by Nick Fisher
Anyway, it made boat-to-boat relations prickly. Lyall had nothing against Adrian. But where Matty was involved Lyall wouldn’t piss in his mouth if his teeth was on fire. And Adrian knew it. Which was why Lyall was the perfect one to ask a favour of, ‘cause Adrian knew he’d refuse. Tactfully. On principle. The call would’ve been recorded on Channel 16, and Lyall would have seen the Kitty off his stern when answering the call. All Adrian wanted was to be firmly put in the near-grounds by an official recording and a dependable witness. Just in case anyone wanted to know if the Kitty K had been in the Hurds today.
OK it wasn’t exactly bulletproof evidence. Just because they were logged in the near grounds at, Adrian checks the clock on his phone – shit, it’s ten minutes past two. All the other boats heading into port now, to unload their catch. If Adrian wants to make it look like they fished the near grounds too, then they couldn’t be back in port much later than the others. They had fuck all catch to unload, which would need some sort of explanation to the Kitty’s owner Paulie. And there was the situation with the dope. No way they were going to steam into port with a hundred grand’s worth of black hash in the wheelhouse and a 15-year-old so smashed he could hardly stand.
Adrian’s mind churning like a washing machine. Matty just staring blindly out the portside window, so stoned his eyes were glazed over and his mouth hung open, half a joint still stuck to his lower lip.
“Selling this dope, right?” begins Adrian. Matty breaking out of his far away stoner daydream. Adrian thinking through the logic. “When we sell this hash …”
“We?” Matty snorts. “Who do you know to sell hash to? Fucking Portland Allotment Association?”
Adrian’s jaw tightens. “OK … when you start to sell this hash. There isn’t going to be any other black like it on the market?”
“You kidding? Never any black. Hasn’t been black hash about, in quantity for donkey’s.”
“So, you … will be the only guy out there selling top quality black Afghan?”
“Fuck yeah?” says Matty already feeling the buzz he’ll get from being The Man.
“Then, we can’t sell it.”
“I’m, selling it,”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
“No. Not local. Not even South-West.” says Adrian. His voice firm.
“Why not?”
“Have to be London, or up north or something.”
“You want me to take a train, like to Leeds or Yorkshire or some fuck place,” says Matty incredulous. “Get out in Bradford and set up a market stall? You’re talking shit.”
“If this is the only decent black hash for ever, it’s going to be noticed. Don’t you think?” says Adrian.
“Fucking right it is!”
“And if you were the people went to all the trouble to bring the hash in, and knew it would be the first black on the market for ages. You’d be kind of interested to talk to the geezer was selling a load of decent black hash, just like the stuff you ordered – but didn’t get. Am I right?”
“So?”
“So you going out selling makes us into sitting ducks,” says Adrian. “Stuff isn’t like other stuff, said it yourself. So the guys who’re missing stuff so special as this, is going to notice if someone else is selling it.”
“How they going to find out?”
“Because there’s 22 kilos of it!” shouts Adrian. “Whole fucking country is going to be awash with the stuff.”
Matty now beginning to see a little of what Adrian said had a ring of reason to it. “OK, so we sell 20 kilos in one single sale. Take a little bit of a hit on the street price, for wholesale rates. Save the rest for–”
“So what, 80, 90 grand? In one sale?”
“Exactly.”
“Who do you know got the cash to do a wholesale deal that size?”
“I know guys,” says Matty, hunching his shoulders, looking away, feeling this body language might add a little air of mystery.
“What guys?”
“Guys you don’t know.”
“Bullshit!” says Adrian. Pulling back the throttle as the Kitty slows down quickly, a wave from the following sea curling up around her stern. Pushing her forward in a lurch that flings Tim off the pile of oilskins. For the first time in nearly an hour, Tim opens his eyes. Blinking. Still stoned. Trying to get his bearings, his mouth dry. He struggles with his tongue, sticky in his mouth.
