“Talk to me, guys. How does this work?”
Brendan Bailes, the taller of the two, paused in his stowage and straightened up with a grin. “Easy. We toss one anchor and buoy out to set one end of the line. We run half a kilometer and let that baited line trail out behind us. It’s weighted to sink to the bottom. When the line runs out, the other anchor and buoy go over the side. We mark the locations in our GPS log, and off we go. Next day, we come back, pick up the buoy, and pull in the line to see what we got.”
His buddy, Charlie something, that Tony never did hear, said, “Yup.”
Billy Samson stood on the dock with Tony and pointed to the smaller lines tied to the rope. “Those lighter lines are attached so the baited hooks aren’t tied directly to the rope.”
Charlie said, “Yup.”
“How long can these be?” Tony asked.
“Long as we want,” Brendan said. “Half a kilometer is about as long as I’m interested in lifting without hoists so, that’s what we got.”
“Those tubs of line, and fish parts get heavy,” Jimmy said. He was impressed with the two men and the fact that they were, in fact, going out to retrieve the line they’d placed yesterday. In only a couple of days, Billy had managed to get the fledgling long-line project underway to the point where the first landings would be ashore in a few stans.
“Yup,” Charlie said with a grin.
Tony and Jimmy exchanged a glance as the two fishermen finished their stowing and took one last look around.
“You guys hang out a lot together?” Tony asked.
Brendan said, “Oh, yeah, me’n Charlie here been fishin’ together for...well...forever, ain’t we, Charlie?”
“Yup,” Charlie said.
“Quite the conversationalist, ain’t he?” Tony said.
“Oh, yeah, always got something to say, Charlie does.”
Charlie grinned and nodded. “Yup,” he said.
“What do you guys talk about?” Tony asked.
Charlie looked up at Tony. “Oh, usually I like talking about the social and ethical implications of the post-Diasporan rise of the corporate planet-state, but Brendan? He talks about girls.”
“Yeah,” Brendan said. “Now if you nice people will excuse us, I think we got fish to catch.”
Charlie grinned up at the stunned faces on the pier, flipped the line free. Brendan goosed the motor, sending the light boat dancing across the bay. Charlie waved a jaunty wave and settled down for the ride.
As they sped off over the water, Tony turned to Billy and asked, “Are they always like that?”
“Like what?” Billy asked.
Jimmy made a sound that was suspiciously laugh-like, but ended with a hoarse coughing.
“Never mind,” Tony said with a grin.
“Well, they’ll be back in four or five stans. The first trial lines are just outside the harbor. They ran them parallel to the coast about two kilometers out. There’s a shelf there that’s only twenty meters deep.”
Jimmy nodded. “Sounds like a good plan.”
Billy said, “Well, it’s a start. I wonder if we can get enough people to do this to make it worth while, though. A hundred megatons is a lot of fish.”
“Is that what we’re gonna need?” Jimmy asked, still looking out over the harbor to where the small boat was pounding along the surface chop.
“No, but it’s looking more and more like we’ll need at least twenty five to make up what the grounds aren’t providing. The model is so close that I can’t say we should pull any more boats off, because if we do, we’ll be short on the other side.”
“So, if we put out enough boats, we reduce the fish. If we reduce the boats, it’s not enough to land what we need.”
“Yup,” Billy said.
Tony and Jimmy both looked at him hard, but he seemed totally oblivious.
“Well,” Billy said, “I need to go talk to Dad about getting some additional electronics put on that boat when they bring it back. Needs radar if it’s going outside the harbor, and a better binnacle.”
Jimmy said. “I wondered about that.”
“It was what we had for them to use at the moment,” Billy said, “but we’re gonna have to give them better gear.” He waved and headed back down the pier toward the yard.
Jimmy thrust his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. The sun was warm, but the wind still had a winter bite as it swept in across the bay. He stared out to sea.
“Twenty-five megatons?” Tony asked.
“Yup,” Jimmy said, and they both laughed.
“That’s really close.” Tony noted.
“Not close enough for contract compliance,” Jimmy said.
His hand brushed up against the wooden figure, forgotten in his jacket pocket from two days before. He pulled it out and held it up to see what, exactly, it was. When he flipped it over and saw the purple shell inlaid on the breast, he froze.
Tony sucked in a sharp breath. “Jimmy? Where’d you get a whelkie?”
“I went to Callum’s Cove the other day to see Alan about starting the crabbing operation out there. I met the shaman and his son and he gave me this.”
“Who? The shaman?”
“No,” Jimmy said, gazing at the primitive gull in his fingers, “the son.”
Tony screwed up his face in disbelief. “The son?”
Jimmy nodded. “Yeah. Strange kid. Turns out he’s one of the residential experts in crab collection, too, but this was after.”
“After what?”
“After Alan and I got done talking to Rachel Krugg about spearheading the development of the crab fisheries, we ran into Krugg and his boy as were leaving. They seemed nice enough. Krugg doesn’t seem to have suffered any long term issues, but his son gave me this. I didn’t look at it until now. I didn’t realize it was a whelkie.”
