Page 18 - Willem Barentsz

The catching technique.

Whale detection was and still is done sensorially with the eye. From the "barrel" and from the open
hunting bridge, the horizon was searched for spouts. Experienced spotters could quickly see what
kind of whale it was, which is quite an art. If it was found that it was a good species and the fish(es)
were not undersized or that they did not have a young with them, hunting could take place. The man
in the "barrel" also played a major role in this. He had to indicate as early as possible over which bow
the fish came up again. With the sonar, this is of course not a problem. We only had sonar on one
catcher, and it was damaged in the second season, due to the negligence of the operator, to such an
extent that it could not be repaired on the spot. This was a Kelvin Hughes Whale Finder. We had a
poor-man's sonar, the so-called whale scares devices. Acoustic impulses were emitted by means of a
fixed transducer, in the front of the bow. The intention was to scare the whale, so that it fled in one
direction and was therefore easier to catch. The cannon was used to shoot harpoons weighing 75
kilos and an explosive charge on the head. A good gunner usually only needed one shot to kill a
whale. Tests have been carried out with electric harpoons, not in our country, but the difficulties were
insurmountable. What we did try were gas harps. The compressed gas had to produce so much cold
during decompression that the whale was killed and floated. I will not soon forget the reaction of the
shooter who tried. "They seem to enjoy it," he said.

A unique photo of the hunt: the captain-harpooner has just fired his Bofors cannon. The harpoon
(speed when leaving the tromp 100m/sec) flies to the prey. The sinuous line is clearly visible. The force
that the line exerts on the harpoon is the reason that the harpoon never goes through a completely
precalculable trajectory. The line had advanced in a small space under the cannon platform and ran
through the "glasses" on both sides of the prow to the fastener on the harpoon

Long whale season.

The working days on a catcher were long. Especially at the beginning of the season when it didn't
really get dark. I remember that on the first day of the "long whale season", during my first voyage
we caught the first fish a minute after midnight. Before 8 o'clock in the morning it was already "stop
catch". This means that at that time it took more than thirty hours to process the caught fish. Later
this was extremely rare, and people were almost always busy with hunting. Once a season, the catch
was voluntarily stopped for a few hours. That was on Christmas Eve. There was even more extensive