“I’m hungry,” he says. And then looks up at the two men, who stare angrily at each other.
“We can’t land this now,” says Adrian.
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t know who might be waiting when we dock.”
“You’re being paranoid,” says Matty. “No one knows we got it.”
“You’re right,” says Adrian. “But just say, for whatever reason, the guys whose gear it is, or the Old Bill, or Customs, is waiting when we dock. Then we’re bolloxed. Bang to rights. They search the Kitty, we’re fucked.”
“No one’s going to be waiting.”
“If we stash it, before we dock,” explains Adrian. “And clear every speck of evidence that anything ever happened, out the boat, then no one can touch us.”
Matty says, “You think I’m dumping this back in the sea again, you’re fucking psycho.”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
“Fuck off.”
“Matty, think it through. You said it yourself, maybe the geezers whose blow it is have been out already. Couldn’t find it. Maybe they did know it had been dropped near some crab pot buoys out in the Hurds,” says Adrian. “You don’t think they’d do a bit of research? Watch a few local boats landing? See if anyone’s acting weird. Like off their faces planning to hold an all-nighter to celebrate?”
“I don’t care. They can walk up to me and say ‘give us our hash back’ and I’d say what I’m saying to you right now. Fuck off.”
“And then they follow you home. They follow me home. They follow this little prick home,” Adrian says, cocking his thumb at Tim. “How long before one of us has a can of petrol poured through their letterbox? You really want to look over your shoulder every time you stagger out The Sailors, shuffling your way home? Me, I don’t want to live like that. Don’t want anyone else to know what went on here today,” says Adrian. “I want to live to spend that.” He waves his hand at the dope.
Matty for once didn’t open his mouth. Which was a good thing, a sign he was letting his brain tick over without talking. One thing at a time. One thought at a time.
“Where you thinking of dropping it?” says Matty. Thank Jesus for the love of Christ, thought Adrian. At last, he was getting through.
“Off the back of the Kidney Bank,” says Adrian, quickly, already working it out in his head. “We’ve got two shanks out there from Tuesday. Ones we shot late ‘cos we’d no room left to stow the gear.”
Adrian was being kind, in order to massage his plan into Matty’s head. In truth, the reason they’d shot those pots on the Kidney Bank was because they were so late steaming in, on account of starting out so late. On account of Matty not showing ‘till after the flood tide flowed. On account of him being so hungover and strung out he could hardly function.
“We pull up one end of the shank. Stick the dope in the first pot,” says Adrian. “Drop it again. Maybe lash the bag of packaging to the anchor. Keep any sign, anything, off the boat. So we steam home, clean as a whistle. Nothing to fear.”
Matty chews his thumbnail. Running it through his computer.
“I need to take a lump of personal,” he says, pawing at the unwrapped slab.
“Me too!” says Tim, looking at Matty first, then Adrian.
“No way,” says Adrian.
“I’m only talking about half an ounce, max. Just personal.”
“And me.”
This time Matty rounds on Tim. “Shut the fuck up!”
“It’s my dope too!” whines Tim in retaliation, sounding like he’s eight y
ears old.
“Makes no sense, Matty,” says Adrian, his voice now with a pleading, be-reasonable pitch. “You got any of the black stuff on you, you risk us losing the whole lot. Few joints worth is as incriminating as the whole 22 keys. Said it yourself: ‘There’s nothing else like this out there. It’s unique.’ You get caught with just a little bit – it says you know where the rest is. It’s not worth the risk.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“Like you said, this is a once in a lifetime event. Life changing. Best thing that will ever happen.”
“Fuck, yeah.”
“So let’s not fuck it up by being careless. Let’s be serious. Do it right.”
Matty sneers and shakes his head. Like hearing rational sensible logic causes a pain between his ears.
“Roll another joint. Roll two,” says Adrian. “But just don’t take any into port with us tonight.”
“We pick it up tomorrow?”
“If the coast is clear. If nothing smells bad in town. Then sure … Although …”
“What?” says Matty, getting annoyed
“Although, if we’re going to stash it anywhere, while we wait to make one big sale… Bottom of the sea’s as good a place as any.”
The Kidney Bank is basically an underwater sand dune. A two-mile long, gently sloping hill of sand built up from west to east by the force of the big flood tides that get funnelled and pinched into a race of fast current, by the long thin rock finger of Portland Bill. Portland tidal race is a rush of tide that curves around the jagged rocks of Portland Bill and violently crashes into the underwater and reefs and boulders that lie just offshore. Portland Race is the most dangerous tidal race in Britain, arguably one of the most dangerous in any shipping channel in the world. More ships have been sunk in a five-mile radius of Portland Race than in any one patch of sea around the whole of the British Isles.
Granted, German U-boats and the Spanish Armada were responsible for a fair portion of the shipwrecks across Weymouth Bay, but the Portland Race itself has caused chaos to shipping for centuries. The force of the tide, accelerated by the funnelling effect of the nine-mile long promontory of solid Portland stone, is so powerful it picks up hundreds of tons of sand from Lyme Bay and carries it in suspension, every time it roars east. Twice every day it transports sand from the west side of the Bill, then dumps on the east side, in two places, the Shambles Bank and the Kidney Bank.
Kitty K’s rogue pots were shot on the leeward south eastern edge of the Kidney, where the sand begins to thin out and the rocky bed starts to show through, like scabs on a bald head. Setting crab pots on sand is like trying to grow leeks in concrete. Brown edible crabs don’t live in sand. They live amongst rocks and ledges. So, the edge of the Kidney is not a great place to shoot gear, but it’s convenient. It’s close to the harbour. No more than an hour’s steam in most seas. The only other upside to potting on the southern rocky edge of the Kidney is that none of the other boats would bother. Their working practices aren’t as haphazard as the Kitty K, so they’re not always trying to make the best of a bad job. Something which is pretty much the daily mantra of Adrian’s working life.
Every single morsel of the black dope, apart from two joints, one on the sink drainer and one in Matty’s mouth, is in the grey plastic bag, which has been resealed with a roll of duct tape taken from under the sink. Several layers of the thick commercial cling film have been wrapped back around it too. Of course, it’s now doing nothing near as good a waterproofing job as the original packaging did, but it’ll do, at least for a day or two.
The tide on the leeward edge of the Kidney is much slacker than in the Hurds, which is the reason why all the sand settles on the bank. The Race pushes the sand around the Bill, then as it flows a couple of miles further away from the rocky point which causes the pinching and acceleration, the tide slackens and the sand drops to the seabed. So, on the Kidney, the stash won’t have to stand anything like the physical punishment it would out in the Deeps.
The first pot of this rogue shank that’s pulled up has a huge brown cock crab and two lobsters inside, all intact. All in prime condition. In fact, they are such good specimens it’s tempting for the boys to take time and pull the whole shank. A few more crabs and lobsters would make it look like they’d actually done a day’s work, but rather than deviate from the plan and confuse the issue, Adrian settles for pulling the first pot, emptying out the crabs and lobster and replacing them with the grey plastic parcel.
Matty holds the dope-packed crab pot on the gunwale, his fingers curled through the mesh, hooking around the steel brace bars, like he is never going to let it go.
Adrian doesn’t say anything. He just waits for Matty to make up his own mind. He knows if he opens his mouth at the wrong moment and says the wrong thing, Matty could easily U-turn, refuse to drop the pot and they’d be right back to square one. Tim is easily distracted with lighting the last joint, and finally, as if saying goodbye to a dead relation, Matty lets the pot fall from the gunwale into the sea. Where it spirals away to its resting place. Matty then heaving the anchor and pot buoy in after it, to mark the precious spot.
