My first trawling trip

Ok. I'll skip ahead to some "fish stories" and get back to some of my euro-adventures later.
We tagged our sturgeon trawling trip onto the end of the annual Jersey trawl. Four of us plus a truck load of boxes containing foul weather gear (which you don't just wear in foul weather), measuring boards, computers, scanners, tags of various shapes and sizes and a trailer with nets and other important gear headed off towards Jersey City to meet up with the Seawolf (which is "my departments" research vessel).
We were short handed both on the crew and the science party side, so we came in every evening to a little Army Corps of Engineers harbor. In the morning we would steam out right past the Statue of Liberty towards Rockaway Beach. It's a good thing we had a Computer that always shows our latitude and longitude and a map of where we were... this way I'm starting to get aquainted with Long Island's geography from "both sides". Rugby takes care of the land side and as I continue to go out in the field I'll get to know the other side as well. Interestingly enough, after speculating what that bridge was that we could see from the area we were trawling from for several days that Saturday I crossed it to get to the Rockaways 7s tournament!
In principle, trawling is quite simple: You've got a big net wrapped up on a huge winch and two big steel doors on steel ropes. You set in - doors first - and the let the net drag behind the ship for how ever long you see fit (since we're aiming not to do a lot of damage we were doing short trawls of only about 10 minutes give or take), then you pull everything back in and we would dump the contents onto a big table with removable side boards: dogfish (lots of them), horseshoe crabs, various flatfish, spider crabs, more fish,... and our "treasure": STURGEON.
Our first trawl was a test run and longer than usual so when we dumped the net there was more "stuff" than fit in the table - the deck was a flippin' and a floppin' with fish. I'll admit I was a bit surprised and unsure of how exactly we go about this now (remember this was the day jet lag hit me!).
But only for a minute or two: I'll admit I find an odd satisfaction in throwing dogfish (they're a kind of shark) overboard: weeeeeeeeee... they are so aerodynamic and can be thrown with a similar wrist-flicking technique as rugby balls, though I refrain from making "spin passes". We did keep a few to take some fin clippings for genetic studies for my advisor before tossing them back in. Once we've pulled out the species we're interested in, we push the rest right back into the water. Once almost everything is out there's always a few persistent individuals that you have "shoot" into the water. For some reason the combination of slimy fish on a wet table has a very air-hockey-like effect.
We had baskets to collect horseshoe crabs in. There's an ongoing tagging study where we record their sex and size and tag them (you drill a hole in their shell and screw it in). People who find them on the beach or in nets will then hopefully call them them in...
Unfortunately, Murphy decided to come a long for the ride. On Monday, just as we started pulling out 1-3 sturgeons per trawls our net must've gotten snagged by something on the seafloor and was literally split in half. Luckily, we had a second net on board. But first we lost a lot of time swapping them out and then we didn't seem to be able to pull out anymore sturgeon.
The next day follow a similar pattern. We pulled out a few sturgeon, then hit a really muddy patch which tore part of our net. We did mange to keep most of our catch. As we hauled the net aboard and  dumped the contents into the table, we all got showered by mud dripping off the net, as we were sorting through the fish (digging around in the mud) we did find a huge sturgeon for our efforts and looked like we had been in a mud fight: As we dug through and tossed fish they'd suddenly start thrashing and flopping and we'd be hit by a wave of mud!
The captain and mate were able to fix the net, but again we weren't catching anything anymore... then a few trawls later I heard the motors run to haul the net back in just minutes after we'd set in. I was a bit confused, then surprised: Wait, shouldn't there be more net than that?
Yeah, so that was that. We headed back to Jersey City and ended up coming home a day early... though I must say steaming through New York and halfway across the North Shore to Port Jefferson gave us a pretty backdrop to scrub all the decks, too!