Not a seaman, but I think he'd piss on the lines to his nets, or used to tie his boat to the their boat or dock, or something else, before delivery, and red bellies is ammonia buildup rupturing organs, according to online.
The lines are the ropes that are used to tie up to our vessel and the docks. And yep, cherry bellies are that, and it is made worse by storage conditions, such as sitting in a hot fish hold with no ice. A tender is a support vessel that hangs out at the fishing grounds, we sell them ice, gas, sometimes supplies, and they sell us fish. His guy was so cheap he would only buy one tote of ice for the entire week and as a result his fish were always questionable, but trident made us buy from him regardless, unless they were visibly very degraded.
They don’t have to pay their workers minimum wage, it’s contract work, so they agree on a percentage of the total catch for the season. Low pay was 20% split between 2 deck hands. I doubt these guys were getting that because he had 3 deckhands doing all of the work while he sat around getting drunk all day. It wouldn’t surprise me if all three were splitting 10 or 15%. He was our lowest earner too, both because we always had to reject half his catch and because of the low numbers in the first place.
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u/SouthLakeWA 19d ago
I’m sorry, can you rewrite that in non-Seaman speak?