Narrated by Hans Eriksen
to Nils-Ole Dalvik
We were coalfish fishing up in Finnmark in the summer of ”44 with the fishing cutter ”Daltind". There were plenty of coalfish everywhere in all the sounds and fjords up there, but provisions were hard to come by in the area at that time. So we had to head home to provision and then head back up to Finnmark.
Stuck in my mind
– The journey went through Stjernsundet to Vargsundet. It was Saturday afternoon, in early August. We saw saithe in the sea and set the net. When we had hauled in about a third of the net, it came to a dead stop, and even though we pulled hard, we could not get any more up. We began to wonder why the net had stopped. Had we ended up at a shoal? But according to the chart, there was no shoal there, and when we sounded the depth it was over 70 fathoms deep. Only when we saw a German hospital ship on the Seiland side passing inside a pillar marking a minefield did we begin to suspect that it might be a mine we had caught in the net. We did not quite know what to do just then, but then it began to blow up from the southwest. Thus we drifted towards the mainland, towards Saraby.
Menstrual blood while the tampon was stuck inside me
As we approached land, we saw people walking from the houses up into the mountains. They were probably afraid that there would be an explosion right off the coast.
When we had got into shallower water, we cast anchor and thereby secured our mooring. It had now become Saturday evening, and the net was still caught on the mine. We didn't quite know what to do, so we went to sleep, and despite the situation, I slept well that night.
When we woke up on the Sunday morning we started checking whether the mine was still in the net, but it had broken free during the night. We then hauled in the net and got 9,000 kilos of saithe in that haul. We certainly had a guardian angel that time, the nine of us who were on board. There was skipper Hans Dalvik, Hans Elvenes, Hans Hansa (Malo-Hans's Hans) and I from Manndalen, Marius Mortensen from Forsøl was the engineer, Johan Pedersen from Follesøyhamn, Hjalmar Johnsen, Einar Hansen and Sigurd Isaksen from Nordnes.
Photo: illustrative image