Salt Story (2 page)

‘What have we got? A brick fish!' We haul up the house brick that holds the net to the ocean floor.

‘Nuffing!' Salt shakes his head in disgust. He says it every time we pick up that brick. ‘Fuckin' nuffing.'

There is a legendary flathead lurking somewhere in King George Sound. I hear about it quite a lot. ‘It just ate that KG,' Salt growls, tearing a mangled King George whiting from the mesh.

‘Not a stingray?'

‘Nah, it's that big fuckin' flathead. Too big to fit in the box, it is. About the size of a small crocodile but nastier.'

If you told me the word gullible wasn't in the dictionary, I'd have to check, secretly, later. ‘Really?' I ask, agape. ‘Have you seen it?'

‘Seen it? It tried to chew me leg off,' he pulls up his wet-weather pants to show me the scar. It is a terrible scar, two sets of teeth marks, scoring across to meet in the middle of his calf.

‘But wasn't that a shark?' Last time he showed me that scar, he said a dog shark had latched onto his leg and he'd had to cut off its head because, in all the excitement, the shark's jaws locked.

‘Nah, that's the other leg, girl,' he smirked. ‘Great night at the Bremer Bay pub that night. The barmaid had to fetch the pliers onto me.'

In the early evening, the western wind turbines slowed and then stopped.

‘Not far now. We're nearly onto The Net That Doesn't Catch Anything,' Salt says.

‘It's not so bad, that net.'

‘Nope. I'm cutting it off tomorrow. Forgot to do it today. Doesn't catch anything,' Salt says. The silver gleam of King George whiting flash into the plastic bins. ‘And it's too shallow. Pike swim straight over the top.' Just like that, there is a pike, then two, three, wrapped up in mesh like a rolled roast and still baring their teeth. ‘I'm gonna cut the whole lot off. It's useless. It's The Net That Doesn't Catch Anything.'

Salt has diamonds on the soles of his feet tonight, electric blue, phosphorescent diamonds.

‘Take me home.' He sits amidships on the pile of nets and looks ahead as I take the tiller. Just like a working horse, it is my favourite time of day but not because I am going home. It's nearing ten at night and the wind has dropped. We have the loveliest tub of fish for tomorrow's market. Navigation lights – green, red, yellow, blue – blink around me. I head into the channel and feel the chill of the land. The woodchip mountain is composting, woody scented. Steam clouds the orange lights. Our crocodilian wake flickers with fire in the water.

We never say anything during this part of the trip, not just because of the noisy two-stroke. It is that short period of absolute satisfaction that everything is right with the world.

‘I'm gonna get on the piss soon,' Salt tells me at the jetty. ‘Been too good for too bloody long. I'm gonna go out and shake this town up, shake things up a bit. It's about bloody time.'

He's pretty happy. He's outfoxed that fisherman's jinx yet again. It's been a good night's fishing, despite that net.

One of the Aunties told me that she and the grandies swam a net out at Pallinup, and caught all this sea mullet. I mentioned it to Salt and the next time he saw her, he had to ask. ‘Where'd you catch that mullet?'

‘Oh, over by the bar. Then we set another net, caught some more, cooked it up on the beach wrapped in paperbark.'

‘Which beach? What side of the bar?' He listened intently to her directions.

Salt has been itchy about sea mullet, seeing as the latest theory is they've swum up the Pallinup River where we commercial fishers are not allowed to work. So we were out on the inlet this week trying to find where this woman had caught her fish. The evening was so still and clear that as we planed across the inlet, it felt the boat wasn't even moving, just the sky and the red cliffs moving towards us. We set two overnight nets by the paperbarks near the bar, where furtive camp fire smoke smudged the trees.

The next morning it was raining sideways. That was the first bad thing. I kept shouting to slow down as we roared out to the nets because the rain was drilling me and I hadn't found my sunglasses in the half-dark tent. As we hauled in the net, I began to realise we'd started at the wrong end. Salt had to start the motor again and reverse along it because the wind was blowing the boat across the net and getting everything tangled.

I also understood that my wet-weather gear was no longer waterproof. The plastic had worn away from the lining when I'd left my pants and jacket pegged on the camp washing line during the storms. This may seem like a minor technicality but I was living in a tent at the time. Dodgy wet-weather gear in sideways rain when the nearest hot shower or clothes dryer is fifty kilometres away, is a
real bastard.

Then Salt backed into the net and bound up the prop in monofilament. You know the Conchords song ‘Business Time'? Yeah, well. It's Whingeing Time. Six in the morning, the sun not yet wakened and my expletives were already spraying the deck. Salt always thinks my tantrums are very funny, so to up the entertainment, he backed into the net a second time after I'd untangled the first one from the propeller.

It wasn't easy in that wind to climb over the stern of the dinghy with a filleting knife between my teeth, lean into the outboard and start fiddling with strands of nylon wound tight around the prop. Plus I was no longer waterproof. (Have I mentioned I wasn't waterproof?) Salt couldn't do the untangling because his waterproof waders severely constricted his movements.

‘I know what's going on,' I shouted over the sleet, surf spray and other flying rhetoric. ‘You've got a deckie! No one else has a deckie. If you didn't have a deckie, you'd be thinking about how to make your job easier. But no. No. You've got a fucking deckie.'

He looked a bit bemused, like when he can't hear me speaking, like when he just sees my mouth opening and shutting in the middle of a meaningless torrent of strange and vaguely humorous facial expressions. He looks like that a lot, when I start yelling.

Massive schools of flathead swarm into the harbour in November, some laden with spring roe and feasting on anything in their way. After setting some raggedy net in our special spot, I jumped ship and explored the cairn-encrusted Possession Point. Towards her rocky peak were little gardens of perfect crimson orchids in emerald moss and verticordia, that flowered pink against the granite.

The sun began to slip away behind the wind turbine. I returned to the boat, where Salt leaned over the stern and stared into hypnotic depths. We drank coffee, peeled an orange each and waited for the night.

Beneath the boat, I could only imagine all the things going on, connected to these happenings by the net and what it would reveal. There was the skin of the water and Salt's boat, floating above this universe. Down there, flathead swam in toothy, carnivorous swathes and the eccentric little spider crab preened her new crown – a single length of seagrass. Turquoise grass whiting fled from the greedy spotted sharks and vampire bat rays. Strange currents ran beneath the calm surface, rolling the net into tight bundles of monofilament and weed. Seagrass undulated in rippling meadows and above all the drama, the dinghy fidgeted against her anchor like a naughty pony.

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.

‘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.

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!
'