“Son of a shaman,” Tony said.
“This one is certainly running true to his genes,” Jimmy said as he turned the figure back and forth trying to identify what kind of gull it was. “He said I needed this. The son did.”
“What kind of gull is that?” Tony asked. “It looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“I got the same problem. I know what it is. I just can’t dredge it up.”
“Did he say why you needed it?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Nope. Just handed it to me, said I needed it, and we left. It’s been in my pocket ever since.”
“Why would he give you a seagull?”
Jimmy shrugged. “No idea.”
“You could ask him.”
Jimmy turned his gaze from the figure to Tony.
“Yeah, well, maybe not,” Tony said.
Jimmy slipped it back into his pocket. “It’ll come to me, but right now, I got some projections to work on.”
“Yeah, and I got quarterlies to do.”
They both took one last look across the bay, sighed almost in unison, and turned to walk back down the pier.
“I miss fishing,” Tony said as they walked.
“Fishing? Or Casey?” Jimmy teased.
Tony shot him a pained look. “Fishing.”
The vehemence with which he made his statement made Jimmy’s lips twitch a bit. “Yeah, I miss her, too.” In his pocket his fingers were tracing the edge of one of the wings, fiddling with the shape.
Four stans later, after a very frustrating morning of trying to deal with routine office work, Jimmy stood on the end of the pier watching a heavily laden boat slop its way into the channel, bulling its way through the light chop. He had to look twice to make sure it was the right boat, because it rode so low in the water. His hand pulled the whelkie out of his pocket and he started flipping it around in his fingers as he watched the boat putter its way along the channel and across the bay.
Charlie was standing in the bow with a mooring line and waved when he saw Jimmy waiting. Brendan ran the boat up to the dock, Charlie stepped off nimbly and lashed the line around a cleat with no wasted movement.
“Ain’t that something?” Brendan asked Jimmy as he killed the motor.
“Yup,” Charlie said.
Jimmy kept staring at the load, unable to believe his own eyes. “You took a chance taking that many fish aboard.”
“Yeah, well,” Brendan said. “Once you start hauling the line in, ya kinda have to finish. We had two lines out from yesterday. We coulda just pulled the one, but it wasn’t that big a load until we got about halfway through the second line. It was a little too late to back out at that point.”
“Yup,” Charlie said.
Jimmy said, “I can see that. Any idea how much that is?”
Brendan shrugged. “Gotta be close to five kilotons. I think that’s the cargo rating on this boat.”
Jimmy did fast math in his head, and began to think that there was a chance. While a dragger like the Sea Horse would pull in eighty kilotons a day, this was only a small fraction. The other side of the coin was that a dragger cost a lot more to outfit and make sea worthy. He could put fifty of these boats on the water for what it cost for one dragger.
“That’s great work, boys,” Jimmy said. “If we can get a handle on how consistently you can pull this kind of catch in, that will go a long way toward relieving the quota crunch.”
He continued staring, flipping the little gull carving in his fingers, and running the math in his head. If they could average three tons a day, it would take a thousand boats to land three kilotons, and a thousand days to land three megatons. He only had about two hundred days, so he’d need five thousand boats doing long lining. Draggers had winches and he wondered if he could scale the operation up using the idle draggers.
“What ya got there?” Brendan asked, nodding at the figure that in Jimmy’s fingers.
“Oh, it’s a whelkie. I got it over in Callum’s Cove the other day.” He held it up so they could see it.
Brendan whistled through his teeth in admiration. “That’s a beauty. What is it? Behringer’s gull?”
Charlie said, “Yep.”
Jimmy smiled. “Of course. I knew I recognized it. That’s what it is alright.” He grinned, an idea forming. “Well, thanks, boys. I need to go see a lady about some charts. You two keep it up. This looks very promising.”
They waved to him as he turned and strode down the pier. The small gull rode in his hand as he headed for archives to see Janie.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Callum’s Cove
April 13, 2305
Richard held up the carving to the pale morning light. He could see what would become an osprey emerging from the wood as he slowly freed it. It was almost time to go in for breakfast, but since the accident, he found that he woke much earlier and enjoyed the quiet early morning. The half light of dawn felt magical to him. Not night, not day. A good time to listen to the world.
A knot in the small stove popped. A morning bird chir-chir-chirped somewhere outside. Up, he thought, he turned his face until he was looking at where the bird would be. In the distance, the waves hammered their relentless, slow tattoo on the rocks of Bentley’s Head. Above him, the trees sighed as the wind escaped through their branches. Back at the house, he heard one of the shells on Otto’s staff rattle in the breeze where it leaned against the wall beside the kitchen door.
He settled back to whittle, thinking about Otto, his strength, his vision, his gift. Richard only needed to look at him to see it glowing in him. It wasn’t yet full. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew that there was a lot of Otto left to develop. He snorted a soft laugh to himself, wondering how he could have been so blind as to have missed it all these months. He sighed and chuckled, grinning to the osprey slowly slipping from the wood in his hands. “Almost dying makes you appreciate being alive, I guess,” he murmured to it.