Adrian automatically reaches for the ‘create waypoint’ button on the Furuno GPS plotter. Normally, every shot of pots is marked with a numbered waypoint and the number is written down in Adrian’s book. But, because this is a shank they shot three days ago, it already has a waypoint number, 0746. And there’s a corresponding note in Adrian’s little black book, to remind him how many pots in the shank.
Adrian highlights the waypoint number and then selects ‘erase waypoint’ from the GPS menu. He knows exactly where it is. It lies on the eastern edge of the Kidney two-thirds of the way south along the leeward edge. He wouldn’t say he could find it in the dark exactly, but he doesn’t need a waypoint marked in the boat’s GPS to tell him how to find it. More importantly, nor does anybody else. No point leaving evidence in the plotter, which could lead to the stash. Better off the location is recorded mentally, not electronically.
Steaming in to harbour after the last haul of the day is normally a time for a skipper to do his calculations. To estimate how much fuel has been used and be able to judge if the tanks are low enough to need refilling before setting out the next day. The Kitty can do about three or four Hurds runs before her levels are so low she’s sucking crud and emulsion and rust from the bottom of her ancient corroded tanks. It’s when she starts to suck this evil brew into her filters and injectors that everything clogs up. Then she starts to run so rough she can be seen five miles away at sea, by the pall of black diesel smoke that hangs above her.
Steaming in is a time for the skipper to estimate the weight of his catch against market price. There’s not a single load of crab landed by a commercial potter anywhere around the coast that hasn’t had its cash value calculated, re-calculated, guesstimated and predicted, before unloading begins. And not just by the skipper. Calculating their individual share of the day’s earnings in pounds and pence and pints is the daily arithmetic of a crabber’s life. He might not be able to add up the cost of two items on a shopping list, but he’ll be able to tell you to the nearest 50p what his share of 86 kilos of brown crab and 19 kilos of lobster is, once he’s been told the day’s market price. A fact which the skipper always finds out, by phone or ship-to-shore radio on the steam in.
A skipper also checks his fluids, his engine oil pressure, his coolant level, and his hydraulic reservoir levels. He finishes off mechanicals for the day and preps for the day ahead.
Steaming in is also a time for the deck crew to clear and prepare the deck, to stash broken pots, to lash down loose gear, to clear and rinse the bait bins, to store the bands, the tools and the rope. Simple sensible safety stuff. This is certainly the stuff other crews do. But not Adrian’s. Not today. Instead, Adrian’s crew, Matty and Tim, are smoking their last joint of black, passing it back and forth in sticky turns, as they prepare to play their favourite steaming in game: Fish Head Baseball.
In those days they didn’t have a metal baseball bat. They had a thick turned oak ‘priest’ about the size of a riot truncheon. This was the weapon their dad used for cracking congers, bull huss and dog fish over the head before he hung them on a nail hammered in the back of his cuddy wheelhouse and skinned them with a pair of rusty pliers.
In those days the brothers always used mackerel heads as their baseballs. Mackerel was the only bait their dad ever really used. Mainly because mackerel was free – so long as you could manage to catch it. Dad wouldn’t ever consider buying pot bait. He used to say he’d rather chop off his own foot to bait a crab pot than part with good money for something that was going to be thrown away anyway. Some of the netters who snagged by-catch fish, like smooth hound and pouting, would sling dad a bucket of the dead worthless fish for his pot bait now and again. They’d do it in the vain hope that one day he’d stand them a pint-and-chaser in return. That day would be a long time coming. Dad was famous for being tight.
These days, crabbers routinely buy their pot bait. Either fresh from the processors – a by-product of the filleting tables – or frozen in net bags, or in ice blocks the size of a hotel mini bar fridge. No one had the time to catch and sort pot bait anymore, much as everyone hated paying good money for the fish processors’ garbage.
It was precisely because Adrian had forked out his good money and bought today’s pot bait, and because they’d only used a fraction of it, pulling only four-and-a-half shanks, that there was still a whole box and a half of pollack heads lying under the bait table.