Salt Story (11 page)

We picked up the nets from another inlet at dawn and then I ran with my son Stormboy along the wild deep beach on the other side of the bar. His long hair flipped about over the school uniform he was still wearing from the day before. Lacy teal dumpers crashed into the sandbar. We ran until we came to the beach shack, where we could watch the drifting whales from the veranda.

When the day came a putrid wind blew, and the culprit was the rotting carcass of a leviathan long dead, rolling about in the surf. We thought it was a sperm whale. Further along the beach, another car-sized lump of flesh and bone lay. Further still, its cleansed skull.

Last night we drove with Salt through the banksia scrub and found our way to the quieter side of the sandbar amongst the paperbarks, rolled out some swags in the soft sand. We rowed out into the centre of the inlet and set some net.

I stood on the thwart of the tiny rowboat to punt over crunchy coral shallows. Incessant swell, the startled night call of a wood duck and water rippling against the sides of the boat were the things I heard. I was the tallest point in the whole inlet. Above me the stars blazed and a quarter moon glowed the water into shining steel.

I'm not big on ideas of reincarnation. Perhaps it's because my life can be dramatic enough without invoking Boadicea or an Egyptian priestess. But last night out on the water setting the nets, for a moment that only lasted a moment, I knew who
I was, long ago. I was a kid, a brown boy with salt encrusted hair, dirty shorts or sarong and no shirt. I worked the rivers or the inlets, poling through the shallows in a little wooden boat or raft. And that was it. That's who I was once.

We rowed back to the beginning of the net, where it was secured by a stake pushed into the sand. Salt held the cork line out of the water.

‘Hold this.'

I took the cork line. I could feel the fish hitting it – a sharp tug like when they take a hook. Then a lighter flurry as they struggle against the mesh. So I knew there would be a few.

Even when the sun or stars blaze, there is a moody stillness to this place. The country appears to offer up her secrets, the sea breaks the bar to flush the inlet, four-wheel drive tracks tether the country and yet somehow, she doesn't give much away. Lightning storms hang on the horizon for days, illuminating the strange cliffs and ghostly paperbarks, the silver and olive hues of the water ringed with emerald samphire swamps. It is often windy and still at once. There are secret corners where silence is shadowed by the roaring swell, the swell that throws up lumbering, dead monsters.

‘Get up. You gotta see this,' Salt told me the next morning. ‘There's something in the water.'

I sat up, swag and all. ‘Is it five yet?'

‘Close enough.' He was standing by the shore of the inlet.

The light flared from my mobile phone. ‘It's fucking four twenty-seven!' I flopped back down into the sand and grumpily tried to justify half an hour's more sleep against some natural phenomenon.

I sat up again.

Salt stood on the edges of the water and strange blue lights shot out of his toes. Hot blue bullets rocketed away from his legs.

‘Fire in the water.'

Every step as we pushed out the boat created a fiery turbulence. Every stroke of the oars made a sparkling rush in the inky brine and the dripping airborne oars traced wild arcs of colour beside the boat. Shrimp became tracer bullets.

Standing in the starlit dark with the moon gone and a white glow on the eastern horizon, the place made me feel like I'd crossed beyond an earthly threshold, with those surreal water lights and discovering my other life as a river boy. The wind had ceased its harrying but still the swell thumped outside the bar. Fish torpedoed away from our boat leaving comet tails of phosphorescence in their wake. Salt rowed and rowed, straight past the stake holding fast the net and out into the centre of the inlet and none of us dreaming folk even noticed.

‘There won't be many fish,' he said of the nets. ‘Fire in the water will light it up like Disneyland.'

Every mesh was illuminated, diamond lines of fishing net swooping down into an undersea glittery fantasia. We caught some yes, a few fat skippy and some mullet. The sky began to lighten and then all the fire faeries ran away ... and after we picked the phosphorescent nets from out of the inlet, I ran with Stormboy along a deep, wild beach and when we got to the whale's skull, I told him about the brown boy.

‘Go in a bit.'

I am on the tiller, trying to creep the boat along the northern edge of the weed bank in Oyster Harbour; slow enough so Salt doesn't get tangled up in net, fast enough so the afternoon wind won't blow us onto the bank where we will get bogged. Salt likes to set his nets right along the edge, where the fish swim off during the withdrawing tide.

On the move across open water out to the banks, Salt stands amidships, looking ahead. He captains the tinny to me at the tiller with little left and right flicks of his fingers, whirling them to mean ‘slow down' or ‘throttle it'. When our positions are reversed I've tried these hand movements just to piss him off but somehow I never seem to do it right.

When Salt is playing out net, his hands are busy. He has to
mutter
directions, until I yell, ‘What?' This system works fine at sea but on the banks ... well, we argue a lot. I find the whole setting-nets-on-the-banks thing rather stressful. Salt has to get the net positioned just right, so he catches lots of fish and maintains the legend. I don't want to get stuck. There are kids at home, dinner to cook and fading light.

Fishermen of the inlets and bays regard the water as ‘grounds', much the same way a grazier observes their pasture. There is ‘good bottom', ‘weedy bottom' or ‘sandy bottom'. Then there are the banks. A practised eye can see a weed or sandbank beneath the water by watching the ripples of wind on the surface.

‘Out a bit.'

‘Keep her to starboard at the north end of the bank.'

‘Okay, she's on the bank. Out a bit.'

