A swollen golden moon rose over Mount Martin and dwarfed a container ship that swung on its anchor, waiting. By the huge granite slopes on the channel, Gawain was checking his leatherjacket pots. He bent over the beam, his red anorak glowing in the fluorescent light.
The wind dropped.
Water heaved with the breath of the world.
We picked up the tangled nets, heads and fish rendered utterly unrecognisable. Stingray. The flathead of legend chose not to fall for the wily entreaties of Salt, again.
Staunch tugboats nudged the Kwan Yin into wharf timbers. A figurine of the goddess of compassion and motherhood once held pride of place on the dash of my car and now her namesake, this freighter, distributed superphosphate all over Earth.
Wheat silos, smooth white chrysalids, stood among the praying mantis gantry and chugging conveyor belts, orange lights, steaming mountains of woodchips, ships high on the water out in the Sound. All night, the port worked to clear the backlog. Ships in, ships out. Breathe in, breathe out.
The moon was huge, fecund and close to the earth. The ocean rose up to her siren song. After only a few hours fishing in the Sound, the water had swelled over the jetty planking and gently but forcefully, as water is wont to do, urged my return to land.
IT’S NOT ALL HALCYON NIGHTS AT SEA
‘If anyone tells you they’ve never been frightened out of their wits at sea, they’re lying,’ Ms Mer once said to me. Ms Mer is a south-west fisherwoman who has spent most of her life at sea, so she should know what she’s talking about.
No liar, me. When I get scared, I start to feel like an idiot, which in turn makes me grumpy. Despite my anxieties, there is no one I would feel safer with out on the water than Salt, and his faith in me is bolstering. In the first week of my apprenticeship, Salt gave me the tiller out near the islands, when even the night stars were blacked out by cloud, and said, ‘There’s red port left, girl. Let the lights take you home.’
One night in King George Sound a strong easterly blew and the wind waves as we hit the heads were ... well put it this way ... I would have liked a bigger boat. Every time a white-capped screamer aimed its malevolent slop at the gunwales, I’d turn the bow into it.
‘Don’t worry. You can take it on the beam with those puppies,’ Salt smiled at me paternally and then cursed when the next spray drenched him. ‘But you can take it on the bow if you really want to.’
We set some whiting nets out of the wind. I love that hour of waiting for fish to mesh and watching the sun go down. We laid up in the lee of Mistaken Island. I took off my wet-weather gear and asked Salt to drop me on the island. A charter yacht sailed through the channel and I heard the skipper shout a hello to Salt. The narrow channel surged with tide. In a rock pool that collects the flotsam from all over the Sound, I found some glass and a shard of ancient pottery. Perchance a pirate’s rum jar?
Fairy penguins began their evening cries. I climbed aboard again and we sat, happy. I think we even had a beer. Then we motored over to the buoy.
‘A seahorse! It’s that time of year again.’
‘Yeah, the spring racing season.’
Seahorses are difficult to unmesh in the half-light due to their hooked appendages but I’ve managed to persuade Salt that it is worth the time and effort to see them off alive. This one carried roe.
‘What is it then – male or female?’ Salt asked me.
‘Dunno ... when does she hand them ova? Ha ha.’ At some stage the male seahorse looks after the eggs. Salt wasn’t sure when either.
‘You know some fish are born male and turn female,’ he said. ‘Barra do that a lot.’
‘Some people are born female and turn male.’
‘Yes, but they’ve had append-dick-to-me’s.’ He cracked himself up at that one.
‘Everyone is female to begin with ... brings a whole new meaning to your balls dropping.’
‘That must mean us blokes are more evolved.’
‘Well, as long as you blokes think that, then everything’s okay.’
‘Maybe that one is a night mare,’ he says as I finally get the critter free and throw it into the sea. ‘It is night, after all.’
This is the stuff we really talk about.
Water swilled around my bare feet. I heard a noise, like radio static.
‘What noise?’ said Salt.
He’s quite deaf, Salt, but I could hear the water surging into the boat.
