Salt Story (8 page)

We used Salt's salmon camp for a while as our base to go out hunting King George whiting. This day though, was all about sea mullet.

When mullet spend a season in the estuary they get pretty fat but when they get outside in open waters they get leaner because they are chased around by sharks and dolphins. Despite this exertion, their oil content remains obscene. In an anthropologist's terms, the calorific exchange in the process of catching and eating sea mullet is exceptional.

In the camp, the grassed area by the sea was packed with caravans, ancient buses and tents. Parsley told Salt about the sea mullet he'd been watching.

‘Oh yeah, I seen them. A huge school and really moving, they were. I was out on the quad bike at six yesterday morning and followed them around the bay. Then they stopped at the pool right here. They were all jumpin' outta the water...'

‘Why didn't you ring me?' Salt looked like he was in great pain. His face was a bit red. Parsley was the third person who'd told him about this school of sea mullet.

‘Well, we got the net onto the boat–'

‘With the cork line and lead line back to front–'

‘And then they were gone! Dunno where they went. Out to sea, I s'pect.'

‘Then they came back this mornin'. Why didn't you ring
me this mornin'?' Salt leaned against the trailer and kicked the wheel. Hard.

‘They'da been gone by the time you got here.'

‘I can be here in twenny,' said Salt. He was beyond looking pained. He wanted to hurt someone, I could tell.

‘Your van's here, Salt. Why don't you stay here and keep an eye out for them yourself?'

I like Parsley and I was beginning to feel sorry for him.

I've known Parsley for a long time and only ever on the stretch of beach between Muttonbird and Migo islands. His face is brown and cracked and permanently crowned with an old beanie. Even though he owns a house in town, Parsley seems happiest in his ancient caravan by the beach or camping on a friend's farm. During the off-season he works fencing. He is kind and gossipy and rather old-fashioned. Salt asked him recently if he wanted some fresh plums from his overloaded tree and Parsley replied, ‘Oh, no thanks, Salt. I've got no taste for those new things. I like the old things, the tinned plums.'

After the excitement of the salmon season beginning, things quietened down at the camp.

‘I don't even want to come out here sometimes,' Salt said, as he did the country fisherman's version of an intergalactic space drive: dodging peppermint trees in the dark on a sandy black track, boat and trailer
kerthunking
behind us. ‘We used to all sit up in the shed, all get together at night, cook and drink piss and carry on ... now everyone is in their own caravan at eight o'clock, watching TV.'

They haven't been fishing either. It seems at the moment that there is no market for this oily, fishy fish. After the salmon season, most south coast camps work the herring schools but, due to the recent decline in the cray industry, the local processors are not buying bait fish and will only buy herring for human consumption if it is iced down by the beach seiners. At dawn.

One family out of the three who usually work this beach hasn't turned up this year. Salt Sister had a baby a few weeks before, so she won't be swimming out the anchor for the herring net and there's not even enough reason to hire a tractor.

Salt may have been annoyed at missing out on such a beautiful school of sea mullet but he is probably even more annoyed at seeing such an abundance of salmon swim by the camp that there is no point in catching. Who in the whole world could possibly want tons of cheap, sustainable run fish, drenched in omega-3s from the clean Southern Ocean? Anyone?

An octopus in the net out near Migo Island is a good starting point for our weekly argument.

‘He'll do for bait.' That's Salt. ‘We're going out hookin' tomorra.'

My son, Stormboy, who knows these things, says, ‘Octopus are so smart, if they weren't underwater, they would have learned how to make fire.'

Tom Robbins hypothesised that because octopus are so emotional that they can become apoplectic when overwrought, it is perfectly plausible that an octopus might die of embarrassment.

‘Bite 'im between the eyes and turn 'im inside out,' says Salt.

I remember Dunedin and the lovely wahine Donna Toa. She told me stories of living on octopus and fish from the bay and described to me the traps they set.

My take this night in the channel near the island?

‘I'll eat him. Lightly blanched, dropped in vinegar. Otherwise the octopus goes back. Bait? No way.'

I put the octopus in the box with a lonely squid and shut tight the lid. Half an hour later in the midst of hauling the night nets in and the motor cutting on the windward side of a snarly reef:

‘Jesus Fucking Christ!'

The critter was crawling over my bare feet and heading for the sides. I watched that octopus. The dog watched too. How the hell did it get out of the box? The lid was still on.
Stormboy, the dog and I watched it creep along, tentacle after tentacle. We didn't say anything to Salt.

We headed to shore, stowed the nets and crunched onto the beach. Salt was trying to lift the new two-stroke's propeller out of the sand. I watched the octopus heave his way up the side of the boat. He got one tentacle over the side.

Salt was going over the side too. He saw the octopus plop into the water under the fluorescent light, fly past his feet, heading for the open sea.

‘Didya see that occy? Bastard got away.'

‘Yep.'

‘You were watching the whole time.'

‘Yep.'

Standing waist-high in the turquoise waters of Whalers Cove I saw the stingrays come a'hunting, their shadowy pirate sails varnished and black. It was a nervous moment but they swept around me in wide arcs, looking for herring and whitebait along the seashore.

I've loved stingrays since that encounter. I feed them mullet frames from the beach and try to keep the dog from retrieving them. We've pulled up a few in the nets too. Most of the time I let them go, much to Salt's annoyance. When they have munched on every other fish in the net, I take them home and eat them.

