The Deeps

Beyond the Ridges, the shallow banks nine miles out where most of Kent's punts fish, the sea darkens and the bottom falls away to ground no lead has ever properly sounded. The fishermen call it the Deeps. It lies five hours from the beach with a fair breeze, and much longer in a foul one, and that distance is the whole of its danger and the whole of its worth.

From September until the season closes, the luggers go out to it: decked or half-decked boats with four or five men, staying out two or three days on each trip. The autumn fishing on the Deeps is the best money of the Kentish year, and a good week there keeps a family for a quarter. The catch is divided as on every Kentish lugger, a pair of shares for the boat and a pair for its owner, one apiece for the crew. A skipper knows the ground by the shade of the sea above it and by what comes up on his lead, and on a doubtful morning it is often a woman on the shingle who decides whether the boat goes at all.

The rovers know the Deeps too. Out of sight of land, slow and laden, a fishing boat there is the easiest prize on the coast, and a few of the boats entered as foundered each decade were not lost to the weather. So the luggers keep within sight of one another, by an unwritten understanding, and a boat alone on the Deeps is alone by choice. The signal is a sail dropped and hoisted, and then dropped and hoisted again. Every boat on the coast knows it; no revenue man has ever learned it. Three boats answering will not fight a rover, but they mean nine men will be ashore by nightfall to describe her.

The Vivier boats from the Near Coast fish the same ground from the other side, and their men and the Deal men know one another by name. The two fleets have some understanding about the Deeps that has never been reported to either crown, and the fishermen of both shores mean to keep it so. After a bad season an owner will sometimes hire a band to go out with the autumn boats, which is honest work and some of the most dangerous to be had in Kent.