15 ago 2009

ENG - The ultimate weapon against lobster pots

Badly marked, half-submerged, often with dozens of metres of freely horizontally floating rope, fishing pots are (one of) the nightmares of the Portuguese coast.
Sailing mostly singlehanded and not fancying a forced swim in 15°C waters (well that's *very* cold for me), I devised this kind of thing to get rid as soon as possible of tangled lobster pots.
I used a 2m aluminum pole where I previously fitted a hook, the hook is still there but as certainty grows to be totally unable to catch a single fish I will probably remove it.
I bought two 30cm bread knives with plastic handles, cut away the two handles and fitted the blades as shown in the picture.
Fortunately the blades already had holes (which were hidden by the plastic handle), I tried to drill the steel but it was absolutely impossible (at least with a hand drill on a wooden pontoon): a few bolts, a couple of strips of stainless steel to reinforce the whole thing, a bit of duct tape to give more stiffness to the blade parallel to the pole, and here it is;





I tried it on a piece of rope about 25mm 1" thick and it sliced it in two almost without any need of twisting the tool, just grabbing it inside the two blades and pulling the pole a little bit.
The biggest problem seems to be where to stow it inside the boat...
One of those things you hope you'll never need.

Nessun commento: