Salt Story

by Drummond, Sarah

  Sure enough, in the morning, the net was broken. Salt was cursing, again. ‘How the hell did they manage to run into it three times?’

  This was about the time I met Nails. I’ve seen him in the distance but never met him until he came over while we were sorting through the black bream net. He pulled his boat in neatly next to Salt’s and put his wader-clad foot on both gunwales to hold them there.

  ‘Hey Salt. Ran into yer net last night. Sorry mate. Woulda fixed it but it was dark. Couldn’t see a bloody thing.’

  It’s a funny kind of honour, the running-into-nets agreement. Even though Salt had nets all around the channel that Nails used to get into the inlet, the onus was still on Nails to rectify the damages. I’ve seen this before when Salt ran into Bullet’s nets in Oyster Harbour. Fishermen are supposed to fix them on the spot, by finding the stray ends of the cork line and tying them back together, but it doesn’t always happen.

  ‘Don’t worry mate. Shouldna set over there anyway.’ Salt was feeling gracious. ‘I just couldn’t get past everyone else’s gear last night.’

  Nails’ dinghy was a neat little boat with a plywood deck. He stood, one boot on the gunwales and the other amongst his piles of net. He was using rag net, for catching cobbler. A beautifully carved cobbler waddy lay handy. Like most men who have spent their lives on the water, his face was cracked and worn.

  ‘Been gettin’ a bit of mullet out in the middle but it’s all calmed down now the bar’s gone.’ Nails meant the sandbar that breaches to let out the inlet flush out to sea, once there is enough rain.

  ‘Did it open by itself?’

  ‘Nah. Council came down and dug it out. We argued for about a week for them to wait until it rose another eight inches. Shoulda gone up over the road really. But the water got just close to the road and they had to breach the bar. Ohhh, the tourists couldn’t possibly drive through water!’ He flapped his hands and grinned.

  The high-water mark was all around the inlet, staining the reeds and paperbark trunks like a bath ring.

  Later we happened across a big school of tarwhine. There was one monster, the biggest I’ve ever seen, his snout all burly and gnarled.

  ‘I almost want to chuck this old man back,’ I said to Salt.

  ‘Oh, you’re feeling a bit warm are ya?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Feelin’ a bit hot?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘ Wanna go for a swim, do ya?’

  That afternoon, Salt asked Jordie where he was setting. They stood in the shallows of the launching beach at Irwin’s, water swilling around their boots. Salt was asking because it can get a bit hectic at Irwin’s, when four or five other fishers have nets all over the place. The cork lines can get torn up by the propeller and if that happens in the evenings the net flays around in the water and catches nothing.

  ‘I haven’t run over anyone’s nets for years,’ Salt told me for Jordie’s benefit.

  ‘Yes, you have.’ I can be treacherous like that.

  ‘Oh ... Bullet’s. Yeah. Dunno how Nails manages to do it so much. Saw him run over my net next to the marker buoy once. Right in front of me. Ran over it three times last night.’

  Jordie nodded.

  The next morning, we pushed the boat out of the shallows.

  ‘Water’s bright,’ said Salt. There had not been much rain to wash the tannin stain down the river.

  When we were level with the island, Salt fired up the two-stroke. I stood at the bow keeping an eye out for buoys. Salt knew where Jordie had set, so he throttled it. He wanted to beat the pelicans to his whiting. The chill wind forced into the neck of my jacket. My plastic pants filled out like a clown’s. The cold air bit at my eyes, forcing tears.

  Then I was face down on the forward deck, surrounded in a clatter of plastic bins, milk crates and the pointy bit of the anchor. The motor was revving and turning the boat in a big lazy arc. Salt lay on the thwart, staring at the sky. The dog had gone overboard.

  Still got my teeth? Check.

  I climbed down to the stern, eased off the throttle and put it into neutral. The dog swam towards us, shaking water out of his ears. Salt completed an inventory of his body and got to his feet.

  ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  ‘You all right? What happened?’

  ‘Just ran into Jordie’s net. Fuck.’

  I dragged the dog over the gunwale and he shook the estuary all over me. As we motored over to the nets, a bit slower this time, Salt said, ‘The motor was on tilt lock. That’s why we stopped so quick. I’m gonna have to find Jordie before he gets to that net and sees what we done.’

