Cold Water Cowboys

This is a Discovery production, the 3rd season is available on Netflix presently. There are eight shows. The series follows Newfoundland fishermen in small short squat shrimp boats with the two long side rigging arrangements for double rig shrimp trawling. But they catch other species. The crew are dissimilar to the American crab fishing crews, and they're not like the British fishermen on similar television shows. They're more gentle in nature, their swears are Christian, and they're goofier, frankly. Their boats are ill equipped. There is no redundancy on board or anywhere throughout the show, they sail by the seat of their pants, they take too many unnecessary risks, their equipment continuously fails, to the point that the viewer (me) loses sympathy. We expect all technical things to fail. Ropes and netting are continuously becoming entangled in the prop so often that one wonders why there is no protection for the prop. Floats get stuck in the barrel that rolls up the net. Wenches get stuck and thousands of pounds of fish must be scooped out by hand, engines fail constantly, even a simple roller gets chewed through by its cable and there is no replacement on board so the boat must return. Expensive halibut is lost overboard as it's being loaded with gaffs, losing $1,500 in one single fail during an incredibly tight three-day season.

Knowing nothing about what's going on, their failures are easily predictable. Their plans are poorly thought through. For example, the captain cleverly saves a portion of each catch, packages it and freezes it to sell on nearby Labrador where prices are three times higher but he must haul it there by ferry and then through veritable wilderness, miles and miles of zero civilization, no gas station, no telephone connection, nothing, just them, their truck and their flatbed trailer. No road service whatsoever. And that calls for doubling of preparation but they do not do it. The captain must borrow a home-freezer from his grandmother but he never returns things. He takes it. It's beat up. It's dirty and scratched and in worse shape than an item in a garage sale. One of his items of fish, scallops, I think, must be kept frozen hard. The rest of haul can be on ice. The captain's solution is a generator.

Sitting at home the viewer (me) predicts generator failure. There is no back up generator. It must fail. And his biggest payoff must be ruined. I prepare myself to sneer and mock when it does. Along the way the trailer has a flat. No spare for the trailer. The generator does fail. Their trip is reduced to a crawl, they drag into the small town with sparks flying from their load pushing down the axle onto the road. They park at the edge of town in a space just off the road and make a few sales right off. They get money exchanged immediately. Word spreads through the whole town in mere minutes and the entire town shows up en mass to make purchases of frozen seafood at their triple prices. They very quickly sell their product with enough money for repairs. So the trip is a success. It really is a great idea. Still very poorly thought through and with zero preparation beyond the initial idea, so a string of unnecessary difficulties turning a pleasant trip into an ordeal fraught with uncertainty. The whole thing could have gone much smoother with proper updated equipment and with just a bit of redundancy on critical parts, and with tools. But no. They sail, drive, and fly by the seat of their pants.

As boys do.

I like this show a lot. It's fun to watch and see how the other half lives. But it's frustrating as it is charming. The people are backward as much as they're lovely. This last episode, #8 for season 3, a woman sets back feminism by at least five decades. She's on a boat with men. So there is equality right there. There is a small boat approaching. The boats generator dies and the woman waiting to connect bends in half and buries her face in her hands at her knees in fear and frustration. Not the reaction needed for this emergency situation. The narrator describes fear among sailors, and fire is the worst of their fears. The scene is shot at night, the approaching boat's generator that stopped then bursts into flames. The woman's voice rises four octaves to siren pitch and she utters sounds that are not language. The men race around the woman self-assembling to save the life of the incoming fisherman. I thought the imperiled fisherman was her husband judging by her reaction, but he's not. He's another of their crew. There is a 5 gallon gas tank on the small boat near the burning generator. There is no place for the fisherman to go. The water is ice cold. The woman continues screeching very high pitched sounds but she doesn't do anything to help the men. She has no idea how to be any help while the men figure out how to handle this situation. Instead, one of the men must now comfort the woman. So one less man to assist as he comforts the crying distraught woman. She buries her head in his shoulder. She became a screaming child in the face of adversity and the men had to rescue the fisherman.

I realize these are different cultures, but they're not so opposite our own. We speak the same language, they have access to the same technology. We had just had women's marches across the entire United States and beyond of women wearing pussy hats demanding equal pay for equal jobs along with other grievances, mostly pure resistance for the sake of it. And here is a job where the women are actually working with men. The men take care of the fire, save the fisherman's life, save the small boat, resolve the emergency situation, the result of poor planning no doubt, and the woman screams like a banshee and behaves exactly like an infant child.

I love women. I respect women. But this woman on this show represents women poorly.

I recommend this show. I think you'll find it interesting. It's a good peek into a similar yet significantly different culture.

Fakeout. They put cowboys in the title and that's an American thing. The nearest equivalent is Argentine gaucho. There isn't a cow to be seen. Not even a seacow. But they do rustle up fish. I must say, inefficiently, from American perspective.