'A black frost that all mariners dread swept over us. We put our trust in God'

The retired deep sea fisherman spent all his working life riding the icy waves of the Arctic Ocean trawling for cod and never knowing whether he would make it back to shore.

He was just seven-years-old when his father, a cook on a large fleet of trawlers, took him on his first trip to the waters of Iceland and when he went back to school after that summer holiday, he knew what fate awaited him.

"He called it a pleasure trip," says Dave, now 69 and bearing the

tattoos which were a rite of passage for seafarers. "But as I remember, it was anything but pleasurable.

"However, they say some people are born with the sea in their blood and it's definitely in mine."

In 1955, Dave, who comes from a long line of seafarers, did as everyone expected. He followed in his father's footsteps, beginning as a galley boy and learning the industry from the bottom up. Based first in Fleetwood before later moving to Hull, Dave spent most of each year at sea and every trip was fraught with danger.

The Icelandic waters are notoriously treacherous, the equipment was often inadequate and as the trawlers lurched and creaked in the bitter elements, the crew tried not to think about the harsh realities of returning home without the required catch.

"It was a tough industry," says Dave who worked his way up to become skipper on the trawler, Boston Typhoon. "Sleep was a luxury we never really had. There was a saying if you had time to read in your bunk, the skipper wasn't doing his job right, and a lot of people suffered from fatigue and exhaustion.

"On one trip, one of the crew died in my arms. It was as though he had just had enough. When we got back, the owners were desperate to know on which day he died. It wasn't out of any real concern, they just wanted to make sure they didn't give his wife any more of his wages than he'd earned.

"The trawler owners ruled the industry with an iron fist. They gave us nothing for free, we even had to pay for our own oilskins and knives."

When Britain's deep sea fishing collapsed during the divisive "Cod Wars" of the 1970s, most of those who worked in the industry went their separate ways. Some, like Dave, found work in merchant shipping, but in retirement many struggled to adapt. Having spent most their adult lives in the small confines of a trawler, surrounded by a tightly-knit crew, life onshore proved desperately solitary.

It's a feeling Dave knows only too well, but last year he and a group of other seafarers in Hull were brought together to share their stories of a lifetime at sea.

Run by the Community Network Programme under the banner Seafarers Link, every fortnight half a dozen or so veteran fisherman take part in an hour-long conference call where they talk about the good and the bad times. It's all done from the comfort of their own home and, more importantly for those getting by on pensions, it's free.

"It's been a wonderful experience," says Dave. "A lot of our families used to get bored with hearing the same old stories. But there's not many of us old ones left and it's nice to share your memories with people who know what you're talking about."

Those memories range from the practical jokes played on new recruits to the times of tragedy and the lives which were lost aboard the trawlers.

For deep sea fishermen, the winters were always the worst, but it was the events of February 1968 which will forever send a shiver down the spine of even the bravest seafarer. In the space of three weeks, three trawlers were lost and 60 men died in the Arctic waters as Iceland was battered by the worst storms since 1925.

Back in Hull, coastguards tuned in to the shipping forecast and

listened in as the captains of the Ross Cleveland, the Kingston Peridot and St Romanus logged the atrocious conditions and, after describing boats weighed down by ice, sent their final farewells to loved ones back home.

Dave remembers the triple tragedy only too well and his crew, who called themselves O'Connor's Commandos, only narrowly escaped a similar end.

"It was a terrible year," he says. "I'll never forget when we were hit. The morning had started off cold, much colder than anything you can imagine onshore. As the day went on, we all stopped, we were surrounded by an eerie silence and we knew that meant a storm was coming.

"There's only so much you can do to prepare and then there comes a point when you just have to brace yourself. I hadn't known anything like it before and I never experienced anything like it again. A black frost that all mariners dread swept over us. We dropped the anchor, but the wind just didn't let up and it snapped like a piece of cotton.

"All we could do was put our trust in God. There were no atheists on the boat that night."

While Hull's wealth may have been built on the hard graft of seafarers, their return to port was often seen as little more than a necessary evil. With a three-week stint at sea earning crews just three days on dry land, Dave and his colleagues were determined to make the most of what little time they had. Collecting their money, many immediately headed to the pub and the "three- day millionaires" earned a reputation for hard drinking and womanising.

"People say it must have been hard for us working away from home, but I think it was probably harder on our families," says Dave, who now heads Hull's Seafarers Link. "Whenever I came back to shore, the first day was always spent with the family. I'd take the wife out shopping and then we'd all go out for dinner. The second day was about meeting up with the lads and the third day, well, we were getting ready to go back out to sea.

"Our wives basically raised the kids on their own. We might have brought the money home, but the responsibility fell completely on them.

"Like a lot of others, my first marriage didn't survive."

Seafarers Link was set up following research by the Maritime Charities Funding Group which found many men and women who have spent a lifetime at sea are more likely to find themselves isolated in old age. Last week, the scheme, which also operates in Merseyside and Wales, won a charity award and having been praised for its innovative use of technology, there are hopes to roll it out to areas like Portsmouth and Plymouth.

Having been given a way to remember the old times, Dave is also recording the group's fortnightly conversations as an oral history of a forgotten and often overlooked industry.

"I remember walking through a cemetery in Hull and saw a monument to some of the men who died at sea," says Dave.

"It was in a terrible state. When I rang the council to say it was overgrown with weeds and could something be done, they said it wasn't their responsibility.

"For too many years the old seafarers have been pushed to one side. People didn't understand what we did and they weren't interested to find out.

"The lads I worked alongside were the bravest of the brave, but they didn't fit in. This is our little way of saying that they mattered."