  We started picking up the whiting net. The dog had forgotten all about his dunking. He looked like he was considering leaping out after the pelicans. Still no sign of Jordie. Finally I saw his white wake, racing from the car park on the west end of the inlet. I watched him go down the channel. ‘He’s gettin’ the other net first.’

  Salt seemed quite rattled but not about the nasty fall he’d just had. He can mend bruises and dislodged gall stones but a busted reputation takes a lot longer. Another boat came out of the Kent River. ‘Good,’ said Salt. ‘I can finally blame something on an amateur.’

  The second net was full of cobbler. Salt used the waddy and I used the pliers.

  On our way back, Salt pulled in to where Jordie had nearly finished his cobbler net. ‘Jordie, mate. I think I just ran into one of your nets.’ Salt’s demeanour was one of defeat. He even managed to look sad.

  Jordie chucked his buoy onto the deck. ‘That’s my last buoy in, Salt. I reckon you ran over Nails’ net.

  ‘That’s ’im is it? That other boat?’

  Jordie nodded.

  ‘Well. That’s okay then!’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Looks like Nails shoulda got out of bed earlier.’ They both laughed.

  The two fishermen talked for a while, with the boats anchored on the inlet, near the island, cutting the heads off cobbler with filleting knives and throwing them to the beggar pelicans.

  MONSTERS AND FIRE FAERIES

  We picked up the nets from another inlet at dawn and then I ran with my son Stormboy along the wild deep beach on the other side of the bar. His long hair flipped about over the school uniform he was still wearing from the day before. Lacy teal dumpers crashed into the sandbar. We ran until we came to the beach shack, where we could watch the drifting whales from the veranda.

  When the day came a putrid wind blew, and the culprit was the rotting carcass of a leviathan long dead, rolling about in the surf. We thought it was a sperm whale. Further along the beach, another car-sized lump of flesh and bone lay. Further still, its cleansed skull.

  Last night we drove with Salt through the banksia scrub and found our way to the quieter side of the sandbar amongst the paperbarks, rolled out some swags in the soft sand. We rowed out into the centre of the inlet and set some net.

  I stood on the thwart of the tiny rowboat to punt over crunchy coral shallows. Incessant swell, the startled night call of a wood duck and water rippling against the sides of the boat were the things I heard. I was the tallest point in the whole inlet. Above me the stars blazed and a quarter moon glowed the water into shining steel.

  I’m not big on ideas of reincarnation. Perhaps it’s because my life can be dramatic enough without invoking Boadicea or an Egyptian priestess. But last night out on the water setting the nets, for a moment that only lasted a moment, I knew who I was, long ago. I was a kid, a brown boy with salt encrusted hair, dirty shorts or sarong and no shirt. I worked the rivers or the inlets, poling through the shallows in a little wooden boat or raft. And that was it. That’s who I was once.

  We rowed back to the beginning of the net, where it was secured by a stake pushed into the sand. Salt held the cork line out of the water.

  ‘Hold this.’

  I took the cork line. I could feel the fish hitting it – a sharp tug like when they take a hook. Then a lighter flurry as they struggle against the
mesh. So I knew there would be a few.

  Even when the sun or stars blaze, there is a moody stillness to this place. The country appears to offer up her secrets, the sea breaks the bar to flush the inlet, four-wheel drive tracks tether the country and yet somehow, she doesn’t give much away. Lightning storms hang on the horizon for days, illuminating the strange cliffs and ghostly paperbarks, the silver and olive hues of the water ringed with emerald samphire swamps. It is often windy and still at once. There are secret corners where silence is shadowed by the roaring swell, the swell that throws up lumbering, dead monsters.

  ‘Get up. You gotta see this,’ Salt told me the next morning. ‘There’s something in the water.’

  I sat up, swag and all. ‘Is it five yet?’

  ‘Close enough.’ He was standing by the shore of the inlet.

  The light flared from my mobile phone. ‘It’s fucking four twenty-seven!’ I flopped back down into the sand and grumpily tried to justify half an hour’s more sleep against some natural phenomenon.

  I sat up again.

  Salt stood on the edges of the water and strange blue lights shot out of his toes. Hot blue bullets rocketed away from his legs.

