ready for spring fishing he had to prepare as far ahead as July.
Even then he was not always sure delivery would be on time:

... The goods you will please to forward by the first vessel for
Potomac (which possibly may be Captain Jordan the bearer of this)
as there are some articles that will be a good deal wanted,
especially the seine, which will be altogether useless to me if I
do not get them early in the spring, or in other words I shall
sustain a considerable disappointment and loss, if they do not get
to hand in time.

He wrote to Bradshaw and Davidson in London in 1772:

That I may have my seine net exactly agreeable to directions this
year I give you the trouble of receiving this letter from me to
desire that three may be made. One of them eighty fathom long,
another seventy, and the third sixty-five fathom, all of them to be
twelve feet deep in the middle and to decrease to seven at the ends
when rigged and fit for use; to be so close-meshed in the middle as
not to suffer the herrings (for which kind of fishery they are
intended) to hang in them because, when this is the case it gives
us a good deal of trouble at the busy hurrying season to disengage
the seine, and often is the means of tearing it. But the meshes may
widen as they approach the ends: the corks to be no more than two
feet and a half asunder and fixed on flatways that they may swim
and bear the seine up better with a float right in the middle to
show the approach of the seine with greater certainty in case the
corks should sink; the leads to be five feet apart. The seine I had
from you last year had two faults, one of which is that of having
the meshes too open in the middle; the other of being too strait
rigged; to avoid which I wish you to loose at least one-third of
the length in hanging these seines; that is, to let your 80 fathom
seine be 120 in the strait measure (before it is hung in the lead
and cork lines) and the other two to bear the same proportion, I
could wish to have these seines tanned but it is thought the one I
had from you last year was injured in the vat, for which reason I
leave it to you to have these tanned or not, as you shall judge
most expedient ... I would not wish to have them made of thick
heavy twine as they are more liable to heat and require great force
to work them....

A detai