As the guns ~ artillery of the two sides began to fire at each other, Guan Gong once again sent a large number of small boats to clear the fishing nets along the entire length of the river. Originally, Guan Gong only planned to clear a waterway, and he left the fishing nets outside the waterway to nothing. Now that he knows the danger of these fishing nets to the propellers, Guan Gong plans to clean them all up first, so as to save the trouble at the critical moment.

Some of these small boats are cement boats, some are wooden boats, the cement boats are recently built, and the wooden boats are the home of the former Jingzhou naval army. Regardless of the type of material, all boats have one thing in common, and that is that they are powered by oars.

Small boats simply don't have enough space and too much buoyancy to accommodate the propeller power system, so simply use the simplest paddling method. Without the use of propellers, there is no fear of getting entangled in fishing nets.

The way these small boats clean their nets is completely different from the rough and direct way of larger boats, or they don't clean them, they recycle them. And they recovered it thoroughly, not only the nets, but also the buoys, chains, and anchors that tied the nets.

In this era of material scarcity, these things have a certain value, and if they are not collected, they will not be collected, and they will be harvested in vain. The nets can be recovered for fishermen to catch and promote the development of the fishing industry. Buoys, chains, and anchors can all be used to divide the channel in the future, and can be collected and put into the inventory of the navy.

Even if they are not needed, iron chains and anchors can be recast and used as raw materials for the production of other iron tools. These iron chains, iron anchors, and the huge iron cable that traversed the Yangtze River made Liu Hou make a lot of money. You can't blame Liu Hou for being like a miser, this is a rag and a lot of money, but it's not a small amount of money, but a real big fortune.

You must know that this line of defense was established by the efforts of the Eastern Wu and consumed most of the treasury of the Eastern Wu. Other manpower and material resources aside, let's just talk about the amount of iron tools used, and Soochow used almost all the iron tools they could use to build this thing.

Note that the iron tools used here are not the steel production of Soochow in a year, but the surplus steel of Soochow over the years, plus the output of that year, you can imagine how much this wealth is.

Of course, compared with the Han family's background, the steel output of Dongwu is far behind that of the Han Dynasty, about one-tenth, plus the inventory accumulated over the years, the soldiers can probably pick up one-fifth of the annual output of the Han Dynasty for Liu Hou.

One-fifth of the annual steel output is enough for Liu Hou to be happy for half a day, this is for nothing, Liu Hou is really grateful for the generosity of the people of Dongwu. Although steel is not a precious metal, it is still quite valuable when the quantity goes up, you know, in some special historical periods, there are people in power who have minted iron money, and iron can also be used as currency??.? Now it is equivalent to thousands of soldiers in the Yangtze River to help themselves make money, can Liu Hou not be happy.

Of course, making money from the river is not as simple as imagined. It took some thought to set up the fishing net array in Soochow, which is probably divided into two situations. One is the open surface of the fishing net, the buoy of this fishing net is easily recognizable when floating on the water.

When they saw this kind of fishing net, one or two people would go down to the small boats that made money, and use an iron chain to penetrate the chain of the buoy, and then the whole boat would pull the iron chain together and lift the anchor.

In this way, buoys, chains, fishing nets, and anchors, the whole thing will be recycled. The recycled items will be dismantled by special soldiers, and then sorted and stacked.

However, in the second case, it is not so easy. The second situation is that those fishing nets and buoys do not float on the surface of the water, but half-sink below the surface, which is designed to deal with the half-floating mines of the Han army.

In this case, the soldiers of the Jingzhou Navy called it "Hidden Mark". The first thing you need to do to get rid of these dark marks is to find them.

As a result, the crew members of those small boats, except for the rowers, all the others held long bamboo poles, and inserted the bamboo poles deeply~ into the bottom of the water and stirred them continuously, so as to detect whether there were fishing nets in the water.

If they detect a fishing net, they will first try to pull the net up with a bamboo pole, and then use the vine to get the chains, buoys and anchors up.

If the bamboo pole can't bring up the fishing net, the "water ghost" will have to be dispatched. In this era, there was no diving equipment, and the so-called "water ghosts" were people who were very good at water and could dive deeper and for a longer time.

Jingzhou's water network is vertical and horizontal, there are many people on the water, and people who know water and have good water nature are also easy to find, so Guan Gong selected some people with particularly good water nature in Jingzhou Water Army to form a "water ghost team".

This "water ghost team" is actually a kind of special forces, and the special operations they are good at are fighting underwater, such as diving to the bottom of the water to scuttle through and sink enemy ships, such as sneaking from the bottom of the water to the designated position and then suddenly rushing out ~ Killing people on the surface of the water, etc.

The "Water Ghost Team" is not a rare type of troops, it is also in the Huang Xu Army, and there are more in the Dongwu Water Army, and as a veteran water army, the "Water Ghost Team" of the Dongwu Water Army is much stronger than the "Water Ghost Team" of the Jingzhou Water Army.

On this expedition, Guan Gong did not bring out the original two super battleships, just to prevent these two wooden battleships from being chiseled by the "water ghost team" of Soochow. At present, most of the warships of the Jingzhou Navy are cement ships, so there is no concern about this at all.

Now, these "water ghosts" have all been mobilized by Guan Gong to clean up this small fishing net. Although the water spirits are very good, it is still a bit risky to clean the nets, and it is very troublesome if they are unfortunate enough to get entangled in the nets at the bottom of the water.

To prevent these accidents from happening, they have two safety measures in place. One of them is to carry a sharp dagger into the water, and in case of an accident, cut the fishing net by yourself and save yourself by yourself. The second is to tie a rope to his body, and when he encounters a fierce struggle, his comrades on the ship will know that he is in danger and will pull him up in time.

Due to the storage of hidden fishing nets, the clean-up work has become very slow, and according to the current progress, it may not be possible to clean it up during the day today. It's been so long, if the two sides still fight indiscriminately~ The cannon will be a bit unreliable, without him, it's too wasteful, and the cost performance is too low.

The first to be unbearable was Ling Lie, Dongwu's ammunition reserves were far inferior to those of the Great Han, and they would definitely not be able to fight the Great Han. After firing a few rounds of artillery, he observed through his telescope from a distance that the Jingzhou Navy had sent a large number of small warships scattered across the river to salvage fishing nets.

Seeing the action of the Jingzhou Water Army, he felt that his previous conjecture had been confirmed. His conjecture was that the reason why the Jingzhou Navy began shelling at such a long distance, regardless of the accuracy problem, did not hesitate to waste ammunition, was to cover these small warships to destroy their fishing net array.

Ling Lie thought that he had seen Guan Gong's calculations clearly, so he felt that there was no need to waste ammunition with the Jingzhou Navy here, so he decisively issued an order for all the gunboats to stop the shelling and retreat beyond the safety line to avoid the artillery fire of the Jingzhou Navy Army.