At the Sunday markets I have an English customer who relishes stingray. She poaches it and serves it up with butter and capers. I use my own antipodean's recipe.

Hopefully you've got a Salt or a fisherwoman in the neighbourhood who can deal with the killing and cutting of a stingray because landing it involves lots of blood and wriggling and squabbles, especially in a little boat.

The flesh is a strange, grainy texture with a sheet of cartilage through the wing holding the whole thing together. Cut the wings straight down, into one-inch steaks. A sharp, flexible knife will deal with the skin and the cartilage. Make up a mix of soy sauce, olive oil and freshly grated ginger. Marinate the stingray steaks in this mix for a few hours. Then cook the stingray steaks quick and hot on a barbeque.

Apart from sea mullet and salmon cooked in huge slabs in a frypan, Salt's idea of culinary delight is mustard pickles or corn relish on white bread with cold meat, or boiled potatoes and lamb chops. He also likes Spam.

I told Salt I may be late getting to the fishing camp. Just not how late. Originally I was intent on getting to Pallinup in time to set nets but I got stuck up the mountain I'd been climbing. As soon I was within range, I sent him a message to say that I'd be there before dawn.

Salt and I have had plenty of conversations about me being late.

Sandy was standing by the fire a week later and laughing about the debacle. ‘Oh yeah, Salt, I had one of those deckies who could never turn up on time come Saturday morning.'

Salt looked at me. ‘We've always had a problem with Saturday mornings, haven't we Sarah?'

Sandy said, ‘I'd ask him on Fridays,
You going to the pub tonight? Nah, nah,
he'd say. The next day I'd be waiting at the jetty for him. By seven thirty I'd have to drive around to his house and wake him up.'

‘Seven?' I said. ‘Seven is a completely respectable hour. Who can't make it to a boat ramp by seven? Now, four thirty on a Saturday morning is a different matter.'

Salt groaned and rolled his eyes at me.

‘Well. Four thirty. C'mon Salt. It's not always achievable. It means three forty-five out of bed after sitting with my friends around a fire, playing guitars till one in the morning.'

‘Yeah, I always hate the summer crab season around you social butterflies,' he said.

On this occasion, I didn't make it by dawn. After sleeping under a rock in the dirt, it took me till lunchtime the next day to trek across the north face of the mountain to the car park. Hungry, scratched and bruised, with an eye suffering from a misanthropic spider, I got a message from Salt once I'd arrived back at my car: ‘Eight boxes.'

Damn. The last time he caught that much I was camping on Breaksea Island. He's never caught that many fish when I'm around. At this point I began to entertain the women-and-bananas-on-boats superstition.

I met him at the roadhouse on his way into town. He was sleeping in his car when I pulled over. I showed him some bruises as evidence of my mountain misadventure but he was having none of it.

‘You know, last night the caravan went up on three wheels in that storm. This morning I was trying to pick up, and nearly rolled the boat in the wind. I had to tie the net onto the bow and pick up fish and all. And that was only the first fuckin' net! The boat filled with water. I had to come in. Sandy saw me come in and asked if I needed a hand pickin' up the other two nets. Of course I said no but he insisted.'

Sandy had then helped Salt unmesh his fish and pack them into boxes. Once Unruly had finished with his own catch, he came and helped too.

‘You owe them both a slab,' Salt told me. ‘They were bloody good blokes, those two. I always thought fishermen are bastards but those two ... they're really good, they are.'

I dropped off a carton of beer to Unruly's shack last week. It was a surreptitious operation; it had to be at an hour when I knew the two fishermen wouldn't be there to refuse my gift of thanks. I drove past the shack lands, through deep puddles in the chewed-out track and into the mallet country.
I pulled into the clearing where their shack stood among the mallets and burnt out car wrecks. They had a fireplace crafted from a truck's brake drums and inside the three-sided shed was a tent, a cooker, some wire beds. I've seen them cooking up in the evenings. Unruly will boil potatoes and fry sausages, or Sandy will make a kind of cabbage, carrots and steak meal. I placed the carton on the bush kitchen bench and left.

Unruly and Sandy had a late start out on the inlet the next day. Later as they were chopping ice and packing fish into boxes on the shore, I wandered down to say thank you, for saving Salt in his moment of need (and probably his life) but they both looked at me like I was quite superfluous, nodded and went back to their work. They didn't see their heroism as anything other than ordinary behaviour and I wonder if they found my gratitude necessary.

It's a code that I'm still unsure how to navigate. ‘Fishermen don't ask for help,' Salt has told me more than once. ‘And if anyone offers, refuse them. But always step up when yer needed.'

How do you work that one out? And how do I renegotiate it, being a fisher
woman?

Anyway, the irony of my absence while Salt got into trouble on the inlet was that instead of getting sacked for a no show, I'd proved myself indispensable. There was a price apart from the beer though.

‘Those blokes, they are the best fishermen I've worked with for twenny years. I want you to put a feed on for them at the end of the season, Sarah. We'll invite them over to my camp for the night. Give them a real slap-up feed. Whaddaya reckon?'

Salt was quite definite about the ‘nibblies' he wanted me to provide. ‘Some cubes of cheese and bits of pineapple on toothpicks. I know you don't like Spam but they do.' He hassled me about it all week, even ringing me while I was shopping. ‘So get them some Spam, okay? And those little green cocktail onions. Yeah, and maybe some bickies too.'