Pescador's Wake

For Craig, L and C

‘Beyond 40 degrees south there is no law…

Beyond 50 degrees south there is no God.'

A
MARINER'S
S
AYING

 

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he

Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o'ertaking wings,

And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

FROM
T
HE RIME OF THE
A
NCIENT
M
ARINER
,
S
AMUEL
T
AYLOR
C
OLERIDGE

Cover Page

Dedication

Author's Note

Epigraph

Map

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES, FIRST MATE, PESCADOR

CARLOS The Pescador

DAVE The Australis

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

DAVE The Australis

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

DAVE The Australis

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

DAVE The Australis

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

DAVE The Australis

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

DAVE The Australis

MARGIE Hartz Mountain, Tasmania

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

JULIA La Paloma, Uruguay

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

CARLOS The Pescador

DAVE The Australis

MARGIE Hobart, Australia

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

JULIA Montevideo, Uruguay

CARLOS Fremantle, Australia

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Celebrating New Writing

Copyright

About the Publisher

It's broad daylight as I stand on deck, but there is no sunlight two thousand metres beneath the sea where our hooks prowl in the dark.

I am a fisherman, but I know little of this other world—the abyss. No one does. It is the largest and least known environment on Earth. I've heard that it's so dark at the bottom of the sea that life must make its own light. It must survive the enormous weight of water above it, and be prepared for near-starvation.

I saw a documentary before this trip, footage taken by men in a submersible and shown for the first time on television. It made me want to write, not fish, to glimpse this other world. To proclaim its magnificence, not plunder its depths. Perhaps even to begin my book…Out of the blackness, bizarre torches shone from the heads of angler fish, and bands of flickering cilia radiated rainbows of light down the outsides of jewel squid and jellyfish. Tiny beacons adorned hatchet fish in patterns that disguised their shape, fooling predators. Flashes of phosphorescence created nocturnal firestorms. The oversized, needle-sharp teeth of viper fish held fiercely onto meals that came by only rarely,
and gulper eels with distendable stomachs swallowed prey larger than themselves. Giant sea spiders patrolled the seafloor alongside armoured isopods that resembled military tanks.

I close my eyes, blocking out the sun, and try to picture this alien realm at the outer limits of man's reach, where our longlines rob the Southern Ocean—the sea's last great wilderness—of its last hidden treasure.

A Patagonian toothfish—the size of a german shepherd dog—rests, ripe with eggs, on the fine mud of the deep sea's floor. She lies in a groove carved into the seabed by deep ocean currents. If you could see her, you would wonder why her vanishing species attracts such high prices in the best restaurants of New York and Tokyo; why we fishermen have risked our lives in leaking pirate fleets, traversing the planet's wildest seas, to arrive here at the ends of the earth in pursuit of such an unlikely prize.

She is ugly. Her gross underbite and black lips, pierced with hooks from earlier failed fishing attempts, hide teeth that feast on inky squid. Eyes perch atop a flattish head, gazing upwards, for the entire world is above you when you inhabit the base of the ocean. But it is what lies beneath her dark grey leather that is so determinedly sought: her thick, white, firm flesh that, no matter how it is cooked, is always moist, always sweet.

The toothfish ascends now, chasing the scent of squid.
There is more food than usual today. An endless procession of baited hooks drops from above.

Through her skin, she senses an unfamiliar, distant thrum—our engine working overhead—but she is more interested in the vibrations she has detected at a closer range. An ambush predator, she darts forward at five metres per second before fastening her jaws around her prey. The frozen squid catches in her throat. She rams ahead only to be drawn back. She shoots forward again but the hook has taken. She fights, but without effect.

Along the mainline there are countless shorter lines, each with a hook five centimetres long; fifteen thousand hooks in total. The large female—the largest fish in the school; at thirty-five years of age a grandmother many times over—is in good company. Thousands more toothfish hang like macabre jewels from a thread of necklace. They are hauled up and onto the deck as the line is wound in. Hooks are cut. Fish are skidded along wet metal and down to the factory deck for immediate processing. The large female is brought up and out of the water. She glimpses dark faces and bad weather.

