Tossing and turning until the sky outside began to lighten, Brian Carter still couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe it was because there was too much on his mind, or maybe time travel also came with jet lag. Most likely, though, it was because the planks of the boat were too hard—lying on his side made his thigh bones and shoulders ache, while lying on his back made his tailbone and shoulder blades hurt.

But the sleepless night wasn’t wasted. Brian Carter still managed to find two relatively reliable skills among his jumble of abilities that could help him survive in this era for now: one was sailing, and the other was fishing!

Chapter 7: I Can Fish

Sailing is very important. Although there are no modern large sailboats or navigation equipment at present, navigation was a required subject when taking the A-level sailing captain’s license exam. How to use simple tools and determine the correct course and the ship’s position by observing constellations, the moon, and the sun was a must-know. If you couldn’t pass, you weren’t qualified. This was to prevent the captain from being helpless if the ship’s equipment failed—at least you’d know the right direction and position, and could wait for rescue instead of drifting farther away.

What use is this in the Song Dynasty? You can go on long voyages! As long as you can sail far, you’re a talent! Long-distance maritime trade in this era is extremely profitable, but also extremely limited. Only a small part of these limitations come from pirates and weather; most are due to issues with power and routes. Many long-distance fleets can only use the monsoon winds to make one trip a year, and only on fixed routes. If they want to go somewhere else, they don’t dare, because they don’t know how to get there. The secrets of each route are held by the big families who control the fleets.

If you can open up new routes and build large sea-going ships that can sail against the wind and move faster, then ocean trade is no longer a dream. As long as you can make more trips and go faster than others, becoming a great maritime merchant is within reach. By then, you’ll be living the good life, and the sea will be your domain. But this is still a distant goal. First, you need a ship. How to build it, whether anyone knows how to build it, and how to go about it all need to be planned step by step.

For now, the only way to live a good life is fishing! What do the Tanka people rely on to survive? Fishing! Their small boats can only wander along the coast in shallow waters; they can’t go far, and their nets are very simple, so their daily catch is very small. The rice they ate yesterday was exchanged for fish with the locals on shore, and it was special stock brought out to entertain Brian Carter as a guest. Normally, they could only fill their stomachs with taro, and even taro had to be traded for with fish and shrimp. Just eating fish and shrimp isn’t enough to fill you up.

Before dinner, Brian Carter had looked at the net belonging to the Bo family. It was a casting net with a diameter of over four meters. This kind of net is only suitable for shallow water. When thrown, it spreads out into a big circle, and the iron weights tied around the edge make it sink like a big cover to the bottom. If a fish happens to be in the middle and gets startled, it will thrash around and its fins will get caught in the net, so it can be hauled up together with the net.

This fishing method is too primitive and backward, relying entirely on luck. You have to keep casting and retrieving the net, and the chances of catching something aren’t high. If the net gets snagged on an underwater rock, you have to dive in to free it, which is exhausting and inefficient. Brian Carter’s improvements come in three types, all tailored to the current era and economic situation.

The first method is the fish trap. This fishing method has been used extensively in later generations and is especially suitable for lazy people. What is a fish trap? It’s a fishing net rolled into a cylinder, usually about a dozen meters long. The cylinder is supported by wire or steel so it keeps its shape and doesn’t collapse. Both ends of the cylinder are left open, with a funnel-shaped net sewn in. The wide end of the funnel faces outward, the narrow end faces inside the cylinder, and you can add several such funnels along the cylinder as entryways for the fish. Then you tie weights to the net cylinder and sink it to the bottom of the sea, with a sturdy rope attached to a float on the surface as a marker.

How does this thing catch fish? You don’t need to actively fish—just row your boat and toss as many of these long net cylinders into the sea as you want; the more, the better. Fish have a habit of seeking shelter, and they don’t recognize these net cylinders as anything dangerous. They’ll swim around them, and when they see an opening, they’ll go inside.

But fish have no memory, or their memory is extremely short—just a few seconds. Once inside, they forget where the exit is and just swim around inside the cylinder. The funnel-shaped entrances are easy to get into but hard to get out of, because the fish’s fins grow in a way that lets them enter smoothly, but trying to squeeze back out the small end is very difficult. Some small fish might manage to escape, but most will be trapped inside. Depending on how many fish are in the area, after a few hours, half a day, a day, or even a few days, you can row over and pull the trap up onto the boat, and the fish inside are yours. The float tied to the rope on the surface marks the location of the trap for the fishermen.