Salt Story (4 page)

‘The best place to be,' said Salt. ‘No slinking around the paperbarks tonight. Right here, where everyone can see us.'

The last time we visited, we had the place to ourselves. Now, the moment we crunched on to the little beach, people were everywhere and especially interested in us, it seemed. I hoped Salt knew his stuff.

I chucked the swags out of the boat and they bounced on the coarse yellow sand. A late afternoon sun considered the horizon. Salt backed the trailer into the inlet. I rolled up my jeans, exposing lurid tattoos, and stepped into the water to bounce the little boat off her trailer. I could feel the air that the gathering mob sucked in. We held our breath too, hoping the silver paint would not scrape off the boat to expose the licence numbers to militant anglers.

There was a pair of Irish newlyweds. She had hair like nasturtiums in the setting sun, red dress against silver water and she posed for her photographer husband. An old couple from Queensland cleaned black bream near where my swag lay and threw the guts to pelicans. And here also, came he: civic policeman, citizen sheriff. His rotund, red-faced stance said it all: mouse wife, lapdog mate; a man otherwise rendered impotent by his own retirement. He stopped to check the Queenslanders' bucket and then made his way to us, his friend following him.

‘You after mullet, mate? You'll need some net, y'know. Got some net?'

‘I dunno. I thought we'd go lookin' for a coupla bream.' Salt was all innocent tourist. He didn't want anyone to see those nets stashed under tarps in the boat.

‘There's plenty around.'

‘Are they nice to eat?' I asked.

‘Oh, we catch and release normally,' Civic Cop shrugged. ‘But they're all right. If you like fish.'

Salt was extraordinary. He just smiled and nodded. I remembered his rants about both self-appointed sheriffs
and
catch-and-release advocates. (‘Just torture a fish for an hour like a cat with a mouse and then let it go without eatin' it. You'd get arrested if you tried that with a cow or a sheep. Blimmin' cruel. Eat it, or leave it alone, I reckon.')

‘I hope you're not going to smoke onboard, girly.' Civic Cop nodded towards Salt, as I rolled a durry. ‘What would the boss have to say about you smoking around all those petrol fumes?'

‘He's just not that fussed,
mate.
'

We all watched two men in a tinny picking up nets close to shore. They threw out undersized bream. Pelicans tumoured around the boat.

‘You using net?'

Salt played deaf, not a hard ask. ‘Don't forget the bait!' he shouted at me and threw a tangled mess of gummed up fishing rods into the boat. I climbed into the dinghy to tidy things. The two fishers finished stowing their nets and motored into the beach. Civic Cop's focus on us began to waver. He strode over to seagull the two fishers' catch, his mate following behind. He called back to me, ‘Now don't go over the bag limit, will ya.'

I don't know how much more of this story I can tell, before I would have to kill you. It was a sweaty night. An apprenticeship with Salt can be precarious at best. Salt's take on the night's work, as we drove out of the paperbarks at three in the morning with no headlights, was, ‘Well thank fuck for that. Every flap of a bream's tail was too much racket. Get me some plonk next time, deckie. That was no job for a sober man.'

Salt dropped me onto a quiet beach heaped with bleached ribbon weed at the west end of Two Peoples Bay. Those soft dry beds of weed looked so inviting, the perfect place to kip – but I knew that Tiger Snake Swamp lay matted below the strands of tea-tree just metres away, and oblivion among those critters, even on this warm eve, was not a thought to entertain for long.

It is here that the granite gently slopes down into the water. The bay whalers of old knew it was a perfect place to winch up the huge carcasses of the humpbacks and flense them of their blubber by peeling it away like mango skin.

Now there is no blood. When it's dark and the moon has died, stars streak silver on the skin of the sea and I've heard the breathing and singing of whales all around me. Once I tracked them through the water by their ghostly wake of phosphorescence.

This night, Venus shone red with the vanquished sun. Gleaming silver sickles of King George whiting came up in the nets in clumps of three or four, ten dollar notes, to become subjects of queue-inducing hysteria down at the Sunday markets.

The onshore wind pushing us into the surf, the wet jeans that stiffen into stovepipes, bare toes on a cold steel deck – all of those things are worth a catch like this.

A giant stingray followed us along the net, his bat sails undulating against the green of water over a white, sandy bottom. Squid flew away like wraiths as we hauled up the net and shot sooty plumes of ink, hovering just out of the
fluorescent light to watch us pull up a whiting with a perfect crescent chomped out of its head. Squid must love that rush of blood. An oily little shark, its tail and dorsal fin slicing, meandered by, hunting.

We sat for an unusually long time in the boat after we'd finished with the fish and the nets, faces parallel with the stars and the nippled mountain looming against a dark sky to the east. When we finally landed, Salt trudged up the beach to get the car. I stood in the shallows and waited for the shock of red tail-lights in the night, for the rumbling of the four-wheel drive reversing across hard sand and into the water. I played the little boat against her ragged rope.

A chill wind blew off the sea. Salt and I pulled the garfish seine net onto the little rowboat. The wind crept through my woollies and the sand in the nets blew into my eyes. I finished loading with my sunglasses on in the half-dark. Then I lost the bung. Then Salt lost the padlock key to the towbar – in the same patch of grass as the invisible bung.

I was thinking: everything's going bad. Oh well. There's been shit shots before and there will again. The last bad one, the net found a submerged rock and couldn't stay away from it.

We went inside the shack and made a cup of tea, waited for the night to come on.

Around the corner from Foul Bay at Peaceful Bay, the wind died. It felt almost warm. Salt backed the trailer down to the water. We launched the boat and pushed her out. He rowed off into the night, with me standing on shore holding the end of the seine net.

