If you've only seen one dead held aloft by a fisherman it's as if you'd only ever seen a rose browned with frost and never in it's full bloom. There are always by-catch pulled up with the swordfish.
They can kill a man, or almost as bad, a wound from the sword will almost always become infected and the boat might be very far in distance and time from home. When they are hauled on board alive, they are very brave and will attack to the last.
Swordfish have a long, barbed extension to their jaw that is both a weapon of attack and used to slash prey fish to weaken them. Because the permits they bought were limited in what they could do and the by catch could not be sold, a local would always be on the boat with them, sometimes my ex. How do I know about swordfishing? My ex-husband was Chief Fisheries Officer and used to supervise the boats that came to fish in our waters.
That month the deckhand took home $10,000. The money from the catch on a boat is 50% to the owner, then the expenses are taken off and a set formula applied to the rest where the captain takes the most and the newest deckhand the least. Where the normal catch is 1 ton a day, for seven days straight she hauled in 5 tons each day. Not only was Greenlaw one of an infintessimally small number of women swordfishing, but she was the most successful captain of all time. This was Linda's strength, this finding the schools of swordfish. The electronics, depth sounders, radar and the like are not just for navigation but crucial in working out where the fish are. As well as directing the crew, a hard-drinking group of macho men, maintaining the boat, it's structure, mechanics and electronics. Then there is the killing of the swordfish when hauled in, gutting and icing them. The hooks are so big they could rip right through a man's palm if the spool should run on. It is an extremely physical job, setting hooks and squid bait, on spooled longlines that run for miles and rip your fingers. An aside - there are very few countries and vessels in the world where a woman would have the opportunity to swordfish let alone be a captain. So I could not just see but feel what a difficult position they were in. It prevented us going into Fernando do Noronha, our next stop, we couldn set a course for the archipelago at all. It wasn't a 'perfect storm' but it was still rough, with huge seas and a constant exhausting beating against the wind. It had a lot of impact on me because I have been in a small boat, a 34' catamaran in a 4 day storm out in the Atlantic before Brazil. I didn't see the film so I came fresh to the book.
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