  ‘Fire in the water.’

  Every step as we pushed out the boat created a fiery turbulence. Every stroke of the oars made a sparkling rush in the inky brine and the dripping airborne oars traced wild arcs of colour beside the boat. Shrimp became tracer bullets.

  Standing in the starlit dark with the moon gone and a white glow on the eastern horizon, the place made me feel like I’d crossed beyond an earthly threshold, with those surreal water lights and discovering my other life as a river boy. The wind had ceased its harrying but still the swell thumped outside the bar. Fish torpedoed away from our boat leaving comet tails of phosphorescence in their wake. Salt rowed and rowed, straight past the stake holding fast the net and out into the centre of the inlet and none of us dreaming folk even noticed.

  ‘There won’t be many fish,’ he said of the nets. ‘Fire in the water will light it up like Disneyland.’

  Every mesh was illuminated, diamond lines of fishing net swooping down into an undersea glittery fantasia. We caught some yes, a few fat skippy and some mullet. The sky began to lighten and then all the fire faeries ran away ... and after we picked the phosphorescent nets from out of the inlet, I ran with Stormboy along a deep, wild beach and when we got to the whale’s skull, I told him about the brown boy.

  DAMN THE BANKS

  ‘Go in a bit.’

  I am on the tiller, trying to creep the boat along the northern edge of the weed bank in Oyster Harbour; slow enough so Salt doesn’t get tangled up in net, fast enough so the afternoon wind won’t blow us onto the bank where we will get bogged. Salt likes to set his nets right along the edge, where the fish swim off during the withdrawing tide.

  On the move across open water out to the banks, Salt stands amidships, looking ahead. He captains the tinny to me at the tiller with little left and right flicks of his fingers, whirling them to mean ‘slow down’ or ‘throttle it’. When our positions are reversed I’ve tried these hand movements just to piss him off but somehow I never seem to do it right.

  When Salt is playing out net, his hands are busy. He has to mutter directions, until I yell, ‘What?’ This system works fine at sea but on the banks ... well, we argue a lot. I find the whole setting-nets-on-the-banks thing rather stressful. Salt has to get the net positioned just right, so he catches lots of fish and maintains the legend. I don’t want to get stuck. There are kids at home, dinner to cook and fading light.

  Fishermen of the inlets and bays regard the water as ‘grounds’, much the same way a grazier observes their pasture. There is ‘good bottom’, ‘weedy bottom’ or ‘sandy bottom’. Then there are the banks. A practised eye can see a weed or sandbank beneath the water by watching the ripples of wind on the surface.

  ‘Out a bit.’

  ‘Keep her to starboard at the north end of the bank.’

  ‘Okay, she’s on the bank. Out a bit.’

  ‘Just follow it round to the Kalgan Stake.’

  Oyster Harbour, like many south coast inlets, is delineated by a series of markers, improvised by commercial fishermen to show the edges of the banks. It takes no Nostradamus to predict that when planing along nicely and you pass a wooden stake in the water, then in a few seconds the bow will plough into a submerged sandbar and the whole boatload of people and gear will get thrown to forehead. At Irwin’s Inlet the stakes are slender lengths of tea-tree bleached by salt and wind with white plastic reflectors or Emu Bitter cans nailed to them. Oyster Harbour has the Kalgan Stake, the Stick and the Periscope – a length of plumber’s poly pipe with an elbow at the top.

  ‘Follow it round to the Kalgan Stake but stay out of the weed. Don’t wanna get any more o’ that shit in the motor,’ says Salt.

  ‘Where’s the Kalgan Stake?’

  ‘Ahead.’

  ‘That’s a rock.’

  ‘No, it’s the Stakeh’ he says.

  ‘It’s a rock. It’s that aggregate you told me about, where the bream breed. If I go that way, I’ll get bogged.’

  ‘So, your eyes are better than mine. So, it’s a rock. Where’s the Stake? Stop. Stop. Stop!’ He has a tangle of nets in his fist and more about his ankles.

  ‘I can’t! The wind is blowing me onto the bank.’ And I’ll get bogged.

  I must be a bit of a pain in the arse, I think. I’m like a whingeing kid out here on the banks. But being bogged in a following wind really sucks.

