Setting in...

Long lining involves two major steps – setting in and hauling back. About 15 minutes before actually starting the process of setting in the “scientists” go onto the back deck and start baiting all 100 hooks with mackerel. We’ve got two large barrels that have slits in the top where we can latch the hooks while the line they’re attached to stays in the barrel. There’s a certain strategy to baiting – we try to get the hook through twice. E.g. if you’ve got the front half of the fish this is most easily accomplished if you go through the eyes first (they tend to pop and yucky juice comes out) and then sliding back in through the gill cover. If you’ve got the back end you need to make ure you don’t squeeze it to hard or all the guts will squish out.
As we approach the station we’ll be fishing at, one of the crew guys will walk the line from the bow of the ship where the winch is located towards the back – there are several pully-wheeley-thingies across the side of the ship you can put it through. I will tell you it is one loooooooooong line (duh). In the end we’ll have a mile-long line in the water with 100 baited hooks on it.
We attach the front end of the line to a high flyer. Basically, it’s a buoy with two large metal poles sticking out of it. On top there’s a little light that will blink in the dark. We toss the high flyer overboard and then continue running the line for a certain distance depending on how deep we are fishing at that station. For example, at a shallow station when we’d only be fishing at a depth of 60m, we let 60m run off of the line and then attach a large weight. That way the line will sink to that depth. Then we continue running the line as one person takes the bait out of the bucket, throws it overboard and then holds the front end out to a second person who clips a number to it. Then he hands it to the crew member who will clip it to the line. This continues until we’ve got all 100 hooks on the line.
At that point, we clip the line after attaching a second weight and tie it to a second high flier which we then toss overboard as well– though toss is an understatement, those things are heavy! Now all we have to do is let it “soak” for an hour before hauling back.