‘The bung! There’s no bloody bung!’
He thought this was hilarious.
I thought we were all going to die, or something.
‘That’s your fault, deckie. Deal with it.’
The squall from the south-west, that he’d been watching and commenting on, rolled in at precisely that moment. The boat was taking in water and the weight made her slew around and rock violently with every wave. We were halfway through fifteen hundred metres of net, so we couldn’t throttle the motor to flush some of the water out. Sea began to slop over the stern.
‘Bale, girl!’ Salt handed me the bucket. ‘There’s no better bilge pump than a frightened deckie.’
We hauled up the rest of the nets, fish and all, water swilling around my knees. I cranked up the outboard and we charged across the Sound and into the harbour. Gradually the boat discharged her briny load. The waves pushed up by the squall squeezed into the channel against the outgoing tide, pushed the sea into unpredictable peaks. I screamed with mad, terrified laughter as we surfed that channel home.
THE EASTERLY OF MY DISCONTENT
I sat on a warmed rock at sunset. I sat there as a prospective mutineer, a female Fletcher Christian of the Deep South. I can handle all sorts of things. I can handle live sharks, cobbler, getting scared, getting wet and stingrays.
I can’t handle that damned onshore whore – that incessant summer easterly – or sea lice. I get hysterical when sea lice drop off the fish and bite the webbing between my toes. There is nothing quite so gross. Salt has laughed at my screaming lice dance before but he grew quiet when I said they would crawl up his legs and into his bum and eat him from the inside out.
On summery full-moon nights there are lice aplenty and the easterly will not let up. Never say sagely to me, ‘Oh, the wind will drop at sunset.’ Another good one, if you really want the book of expletives thrown at you, is: ‘Well, it’s blowing onshore a bit at Goode Beach but we can set along the sandbanks for whiting and anyway – there’s nowhere else to go.’
Nowhere else to go? Shipmate, it’s Friday night.
At dusk we sat in the car and looked at Goode Beach. True to form, the easterly wind teamed up with the easterly swell and made a meat cleaver mess of the whiting grounds. Weed, slushy white caps and wind; one moment’s inattention would see the tinny in the surf.
‘Looks all right,’ said Salt.
‘Oh, for crying out loud!’
The best thing about Salt is that in gnarly situations he will never chuck a tantrum. Ever. That’s my job. Because we are both seagoing Aquarians, an interesting kind of egalitarian tantrum relegation system has evolved within the highly structured workplace of the tinny. I chuck the tantrums and he don’t give a shit.
Still, I got my way and we left the beach for the flathead grounds on the other side of the headland. Even out there, the wind swung over the hills and batted us into the harbour so the nets ended up all over the place.
Got wet. Set net.
Salt dropped me in a sheltered cove by Point Possession. He said he’d come back when it was time to pick up the nets and do the lice dance. I picked my way over the rocks, looking for polished glass among the smashed turban shells and periwinkles. I sat down on a rock and listened to the swell whacking up against the hill just behind me. I had my mobile phone. Maybe I could call for a helicopter, like a taxi. But really, I knew we had to get back out there and that it was going to be awful.
The phone beeped with a message.
Champers this eve. Didn’t Salt tell you? X Rua.
Bastard
.
‘I told her you were coming fishing,’ Salt said later.
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. I thought you’d prefer to come fishing.’
‘Right.’
It blew harder as we neared the channel. Weird, sloppy waves peeled off Skippy Reef. So far, we’d caught two trumpeters, a poisonous spiked angelfish and two flathead. Salt motored along the net and I untangled any feeble morsels who were feeling depressed enough to choose suicide and mesh.
‘Well, you can still go to her party.’
‘Mmm. It’s nearly ten o’clock. I’m soaking wet. I’m covered in trumpeter guts. I’m in the middle of Princess Royal Harbour and I can’t see my fairyfuckinggodmother anywhere!’