We are not supposed to be here.

Carlos Sánchez Rocha looks up from the radar and out to sea, first through binoculars and then with naked eyes. It always makes him nervous, the calm before the storm. Petrels are feeding on the surface, diving and harpooning slender fish with infinite precision. White clouds are reflected on the sides of waves. From the weather faxes, the Uruguayan fishing master knows that in a few hours all of this will change.

He calls out to his crew in Spanish over the ship's intercom. ‘Now! Bring the line in now. There's another front coming. We could lose the lot.' His deep voice crackles in the air above the deck, large and certain, like a god sending messages on the wind to his men.

His first mate raises an arm in acknowledgment, and the crew begins the long task of winching the fish in. With any luck, the approaching storm will keep patrol vessels away. Carlos watches as the fish are dragged aboard through a gap in the midship rails. He has risked too much to lose this catch to bad weather.

Taped to the wheelhouse wall, on top of peeling paint that has lost its grip after too many voyages to sea, are two photographs. His wife and his daughter. He takes the pictures
off the wall and a shiver passes through his body, as if he has touched the Antarctic continent itself. He sometimes feels that he loves his family too much. They make him vulnerable. More so than any storm the Southern Ocean can throw at him. He reminds himself that he is fishing for them. For their future.

In the first photograph, Julia is looking directly at the camera. Carlos finds himself smiling back at the woman he fell in love with when they were just teenagers, almost a decade ago. He wishes he could contact her, but knows he must be patient. The satellite call could be traced.

He studies the picture. Julia is wearing her favourite dress – white cotton with a red floral print. The fine straps have fallen from her shoulders and her smooth brown hair, bleached gold from the summer sun, shimmers in the half-light of a wooden building, perhaps a boatshed. He didn't ask his wife who took the photograph but whoever it was must have known her well. She has that particular warm glint in her eyes that she reserves for only a few. Carlos remembers finding the picture tucked away under a sea of unpaid bills, the day before this fishing trip. It was with a letter Julia was sending to her parents, but he managed to convince her that he needed the photograph more. ‘They'll be seeing you sooner than I will. It's only fair,' he said as he stroked her hair and kissed her mouth, missing her before he even left port. He fed the picture between the heavy pages of his logbook, not giving her the chance to argue.

Carlos looks at the other photograph. It was taken at their daughter's fifth birthday, just a couple of months ago. María has her mother's wide smile and dark, almond eyes. He and Julia are on either side of their daughter, kissing her face and being pushed apart by her smile. His forearm is protectively across his wife's swollen belly. They're a handsome trio, soon to become four.

He pulls his woollen beanie further down over his forehead, just as Julia did when she kissed him and said goodbye at Montevideo Harbour five weeks ago. She had stayed up late the night before, knitting the hat after seeing the old one stiff and frail from salt.

‘Te quiero,
Carlos Sánchez,' she said before he boarded the
Pescador,
her lips brushing warmly against his freshly shaven face. Carlos remembers the gentle weight of her hands then running across the bulk of his chest and down his arms made strong from a life of fishing.

‘I love you too,' he replied, gripping her fingers and then finally letting go.

‘Be careful,' she called out as he walked up the gangway. ‘We want you back.'

Carlos touches the photograph through well-worn gloves before looking back out to the frozen deck and his crew. The ocean would make even the largest of men feel small, he thinks. His father and grandfather braved the sea in boats a fraction of this size. But it was different then. They fished
close to the coast with nets, catching just enough to supply the local markets. This is the Southern Ocean, the wildest mass of water on the planet.

He scratches his jaw, itchy from a new beard caked with salt. Beneath the stubble, his skin is dark from years of exposure to the sun. His lips are full, but cracked from the weather, and his thick, black hair is pulled into a short, rugged ponytail, which protrudes from under the hand-knitted beanie and sits over the hood of his polar fleece. A small silver stud pierces his earlobe, just visible below the woollen hat.