A beautiful night, glassed off with green harbour markers flashing and bobbing in the water. I lost sight of Salt and then saw him again as he pulled the boat into shore about two hundred metres along the beach and stumbled overboard. By the time he'd anchored the dinghy, I'd nearly walked my end of the net to where the truck was parked. Every so often, I'd shine the torch across the water to find the white buoy marking the centre purse of the net.

‘Start pullin' that lead line in!'

‘Keep pullin' that lead line in!'

‘Get that lead line in. Get that pocket happening!'

Running up and down the shoreline to grab more floats and pulling the seine net in from the sea brought up a sweat. Salt just ambled along until he was near the truck too and then we both pulled the thrashing pocket of fish into the lacy water's edge.

A huge stingray floundered, all elegance lost against the net and the sand. He was swiftly flipped out and he slid into the sea. I kept a weather eye out for the eel tails of cobbler. Blowies began rolling about in the ebb like spiky footballs. I could smell the garfish. Whiting, gardies, herring, all shining and writhing in the torchlight.

A beautiful night.

Two more lessons for the apprenticeship – bad seine shots always happen to fisherfolk when they are down to their last fifty cents but tend to be a good thing when other fisherfolk are watching. To illustrate the first lesson, Bullet was at Irwin's the same week that all his fishing licences, land rates and vehicle registration bills came in. While Salt and I hauled in boxes of yellowfin and King George whiting, he set the same size nets across much the same grounds and got bugger all. Fishing can be fickle and charmless like that.

With seining, we see the fish swim into the bay: the dark stain of tons of salmon, or the fins of sea mullet splashing and writhing on the water's skin, or the smelly glitter of gardies in torchlight. Whenever there are other fishers around, there is a sudden rush of gnarly men to get the boat loaded with net and down to the water. You'd never believe men like that could run so fast. They push the little dinghy into the sea, the rower spools the net behind them and rows in a big arc, back to the beach. Then they pull both ends of the net in.

The last bad shot was at the salmon camp. The sun was setting and the wind farm made asterisks over the cliffs across the bay. A ute full of blokes got bogged on the beach below the camp. Actually they weren't bogged but suspended by the car's engine block on a large piece of granite. They were all drinking and I doubt they saw the rock in the half-light.

For some reason Salt and I were cranky with each other, or just plain cranky. Anyway we weren't talking much as we
loaded the gardie net onto the dinghy. Loading a seine net is an art. Later it's got to play out nice and smooth, straight off the stern of the boat. The pocket in the middle has to be folded just right, so it opens out on its own.

The men in the ute were supposed to be shipping out on the sharker anchored by the island but had forgotten to buy ice. All the factories had shut for the day but the bottle shops hadn't and so I think they settled down to drinking instead. I know their skipper Philthy. He's got a PhD in bugs or something. He quotes Jorge Luis Borges' ‘The Library of Babel' at me when he's drunk. Philthy is a fidgety bantam with a brain like a computer but one day he saw the light and realised he didn't want to be a scientist. He wanted to be a fisherman.

One of his deckies looked like he'd come straight from the darkened back rooms of Darwin's Vic Hotel. Tattooed legs, stubbies, a flannel shirt and a fragile nature, he was a man pushed out of polite society and therefore welcomed by Philthy's operation. No social worker but a man with a philanthropic heart, Philthy has been known to throw those hankering sorts overboard but only when the boat makes it to swimming distance of an island.

I had gone to school with the second deckie. He was blond, a long-haired roughie back then. He hasn't changed a bit. His father was a fisherman too.

The third deckie was from Carnarvon. His diamond-shaped head prickled with a buzz cut the whole way around. He must have been in his twenties but he had the hard face of a man who'd spent a lot of time in the desert. He shot dingoes for a living but while the floods covered the North-West he was on sabbatical, until the earth dried up again.

When it was dark enough Salt drove the boat down to the beach. I walked and the deckies followed in a ragtag, shambling mob. Salt was pissed off. He hates other fishermen watching him work.

I pushed out the boat, with Salt at the oars. There is a rock about fifty metres from shore and I always have to walk the net
over this rock so we don't get snagged up. This night a weird swell washed in. Salt rowed out, with me holding the end of the seine net. The waves kept pulling the net back onto the rock.

Darwin started up a strange dance on the foaming edges of the water. He capered through the swell, holding up his chequered shirt, the waves splashing the tattoos on his legs.

‘He's lookin' for pipis,' the dogger told me. ‘With his toes. He's been going on about the bloody cockles for days now. It's all he wanted to do when he got down south.'

The wind came up and competed with Philthy's rendition of hexagonal vortexes of infinite libraries. I felt the net grab at the rock again and managed to unhook it, briefly. Then Salt was shouting at me from up the beach. He'd already anchored the boat in the sand and was working his way along the end of the net.

‘I'm snagged!' I yelled back.

Salt stumped along the beach, grabbed the rope off me, tugged it. He started into the water. He swam out to the rock in his clothes and ripped the net away. Then he stamped back to the boat and his end of the net.

We hauled.

Three herring.

We all looked at those three fish flapping on the torchlit sand.

Then Philthy and his deckies rocked their four-wheel drive off the offending stone with a nasty crunching sound and took off down the beach looking for salmon, spraying bright plumes of burning cigarette butts and beer cans in their wake.

Salt and I looked at each other. We were both soaked and encrusted with fine white beach sand.

‘Just as well they didn't see us catch any fish,' he muttered at me. ‘Those bastards would tell
everyone.
'