WASHERWOMAN, FISHERWOMAN
It rained all day until people began to realise that it would flood. The main street of town turned into a river and the concrete stairs on Stirling Terrace were rubbled by the deluge. The publican at the White Star kicked out the drinkers early and started sandbagging. I saw a matronly patron dancing in the street. The taxi drivers watched her as slurry swirled around the axles of their cars.
I’d managed to stay on land, but far from dry, the night the southern spring hammered down five inches. I have to remind Salt often that I am a fairweather fisherwoman but these reminders rarely carry much authority. (About as much authority as a fisherwoman has in the Microsoft spellcheck universe it seems. Word has it that I am not a fisherwoman but a washerwoman.) Of course the weather was always my main concern with going fishing that night of the big rain. The red dress and the visiting minstrels at the White Star had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
On the morning before the flood, I talked with Snow and some other friends at the cafe about the nature of work and how we go about it. ‘I know all these people who have bosses and are so unhappy,’ he said. ‘For others it is the perfect set-up. No responsibility. Go home at the end of the day ... I couldn’t stand it though. I’ve always worked for myself. It’s the only way I can do it.’ Then he told me that one of his jobs had been as a droog extra on the movie A Clockwork Orange.
We all stared at him. Snow was a droog? Far out!
My fishing income has eclipsed that of my other jobs and I reckon that makes me a fisherwoman instead of someone who just goes fishing. Salt has been suggesting that I get some bins in my name. His reasoning is that when fishers present their wares at the city’s fresh fish auctions, they get the best price with their first bin of fish and it degenerates from there. So, if we send up two names, we make more money per bin. That’s Salt’s logic. I just like the idea of sending bins of fish to Perth with my name on them. Fisherwoman. Yes.
I also like the Hemingwayesque element of my work, that beautiful interplay of art and labour, the cerebral marrying the physical. Writing about my other jobs as courier driver or kitchen hand never conjure up the same kind of whimsy. I find it hard to wax lyrical about consignment notes or the number of potatoes I’ve boiled in one afternoon. But to head out to the wine dark evening sea, to hear whales singing and see their phosphorescent meanderings and experience those occasions like the Night of the Flathead, when the boat threatened to sink under the freakish amount of fish we’d caught – that is a storyteller’s paradise.
But this night the pot-belly clicked with heat and began to glow red. Lightning spread across the skies. There was a bottle of schnapps beside me. I knew Salt wanted to go fishing. My wet-weather gear was still wet and it looked like it was going to get even wetter. We hadn’t made much money that week but looking outside at the skies made me feel quite flaky. I’m just not that tough. In fact, I was feeling decidedly girly in the best sense of the word – I had my red dress hanging by the fire to dry and I was trying to work out which pair of heels I liked best.
Salt rang again. ‘The weather’s easing up.’
‘It is not.’ I looked out the window to the south. Dammit. I liked this red dress and all its potential. Dammit. ‘It’s a dog’s breakfast over this side of town,’ I told him. ‘There is no way I’m getting wet tonight.’
THE ART OF SEA-DOGGERY
Speaking of dogs, there is Digger. He is learning the art of sea-doggery.
He first came to live with me when his owner went up north for a ‘few weeks’, one year ago now. I was a dogsitter I suppose, and should have been paid lots and lots of money. It was generally after trips to the dentist that I came home to find he had pulled down a veranda post, utterly destroyed my favourite chair or rolled in some of the disgusting things that fisherwomen tend to bury in their gardens. Then it was time for the long-distance phone call, folding expletives around anaesthetised lips, ‘Come and get this bloody dog! I do love him but my life is falling apart! My house is falling apart! ... what? Well put him on the plane then. He’s not my dog.’
It became my refrain. ‘He’s not my dog.’
People said, ‘Oh, he’s so lovable and cuddly.’
‘He’s not my dog.’
The fact that he is a seventy-kilo bull-mastiff slowed them down a bit, when I asked for their phone number and if they enjoyed dogsitting.