Carlos returns his attention to the radar and scans for patrol boats. In these rich waters off the subantarctic islands – all of them owned by other nations—there's always a risk they'll be caught. He calculates the
Pescador
is one hundred and fifty nautical miles from Heard Island, squarely within Australian territorial waters. Fishing here in broad daylight is brazen, but he knows it will shorten the trip by a couple of weeks. The alternative was to try to locate the toothfish clustered around Southern Ocean seamounts—those submerged deep-sea volcanoes whose surrounding waters are rich in upwelled nutrients—or, despite Uruguay being a signatory to the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, to head south into the perils of the ice. How much easier if they could still catch toothfish along the continental slopes off Patagonia, where the species was commercially discovered only in recent decades, but those
grounds offer a fraction of their original bounty. If they can just get this last line in without being spotted, they can leave the Southern Ocean in their wake and begin the four-week journey home via Mauritius, where they will unload the catch.

He thinks of the
Sevilla,
another in
Señor
Migiliaro's lucrative fleet of ten, and of the decision her master took to head south to the pack ice. In his last radio call, the master had boasted of massive catches. Carlos had overheard the call, boldly broadcast to the
Sevilla
's sister ship but audible to all boats in the area. Then there was silence. Perhaps the
Sevilla
had been overloaded, or had hit a rogue wave, or struck an iceberg. Whatever the reason, Carlos knows there will be no search beyond the sister-ship's futile efforts. The authorities won't even be alerted. Not even the families of the thirty-five men on board will be told that their husbands and sons won't be coming home. Migiliaro will keep that news quiet until the last of his fleet has unloaded—until his catch is safely on its way to market and out of his hands. He'll show surprise when the
Sevilla
fails to dock, and issue a statement of sympathy to the families of the missing.

The Spanish owner has plenty more rusting hulks—most of them registered in countries other than his own—to throw at the Southern Ocean. The Uruguayan-flagged
Pescador,
too, is dispensable. Ifhe's caught fishing here illegally, Carlos knows he'll be on his own. Migiliaro will have covered his tracks. His mobile phone will be disconnected, his company address a
dead-end. He will ensure that his middlemen, the ones whose names and companies appear on most of the paperwork, will take the fall for him. They will be compensated for their silence. Paid to say Migiliaro had nothing to do with any of this. Like his lost vessel, it will seem that the real owner has simply fallen off the face of the earth. Carlos looks through the wheelhouse window and out to sea. It's time to go home.

He watches as his first mate, Eduardo Rodríguez Torres (a large ‘E' painted in black on the back of his orange sea jacket), leaves the deck and climbs the external stairs to the wheelhouse, five metres above where the crew is bringing in the ten-kilometre length of line. Carlos reads his watch. It's noon. By the time the last fish is brought on deck, it will be dark and the storm will be upon them. He urges the boat forward with just enough force to retrieve the line without breaking it.

‘We're a few days short of two hundred tonnes,' Eduardo announces, pulling open the wheelhouse door. ‘We should stay longer; fill her up completely. No patrol boat's going to be risking their balls this far south with a storm coming.'

‘What does that say about us?' Carlos says, laughing. He knows that Eduardo's bravado—his eagerness to pillage these waters—is purely a means to an end. Once they own their own boat, the rules will change.

Carlos senses the subtle changes in the weather, viscerally reading signs that those unaccustomed to the sea would miss.
It is as if the seawater and looming atmosphere are communing with the water and air of his own body. The birds, too, have felt the shift and are starting to leave the building seas for the shelter of the island. Carlos raises his binoculars and scans the ocean for the dark line of water that will signal the edge of the front. It can't be far away.

‘Come on, where's your spirit of adventure?' Eduardo persists, slapping Carlos on the back.

‘You'll never change will you,
mi amigo?'
A smile folds dry salt deeper into the folds at the corners of Carlos's eyes. Eduardo has always been the one to take the greatest risks, he thinks. As a boy in La Paloma, Carlos remembers him climbing a fence to steal a bike, which he then hid under old nets in his father's boatshed. Eduardo boasted that he rode the bike on the beach at night, flaunting his crime under the sleeping nose of the bike's wealthy owner, who lived on the waterfront. Carlos, always the moderating influence, recalls now how he took it upon himself to secretly return the prize, rescuing his oldest friend from himself.