The osprey didn’t answer.
After a time he put down his carving and went back into the house. The kitchen was still unoccupied, but he could hear the shower running. He put the kettle on for tea, and started a pot of oatmeal with raisins, apples, and cinnamon. One of Rachel’s loaves of bread was wrapped and waiting on the side board, so he sliced off a couple of slabs and slotted them into the toaster, rummaging in the cupboard for a pot of jam that he knew was there. As he was reaching up, her arms snaked around him, pulling his back against her front in a loving good morning hug, and he smiled.
“You’re feeling frisky this morning,” he said over his shoulder.
“Just sayin’ good morning.” She giggled that bubbly giggle that hadn’t changed since she’d been a girl and melted him every time he heard it.
He stirred the oatmeal, measured the tea, and smeared a fresh hot slab of toast with the jam he’d found before being so delightfully interrupted. He poured water over the tea and set the pot on the table to steep, moving the jammy toast over to keep it company, while he put more in the toaster.
Glancing up, he saw Rachel sitting on the other side of the kitchen table, her elbows on the table and leaning forward, watching him with a faint smile.
“What?” he asked.
She just shrugged and smiled coquettishly. “Just admirin’.”
He wiggled his butt playfully in her direction.
She giggled again, and when it subsided, said, “I don’t remember the last time you were this playful.”
He stuck the spurtle into the oatmeal once more and gave it another stir. “I don’t either. I don’t know if I ever felt this playful.”
Otto came out of the bedroom and grinned when he saw them. “Good morning. Nice day out there, Father?”
“Spring is upon us, Otto. We should take a walk to the other side of the harbor today. There are some perennials there that I need to gather while they’re young and green.”
Otto grinned. “Sounds good. I’d like to finish that piece of carving I started yesterday, too.”
“Yeah,” his father said, “and I’ve got an osprey that’s almost free as well.”
“Well, I have to go play with Mary this morning,” Rachel said. “We’re gonna build a prototype crab-pot.”
“That sounds interesting,” Otto said. “The flat nets I made worked pretty well for fishing just one or two.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, “Mary had me make a couple of those so I could get familiar with the different crabs. But we need to make something that we can use on the boats.”
Richard served up the oatmeal and joined them at the table, sliding hot bowls of the spicy mixture in front of each. “That doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult.”
“Yeah, I know,” Rachel agreed, dipping into breakfast with enthusiasm. “The problem is we need to be thinking ahead to when there’s millions of them scattered across the sea bottom. What happens when we lose one?”
“Ah,” Richard said. “Losing one, not that big a deal, but it goes on trapping crabs that just die.”
“Yeah, and with potentially thousands of crabbers, even if they only lose one a season, that’s a lot of dead crabs. I’d like to try to avoid that.”
“I never would have thought of it,” Otto said.
“Me, either,” Rachel said, “but Mary has this stuff all in her head. She’s amazing.”
“Well, she’s also been studying this for decades,” Richard pointed out. “Mr. Pirano did well to find her to advise you.”
The conversation died out to comfortable silence as they enjoyed the quiet warmth of breakfast. When it was over, the two men shooed Rachel off to play with crabs while they cleaned up before heading for the far side of the harbor to gather herbs.
Mary had offered the use of her she
d behind The Gurry Butt for Rachel to work in. It was handy to both the water and Mary, and already had a lot of the materials. She opened the double doors wide to let the morning light flood the interior and walked over the bench.
Their latest model crowded everything on the bench. At just over a meter and a half in diameter and a quarter meter tall, the squat cylinder was not much more than a simple frame covered with a large mesh net laced together with a soft twine.
A shadow moved across the door and Rachel squinted out to see Mary standing there with a cup of tea and an amused smile. “Good morning, Rachel. You’re at it early.”
“Just wondering how we’re gonna get enough of these to be a valid trial and how do we know this thing will break down when we want it to?”
Mary shrugged one shoulder as she sipped her tea. “Well, that design is about as old and stable as they come. The twine we used to lash the bits together, will rot after about two months in the water. Crabbers just need to carry a spool of it and keep track. It’ll turn color before it fails. As for making a lot of them fast, we can get cut pieces of netting and framing done at the fabrication shop at the Inlet. Maybe we can get some help around the village to put them together.”
“Is this the best design?”
Mary took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Well, it’s a compromise between size, cost, and viability. The design is tried and true. We could make them bigger, but then you’re reducing the number you can put on the boat at one time. These don’t work too well in strings, so you need a buoy for every one. But if you lose one, you only lose one. Not the whole string.” She sipped her tea and considered. “Yeah. That’s the best for what we want at the moment.”
“How many do we ask them to cut out for us? I’m thinking twenty.”
“Ask for a hundred,” Mary said. “It’s just as easy once the cutters and fab unit is set up. We may want that many before the season’s out. I can’t see us changing the design.”
South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Page 23