Salt Story (12 page)

The kids at the boat ramp at Princess Royal Harbour eyed off the little rowboat tenders, upturned on the grass by the yacht club. I reckon ten minutes without anyone watching and those boys would have been rowing off into the nasty sou'-westerly, drunk on Red Bull and freedom, blown over to Possession Point without a hope of dinner.

They were fishing at the little service jetty. A sleepy Pacific gull cruised around them and a pelican lurked nearby. Salt was already there when I pulled into the car park. He had the tinny and trailer waiting on the ramp. The boys thought he was great – a real old salt – someone who could take a bit of lip and give some back.

‘You won't catch any fish here,' said Salt. ‘Too shallow.'

‘We just caught a skippy.'

‘What ya using for bait then?'

One of the boys, the skinny black jeans, black shirt, older than the other, plumper kids, toed something lying on the concrete. ‘Mullet.'

Salt stepped a little closer. The mullet was little more than a head with some meat attached. The head was huge. The whole fish would have been the size of a salmon. I knew where that mullet came from just by looking at it. So did Salt.

‘Where'd you get that mullet?'

‘Me mate's freezer.'

‘Oh. Yeah ... ah, where'd he get it?'

‘The mullet? He's got a shitload in his freezer.'

‘Where'd he get 'em?'

‘It's his dad's freezer.'

‘Mmm?'

‘I think his uncle got them.'

‘His uncle. Who's his uncle?'

‘Dunno. His uncle just went out and got them.'

‘Yeah,
but where'd he get them?
'

The kid was looking at the fish head now. Then he looked at me and at Salt and then back to me.

‘Salt really likes Mullet,' I said.

On Salt's advice, one of the boys stuffed the mullet head into an empty corn chips bag so the pelican wouldn't grab it. He was right, the pelicans
were
edging closer every time the kids moved away. They wrapped up the fish head and looked to Salt for approval. He nodded.

They helped us untie the ropes and push out the boat.

‘That was a bloody Pallinup mullet,' Salt growled as we chugged away. ‘Skippy bait, for crying out loud.'

We returned four hours later. The boys had jumped the gates into the marina (or charmed their way in) and were fishing in the deep, out by the port light, as the sun went down. One figure waved and I saw the silver glint of the chip bag in his hand.

Tonight we worked under the lamp in our special flathead spot. I've been fishing with Salt for five years now and the seasonal swarm of flathead into the harbour still amazes me. A month ago we picked up a few flathead in Oyster Harbour.

Salt said, ‘They got roe in 'em?'

‘Yep.'

‘They're early. Everything's early this year. Let's get out there before the seal finds us.'

He was speaking of the seal who, once he understands where we are setting, will treat our nets like the seafood section of the supermarket. All he wants is the flathead livers but he destroys all flesh in his mission. We can't set in the same spot again for months.

The flathead were early like the plum tree flowers and the black king skinks emerging from their winter dens. I could smell pink jasmine flowers, travelling to me like sure mail across the water.

Tonight, on a rough sea, we gathered a lovely box of flathead and travelled home through the channel, where the incoming tide hit the westerly wind wave of the inlet, past the steaming heaps of woodchips, the chugging train, the trucks, the Chinese freighter, the crew on deck in overalls and hard hats, smoking cigarettes under orange lights, under the seven-metre sign: SAFETY + FIRST.

The wind dropped. The seal hadn't found us. I could smell
the clear cedar of the woodchips. The sea glassed over and, all across the harbour, navigation lights raced in bright streaks towards us, drowning out the sound of the two-stroke.

‘I think I've got whiting fever,' said Salt after pulling some small brown specimens from Oyster Harbour. Someone said there were King George whiting at Casey's Beach, and they are always bigger and whiter out there, cleaner fish from the deep clear waters, not like the inlet fish.

We set nets in the channel between Michaelmas Island and the bleached sands of the opposite shore. Then we sat around, watching the sun go down, drinking coffee from the plastic thermos.

A tinny thudded towards us. ‘What's his number?' Salt asked.

‘Can't see. Oh, it's Jolly Roger and his son.'

Jolly pulled in alongside us. ‘Where'd you set?'

Salt showed him a squiggle of fingers, which all fisherfolk except me seem to understand, and Jolly took off to set his nets somewhere else, the boy a lean figurehead on the bow. He returned twenty minutes later and eased into our gunwale, killed the motor and cracked a stubby.

‘You won't be having a coffee then,' I said.

‘Nah mate, that stuff'll kill ya.'

Jolly wore waders and a filthy old jumper. Salt wore waders and a filthy old jumper. Jolly must be forty years younger than Salt but both of them possess a kind of corpulent anarchism that is out of date in any land-based society and yet is strangely graceful at sea.

