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    The dorys left to "élonger leurs tentis", that is to say, place their lines in the water, leaving a buoy at the end so as to be able to retrieve them easily. Of course, it was by means of oars, that they moved away from the mothership, going at times as far as a nautical mile away (1.8 kilometre) a distance that they had to travel again, sometimes against the wind, to regain the ship.

    After several hours on board, passed in cleaning the fish of the first trip, they went back to sea to take up the lines and collect the cod, then returned to the ship to unload their cargo of fish. This continued for months, without stopping, except if the weather was too bad to put boats in the water.

    Once the cod was transferred to the mothership, preparation of the green cod began, as explained by Louis Lacroix in his work "Les derniers voiliers morutiers" (The Last of the Sailing Ships to Fish Cod) :

    It was necessary first to gut the fish, what one refers to on the Grand Banks as brayer ou ébrouailler and it was the role of the ébrayeur or eviscerator, who stuck the cod on a hook attached to a workbench in front of him and with a single cut of his special knife, disemboweled from bottom to top, emptying it of intestines and throwing the gutted fish in the parc à poissons, a sort of enclosure, formed by four lengths of beam fitted into fixed uprights installed on the bridge and forming a rectangle which occupied a large part of the bridge across the middle, where the décollage (heading) took place, most often a task reserved for un novice (an apprentice between the ages of 16 and 18) . Le décolleur (the header) or guillotineur (beheader) took from the parc where he stood immersed to the waist the first fish that came and removed the head by pressing the fish against a sort of reversed breadknife (la guillotine) attached to a special bench. As soon as by a sharp blow he had felled the head he passed the body to one of his neighbours, le trancheur, (the splitter) who was a specialist : the second or the lieutenant who, with two strokes of the splitting knife made two deep cuts along the backbone and extracted it in a single action.

    He then threw the flattened body in a washtub where one ship's boy pumped sea water without stopping while another scraped the fish with a special spoon in order to énocter, that is to say to remove all traces of blood which could be found on or inside the flesh.

    L'énocteur slid the cod down a special chute into the hold to the salter, who rubbed it with salt according to a clever formula which was a trade secret and on which depended the proper preservation of the cargo ; finally the fish was arranged in piles.

    Once the hold was full they returned to France or to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon to unload their cargo and to buy the bait necessary for the return to the fishery.