But when Digger started coming fishing with me and Salt, the perfect fishing dog was born. The myriad stinking things he could find on a small boat probably helped. He would sprawl over the nets, his puppy guts bulging with fish frames, rotten starfish and crab claws. He grew. And grew. He was putting on ten kilos a month. I trained him to sit quietly on the thwart while we played out net and how not to get tangled up in the mesh.
These days, Digger jumps down as the last buoy is thrown into the water and noses around the deck for last week’s remnant trumpeters. When it is time to pick up, he leans over the gunwale and watches every fish that comes up. He knows the silver bellies are for him. He thinks we catch all fish just for him. He is so robust in his motivation for food that he sees off anything threatening his feed. Pelicans can make him quite hysterical when they crowd the boat, pulling black bream and mullet out of the net. He’s gone over the side after them a few times, dived in headfirst and surfaced like an ungainly seal, spouting brine, circled by smirking birds.
Digger finally grew out of chewing up my furniture and attempting to dismantle the house, not long after my last failed attempt to send him north on the plane. He seems to have finished teething and is evolving from a disaster puppy into a great solid rock of a mastiff mate. But he’s not my dog.
Recently, his owner flew into town and picked him up for a few days. I arrived home to a strange stillness and keenly felt the absence of that joyful wriggling lump of sea-doggery. ‘Welcome home Sarah! I’m so happy you are back! When are we going fishing?’ He’s made himself indispensable, it seems.
WHILE WE WAITED
The lee of Point Possession, a thermos of coffee, an orange and the talking music of water against the sides of the boat: all these things make the brutal southerly almost bearable. We wait for fish to mesh in nets spread across the sandy bottom where there still lies the remains of another net: made from thick cables to thwart wartime submarine interlopers.
I can hear a two-stroke flogging at top revs and see, way off beyond the wreck of the whale chaser, the speck of another boat.
Salt hears it too. ‘Hope they don’t run out of fuel before they get wherever they’re going.’
We drink some coffee and I smoke a rollie. Salt throws his orange peel into the green water and looks around for the boat. The dinghy doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.
‘Are they fishermen?’
‘Nah,’ I say. I can see them now. ‘They’re both sitting down.’ There’s only one local commercial fisher who sits at the tiller.
‘They’re not fishermen anyway. I can hear them talking to each other,’ Salt laughs. ‘Fishermen know every other bastard can hear them across the water.’
I have to laugh when they finally motor by. Two men singing their hearts into the gathering dusk. Their boat is the size of my twelve-foot Lightburn and, like the Selkie, the motor is a b
rave little six. Full throttle, she is wallowing like a beetle through honey, weighed down to her gunwales by the happy drunken sailors.
‘That’s just like my Selkie! ’
‘Maybe it is your boat.’
For a moment I feed that thought corn-chips and chilliphilly in the scenario-party that is my head. ‘Now wouldn’t that be fun?’
They cross the channel and head for the abandoned frozen-food factory. Salt and I watch them in mounting consternation.
‘They’re gonna run into our net!’ It’s getting dark. I don’t want to peel them off the rocks when their prop fouls.
Their motor stops and so does the singing. One man gets up and stumbles to the stern.
‘Oh shit.’
‘All right.’ Salt starts his motor and we head towards them. But just before we get to them, their outboard arcs up again and they continue on to the factory. They pull the little boat up onto the rocks and drag it to their ute. We swing away with a wave and head back to our spot to see out the sunset.
NIGHT OFF
The Southern Champion blew a con rod five days out of Mauritius and then laid up at sea for weeks, the crew borrowing each other’s DVDs and getting bored out of their brains. They limped into town recently for running repairs and have been setting hearts on fire ever since.
I pedalled my bicycle off to the metropolis to attend an exhibition opening. Trousersnake boys mingled and shared canapés and a brilliant local whisky with the Glamazons. It was a glamorous affair. Lots of great shoes. But this story is more pressing than the international deep-sea fishing trade and the art scene. This is the sordid tale of how I fell off my bicycle that night. Twice.
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