  Finally Salt throws out the last buoy. I breathe a sigh and turn away from the dreaded bank.

  ‘Okay, we’ll set the other net on the bank around from the Periscope.’ He looks out over the bank. ‘You can get across that one I reckon.’

  I shake my head, appalled. The last time he told me this, I fell for it and got bogged right in the middle. It’s not nice roaring into the centre of a weed bank on a dropping tide and seeing the tips of seagrass appear above the skin of the water, like the eyes of a thousand crocodiles. I love the water but pushing a seventeen-foot boat, laden with nets, through cobbler-infested seagrass in the half-light is not my idea of a good time.

  The smell of cooking dinners floats across the water. I pray for a dropping wind and head for the channel as the sun goes down.

  AND THEN THEY TALKED ABOUT THE CRABS

  After the eighty-odd kilometres through cow flats and karris I pulled into the parking spot at Irwin Inlet where fishers launch their boats and I groaned a little – not at the black swans or the glass-off silver waters but the expanse of weed poking through the inlet’s skin all the way out to the island. Hard work getting a boat in and out of that.

  I drove on to the shack at Foul Bay. The fisherman who owns the salmon lease there lets other commercial fishers stay there while working Irwin’s. Bullet had already moved in his swag. He is a tidy soul. He picks up plastic rubbish wherever he goes. His esky sat on the sink. I peeked inside at his fare: a bag of lettuce, the carcass of a half-eaten cooked chook, some cheese and some cans of ginger beer, all swilling in melting ice. On the shack’s veranda he’d piled some firewood for the Metters, his rubbish collection, an axe and his catching net.

  Salt had left his caravan by the water tank. His outside light was on. When he arrived from town we took the boat out to the inlet, pushed her over the muddy flats that reached nearly to the island, then dropped the motor and fired her up. As we began planing I saw the other fishermen emerge from the rivers and the inlet mouth, they came from all their hidden places.

  Commercial fishing in the estuaries of West Australia is beset by all sorts of laws, one of which is that the fishers shall only set nets one and a half hours before sunset. They also must have all of their gear out of the water by two hours after dawn (Perth time). These laws are supposed to reduce friction between commercials and amateurs and regulate the amount of fish taken.

  At about three thirty in the afternoon the inle
t was buzzing with small tinnies loaded down with nets. I could see Bullet’s red jacket on the east side and Nails’ neon green bending over the gunwales of his little blue ply boat near Possum Point. We set nets on the whiting banks and then motored down the causeway marked with the trunks of old tea-tree.

  The causeways are important. Nobody sets nets across them, or if they do and someone runs into them and chops them up, they have to cop it sweet. They are the only safe passage in an inlet otherwise crisscrossed with net in the early evening.

  On the way back to the parking spot, Nails beckoned Salt over. He explained, as the wind blew up, the boats clanking together, exactly where his nets were. They’d been to a Fisheries meeting a few hours before in town, so they debriefed about that. Then they talked about the crabs.

  ‘Where’s Jordie? I thought he’d be here this arvo,’ I said.

  Nails looked at Salt. ‘Jordie’s having some time off. Till his hands heal.’

  Bullet came back to the shack half an hour after us. We lit the fire and cooked some dinner. He and Salt went over the meeting. He’s a political animal, just like Salt. They’d both walked out fuming so there was a bit of ground to cover. Then they talked about the crabs.

  ‘They’re a fucking plague, mate,’ said Bullet. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. I was unmeshin’ crabs all day on Tuesday.’

  At dawn, Salt and I waded, using sticks to guide the fish boxes over the water, to where we’d anchored the boat out near the island. Bullet took the Foul Bay way, along the beach to the inlet mouth and launched his boat into the white sands of the kelpy two waters.

  We caught some lovely sea mullet and skippy in the first net. Most of them had their tails or guts chewed out by crabs but that is where a good filleting knife comes in. We were feeling pretty clever about avoiding those dastardly crabs.

  On the second net, bigger mesh, deeper water, Salt and I realised we were in trouble. We had another fifteen minutes to get a few hundred metres of net out of the water and they were inundated with crabs. Each one takes an age to get out of the monofilament. So we decided to pick the whole lot up and unmesh them back at the shack. We hauled the net over the gunwale and it clanked, a heavy chain, of crustaceans.