‘You don’t get seasick, do you?’ – my day on a Cornish fishing boat five years on from the Brexit referendum

Walking around Cornwall’s Newlyn Harbour in shoes and a shirt at 5am, I felt about as out of place as I looked. All around me, fishing boats were coming in or going out to sea. Big men – brawn and boots and no bloody nonsense – were hauling catches into the adjacent market. The whole atmosphere was flesh and rope and blistered hands. And there was I, a soft city lad, calling into boats: “Excuse me, I’m a journalist: what do you chaps think of Brexit?”

Safe to say, I was given pretty short shrift. Until, that is, I got to Graham Nicholas. The skipper of the Girl Pamela – a four-hand, 37ft crabbing vessel – listened sceptically as I told him I was writing a piece for the fifth anniversary of the EU referendum and then he asked his own question: “Have you ever been on a fishing boat, son?”

I had not.

“We’re leaving in five minutes,” he said. “Back at 5pm. Want to come with us?”

Which is how I ended up, soon after, in the western English Channel being told: watch out for the lines, they can take a limb off if they catch you.

Nicholas himself specialises in crabs and lobster. He chucks 400 pots into the water, leaves them on the seabed and then collects them the next day, hopefully with a load of crustaceans inside. It’s hard, dangerous and unpredictable work. It also requires a strong stomach.

“You don’t get seasick, do you?” the 51-year-old asked as we gunned away from the Cornish land.

“Course I don’t,” I assured him.

Reader, it turns out I lied. For a shameful portion of the following 12 hours, I sat in the cabin, green at the gills, woozily dreaming of dry land while, outside, my four shipmates laughed at me as they did battle with nature.

And yet: what a day. All sky and sea and salty tales of ships springing leaks and waves that crash across the deck when the weather turns brutal. All that plus five minutes, too, in the company of a thresher shark, which followed the boat jumping in and out of the water, trying to grab at the seagulls flying behind us. “You wouldn’t see that in an office,” said Nicholas. Quite.

Indeed, it was only as we headed back to shore that I realised we’d barely spoken about Boris Johnson and his Brexit deal. It didn’t matter. Nicholas had no problem catching his – and the industry’s – mood in the colourful language he’d been throwing about all day. “They’ve sold us down the f****** river,” he declared. Again: quite.

Yours,

Colin Drury

Northern correspondent