‘Why not get it while we can? We're on a hot spot here,' Eduardo urges. ‘And the fish are bigger than the ones Migiliaro's other boats are catching around Crozet and Kerguélen. Just one more day and we won't have to try our luck further south.'

‘We've done well enough,' Carlos says, watching his men reel in the excellent catch. He turns his face towards
Antarctica, losing his smile in the distance. He thinks again of the
Sevilla
and the frozen corpses separated from their families forever. ‘Migiliaro has already lost one boat. He'd rather we come home with the fish we have on board than have the lot seized because we stayed too long and got caught.'

‘To hell with him. If we catch another day's worth here and don't record it, we can sell that too without that bastard ever knowing. We'll be that much closer to getting our own boat and quota. No more illegal shit.' Eduardo pauses at the sight of Carlos's fixed expression.

‘Twenty unrecorded tonnes is enough. I'm not risking more. If we're inspected in Mauritius, how long do you think it'll take them to figure out that what's in the log doesn't match what we've got on board?'

‘They'd turn a blind eye for a small fee.' Eduardo rubs his fingers together to indicate the bribe.

‘Let's just get home.' Carlos shifts his focus back to the photograph of Julia.

Eduardo's eyes, too, linger on the picture.

‘You'll thank me when you're back with Virginia, a Pilsen in one hand and a steak I've cooked for you over the
parilla
in the other,' Carlos says, returning Eduardo's earlier slap on the back. It lands heavily on the first mate's shoulder. They've been friends for too long to argue.

Eduardo surrenders a long sigh.

‘You know I always value your opinion,' Carlos says, the good-humoured gleam returning to his sideways glance.

‘You're just getting old and conservative, but our wives will thank you for heading home now.' Eduardo counts to three, using his fingers, feigning stupidity. ‘Carlos, Julia, Virginia…It looks like I'm outnumbered.' He winks and leaves to join the crew.

Carlos again checks the radar and sees another boat enter the field. ‘
¡Vete al infierno
!' He moves the
Pescador
slowly along the longline while he tracks the course of the new arrival. Perhaps it's just the fishing boat they saw earlier. He watches as toothfish pile, one after the other, onto deck. They are, without a doubt, the largest specimens they've caught so far—plucked from the pit of a world he can barely imagine. ‘Freeze the biggest one whole!' Carlos tells the crew over the loudspeaker. ‘The owner wants a trophy for his palace wall.' He pictures Eduardo rolling his eyes in response. One of the crew sends the largest toothfish down a chute to the factory deck. Carlos sees him, hands cupped around his mouth, relay the order to the men below.

A black-browed albatross is landed next. Having fallen prey to the baited hooks, the bird has drowned beneath the waves. Eduardo slams his hand against the rail and Carlos knows, from the accompanying flick of the first mate's head, that he is swearing. ‘
¡Maldito!
' he'd be saying. According to the first mate, it is the male albatross that goes to sea to fish
while the female waits at home on the nest. They have one partner for life, Eduardo told him, and Carlos imagines this bird's sole companion waiting now in vain for his return.

Carlos hates to catch seabirds too, but it's a price they pay for longlining hurriedly in daylight like this. He has heard the Australian boats are banned from using longlines here and instead use deep-sea trawls, avoiding the curse of killing an albatross. He watches Eduardo remove the hook expertly and throw the drowned bird to the hungry sea. If the
Pescador
was theirs, they'd do it all differently.

Carlos studies the radar. The other vessel has maintained its course and is headed straight for them. His guts reel. ‘Cut the line,' he barks over the loudspeaker. ‘We have company.'

He sees Eduardo look up and locate the vessel on the horizon to the north. The first mate shakes his head but follows the instruction, leaning over the rails as the dark shadows of fish on the surface are dragged down by the weight of those below. A wasted catch; a sunken treasure – the five-tonne load spiralling towards the abyss, the fish starving and dying on the discarded hooks. Carlos regards the radar and the approaching vessel. What choice did he have? Another two lines had been set five nautical miles to the east, anchored to the seabed and marked with a GPS buoy. They'd been lucky to retrieve both of those before being spotted. Eduardo will forgive him in time.