His son grabbed the beam of both boats to stop them clashing. He was about nine and keen as a kelpie. Whilst Salt
and Jolly swapped anecdotes and expletives regarding the dubious parentage of the new marine safety officer, Jolly's boy and I chatted.

‘You don't get seasick then?'

He shook his head. ‘Nah. Never!'

He told me about the pre-dawn mornings when his dad heads out to the whiting grounds. The boy sleeps in the bow. He pointed to his nest of life jackets and hessian sacks. ‘Nice and warm. Anyway, it's boring when Dad's setting nets. He wakes me up when it's time to pick up. That's good.'

He swept the seaweed off the deck, while the net was out, to the approving nod of his father and then looked around for another job.

Jolly's sixteen-foot aluminium boat is standard issue for most south-west inshore fishers. Thanks to the new marine safety officer's crackdown on commercial vessels, the foredeck was festooned with fire-extinguishers, EPIRBs and sodden flares, along with more essential items such as a gaff, catching net, squid jigs, torch, jump starter, red bucket, spare bricks for net anchors, buoys, rotten pilchards, Danforth anchor, fluorescent lights, trolling lures, spare rowlock, pliers, spark plug puller and a sixpack of beer.

His boat was tidy enough, despite all this. The working deck, an area of one or two squares, is where the nets are played out, hauled in and fish unmeshed. A lot of these boats have a waist-high rail around the sides, to save us from going over in a swell – a rail I've been very grateful for three or four times now.

Eventually it was dark enough for us to pick up the nets. The air was thick and greasy, with no wind, and the sea heaved up a big, gentle swell. We pulled nets out of the deep, black water in the channel between the mainland and the island, looking over occasionally to see Jolly Roger and his son doing the same under the blue glow of the fluorescent light.

We hurled crab pots into clear patches skirted with weed. Early the next morning we flew across the harbour on a strange high tide to pick them up.

Crabs love eating trumpeters and this is a good thing, seeing the trumpeters are a spiny, orchestral nuisance in the nets. So we returned to land with a box full of blue mannas bouncing in the bow. At the boat ramp, Salt told me with a nasty grin that he was going to try driving the boat onto the trailer, rather than winching it up, ‘Just because I never done it before.'

‘Can't we just winch it? It's too windy.'

But he handed me the keys and I climbed out of the boat and stepped
very
carefully across the slimy jetty timbers, heading for the car park.

I reversed the trailer down the boat ramp and stood in position at the winch. Salt churned towards the trailer and I could see the wind blowing the bow over too far. My job here was like being the flunky when bleeding brakes or helping husband reverse a caravan into a ditch. I was going to get yelled at. Or I was going to yell. Or, I was going to just walk away and make a nice cup of tea. Given the lack of a kettle, the first two scenarios were most likely.

Salt roared in, missed the rollers by an inch or so and drove the boat nearly up to the winch in his enthusiasm. I waded in, pushed the Westerberg off and we went again.

I was knee-deep and sounding by this stage. Suddenly I realised there were two handsome men standing behind me.

‘Do you need some help?'

I looked to the uniform. Grey vest over grey shirt over grey
trousers. Both men had haircuts like US marines but their faces were more like outdoorsy cops. Department of Fisheries. Oh.

Salt aimed at the trailer again. It's a
thing
you know, a
guy thing.
Why can't we give up and winch her on? Well, not any more because some other blokes are watching.

‘How's it going, Salt?' one of the officers yelled.

It threw him off. I pushed the boat off the wheel guards and we tried again.

Salt drove her on nice and straight the third time, making us both look good as I clanked the ratchet and clinched her to the trailer. I drove up the ramp, the Fisheries officers walking alongside the boat, Salt standing amidships, looking ahead.

In the car park I watched the wonders of Fisheries and fishermen at work.

‘What are you catching today, Salt? Crabs, hey.' Brad started poking through the box, looking for undersized ones. (Ever tried to ‘poke through' a box of live crabs?)

‘Yeah, well. It's pretty heavy. You wanna lift it into the ute for me?'

‘Sure, mate.' He struggled to get the box under the rail and nodded at his colleague to help him. ‘I hear you've been out at Irwin Inlet.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘Grievous. He's been sending snapper and cobbler up to Perth. What did you get out there?'

‘Ohh, I dunno. We got ... what'd we get Sarah? A box?'

I nodded, five times.

‘Who else was out there when you were there, Salt?'

‘Nails. Saw him once ... hey, where did Grievous get that snapper?'

‘Wilson's. The bar opened three days ago.'

‘Have you heard what they're gettin' down at Pallinup?' Salt asked.

‘Oh, it's all quietened down a bit now.'

‘Yeah, heard about the mullet dropping off. Musta been poached. Hung any poachers lately?'

