THE days when the fishing industry dominated life on the Yorkshire coast are long gone.

But former skipper Fred Normandale, above, remembers when his home town of Scarborough was one of the great centres for the industry and had the characters to match. He has now turned his memories into a nostalgic book, called First Of The Flood, which has become a local bestseller.

Fred, 54, comes from a family that has been involved in fishing for generations - a tradition his son Danny is now continuing as a skipper in his own right.

Fred wanted to document the days he spent as a boy in Scarborough's old town.

"As a boy I grew up among some wonderful characters - big men with big hearts," he said.

"They were extremely hard-working and, when ashore, extremely hard-drinking, though never mixing the two pursuits.

"I thought this was a normal background, that everyone lived in a world such as mine. But I couldn't have been more wrong."

Fred's father worked on a fishing coble and Fred himself first went to sea as a boy, surrounded by men full of tales of their life and adventures at sea.

Ten years ago he started writing them down as short anecdotes and eventually, intertwined with his own early years, they have become the basis of his fascinating 300-page book.

Fred is now working on his second volume, Slack Water, bringing Scarborough's fishing story up to date.

First Of The Flood is available from Bottom End Publishing, PO Box 318, Scarborough, price £10, plus £1.50 postage and packing.

Updated: 11:05 Thursday, January 09, 2003