, if the roads were passable. They’d freeze right on the ice and they were frozen when he’d take them. We’d shovel them into a big box on the sleigh and drive down and shovel them into his truck.

But the lobsters. When we fished first, we packed them. We were packing with another neighbour down the road here. He took us in; we

Courtesy Jean Hornby

Baxter in 1982.

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234 BELFAST PEOPLE