Officers and commercials in the same car park together have a small amount of protocol to perform before they get down to the real business of the day, the gossip. But it doesn't always flow both ways. I think Salt left with more information that day, and saved his back too.

I watched the weathervane spin on its bamboo stake in the wind. I watched it turn to the north and then change its mind, again and again.

Salt rang. ‘Whaddaya reckon?'

‘It's a bit strange.'

‘Blowing its guts out on this side of town. The BOM says it'll turn sou'-west and then things may get interesting. Tell yer what. I'll ring in another hour.'

Shark rang. ‘Can't come over to fix your computer/download stuff/drink copious cups of tea. Dylan's here and we're going down to the White Star for a drink. Do you want to come down?'

‘Mmm. Can I get back to you on that one?'

‘We won't be there long. Just a quick drink.'

Dylan. Pub. Just a quick drink. Those three elements only work together when there is a bouncer involved. Salt rang back, uncanny in his ability to sniff out that I might be considering other options.

‘Ah, bugger it,' he said. ‘Let's go.'

We set some net out near Mistaken Island. Salt played the mesh out over the stern and I drove the dinghy. The early evening gleamed sulphurous yellow. The sou'-westerly began to freshen. Huge swells rolled in from the east, still coming in from the big blow a few days before. It felt all wrong. We were both jittery: me because I didn't know what the weather was about to do – and Salt, because he did.

‘We shouldn't be out here, by rights.'

‘Yeah, thanks Salt. That's great.' I motored up another mountain that kept getting pushed taller by the wind hitting the swell. I noticed that no other boats were in the Sound. Even Grievous had stayed home.

‘How's about we untie this net halfway and chuck a buoy on it?'

‘Good idea.' That meant about seven hundred metres less of net to deal with when the storm hit.

‘And then we'll start picking up the first net, as soon as we're done here.'

‘Good-oh.'

A shark meandered past the bow, its charcoal-lined fin slicing through the chop, sluicing a little eddy in its wake. We finished the net and motored in circles out by Johnno's mussel lease, avoiding the ropes that held the buoys together, watching the horizon.

A mussel buoy bobbed, hairy with algae and weed. Most of the buoys were oblong-shaped but this one was round and bobbing just above the water, its hairy skull revealed and then cloaked beneath the next wave.

‘Looks like my old man's head,' said Salt.

My mind was off with the horizon, with the brewing storm, and with Dylan and Shark at the pub. I nearly missed what Salt said. But something in the sound of his voice called me back.

‘What did you say?'

‘That buoy looks like my old man's head. When I found him.'

Salt was sharking at Cape Riche when he got the call that his father was missing. They'd found his boat washed up on the banks at Floodgates, nets stowed neat, the red dog waiting alone on deck, alone.

Salt found his body, after three days of searching with his brothers and police divers, in the river that flows from the
Torbay Inlet to the sea. The fisherman of incredible strength, that one-armed poacher of legend, had come fatally unstuck.

Salt Senior rowed a wooden boat by way of bolting the oars together. He built a shack on Muttonbird Island. He used to pull salmon nets in with one arm and one leg. He had so many fishing camps up and down the coast that he buried food stashes at each one.

There are generations of drowners in this town and stories of ancestors mistaken for seals and shot dead, men who lived on islands and the women who grew up their babies and fished alongside their husbands. No wonder people of Salt's ilk struggle to make sense of the rules these days. He used to chuck a match into the scrub when the wind was right, to rid the dry autumn bush of ticks and keep the kangaroos happy with fresh new shoots. His family camped for weeks round the smouldering stump of a long-dead yate tree by Wilson Inlet, netting bream, fat, oily mullet and those big grunters, the mulloway. If they needed to drive a truck on the beach to save their backs from hauling tons of salmon over the sand dunes, they built themselves a road with mattocks and axes.

Salt Senior's was a mysterious end, shared and seen by no one. Yet this end is experienced in the ropey, briny dreams of fishermen everywhere: the treacle swim, the crystalline sound of undersea bubbles and the waves talking to the tinny above.

‘The best way to go,' said Salt.

The sound of his voice that day out on the water, with my whole being wanting to be somewhere else, put things back into perspective for me. I stopped my yearning for the relative sanity of Dylan and Shark and red wine near the fireplace at the pub and ceased worrying about what would or wouldn't happen with the weather. It's like getting tattooed, I reasoned to myself. There's no point going through it twice.

So we picked up the nets early and happened across a nice school of rainbow leatherjackets. The storm gathered momentum as we charged into the wind across the Sound, the
boat laden with fish and nets. I was soaked to my flesh by the bow wave hurled up in my face by the nasty sou'-westerly but also soaked with a sense of occasion and comfortable with my own mortality. The channel lights beckoned us safely home.