‘Just follow it round to the Kalgan Stake.'

Oyster Harbour, like many south coast inlets, is delineated by a series of markers, improvised by commercial fishermen to show the edges of the banks. It takes no Nostradamus to predict that when planing along nicely and you pass a wooden stake in the water, then in a few seconds the bow will plough into a submerged sandbar and the whole boatload of people and gear will get thrown to forehead. At Irwin's Inlet the stakes are slender lengths of tea-tree bleached by salt and wind with white plastic reflectors or Emu Bitter cans nailed to them. Oyster Harbour has the Kalgan Stake, the Stick and the Periscope – a length of plumber's poly pipe with an elbow at the top.

‘Follow it round to the Kalgan Stake but stay out of the weed. Don't wanna get any more o' that shit in the motor,' says Salt.

‘Where's the Kalgan Stake?'

‘Ahead.'

‘That's a rock.'

‘No, it's the Stakeh' he says.

‘It's a rock. It's that aggregate you told me about, where the bream breed. If I go that way, I'll get bogged.'

‘So, your eyes are better than mine. So, it's a rock. Where's the Stake? Stop. Stop. Stop!' He has a tangle of nets in his fist and more about his ankles.

‘I can't! The wind is blowing me onto the bank.' And I'll get bogged.

I must be a bit of a pain in the arse, I think. I'm like a whingeing kid out here on the banks. But being bogged in a following wind really sucks.

Finally Salt throws out the last buoy. I breathe a sigh and turn away from the dreaded bank.

‘Okay, we'll set the other net on the bank around from the Periscope.' He looks out over the bank. ‘You can get across that one I reckon.'

I shake my head, appalled. The last time he told me this, I fell for it and got bogged right in the middle. It's not nice roaring into the centre of a weed bank on a dropping tide and seeing the tips of seagrass appear above the skin of the water, like the eyes of a thousand crocodiles. I love the water but pushing a seventeen-foot boat, laden with nets, through cobbler-infested seagrass in the half-light is not my idea of a good time.

The smell of cooking dinners floats across the water. I pray for a dropping wind and head for the channel as the sun goes down.

After the eighty-odd kilometres through cow flats and karris I pulled into the parking spot at Irwin Inlet where fishers launch their boats and I groaned a little – not at the black swans or the glass-off silver waters but the expanse of weed poking through the inlet's skin all the way out to the island. Hard work getting a boat in and out of that.

I drove on to the shack at Foul Bay. The fisherman who owns the salmon lease there lets other commercial fishers stay there while working Irwin's. Bullet had already moved in his swag. He is a tidy soul. He picks up plastic rubbish wherever he goes. His esky sat on the sink. I peeked inside at his fare: a bag of lettuce, the carcass of a half-eaten cooked chook, some cheese and some cans of ginger beer, all swilling in melting ice. On the shack's veranda he'd piled some firewood for the Metters, his rubbish collection, an axe and his catching net.

Salt had left his caravan by the water tank. His outside light was on. When he arrived from town we took the boat out to the inlet, pushed her over the muddy flats that reached nearly to the island, then dropped the motor and fired her up. As we began planing I saw the other fishermen emerge from the rivers and the inlet mouth, they came from all their hidden places.

Commercial fishing in the estuaries of West Australia is beset by all sorts of laws, one of which is that the fishers shall only set nets one and a half hours before sunset. They also must
have all of their gear out of the water by two hours after dawn (Perth time). These laws are supposed to reduce friction between commercials and amateurs and regulate the amount of fish taken.

At about three thirty in the afternoon the inlet was buzzing with small tinnies loaded down with nets. I could see Bullet's red jacket on the east side and Nails' neon green bending over the gunwales of his little blue ply boat near Possum Point. We set nets on the whiting banks and then motored down the causeway marked with the trunks of old tea-tree.

The causeways are important. Nobody sets nets across them, or if they do and someone runs into them and chops them up, they have to cop it sweet. They are the only safe passage in an inlet otherwise crisscrossed with net in the early evening.

On the way back to the parking spot, Nails beckoned Salt over. He explained, as the wind blew up, the boats clanking together, exactly where his nets were. They'd been to a Fisheries meeting a few hours before in town, so they debriefed about that. Then they talked about the crabs.

‘Where's Jordie? I thought he'd be here this arvo,' I said.

Nails looked at Salt. ‘Jordie's having some time off. Till his hands heal.'

Bullet came back to the shack half an hour after us. We lit the fire and cooked some dinner. He and Salt went over the meeting. He's a political animal, just like Salt. They'd both walked out fuming so there was a bit of ground to cover. Then they talked about the crabs.

‘They're a fucking plague, mate,' said Bullet. ‘I've never seen anything like it. I was unmeshin' crabs all day on Tuesday.'

At dawn, Salt and I waded, using sticks to guide the fish boxes over the water, to where we'd anchored the boat out near the island. Bullet took the Foul Bay way, along the beach
to the inlet mouth and launched his boat into the white sands of the kelpy two waters.

We caught some lovely sea mullet and skippy in the first net. Most of them had their tails or guts chewed out by crabs but that is where a good filleting knife comes in. We were feeling pretty clever about avoiding those dastardly crabs.

On the second net, bigger mesh, deeper water, Salt and I realised we were in trouble. We had another fifteen minutes to get a few hundred metres of net out of the water and they were inundated with crabs. Each one takes an age to get out of the monofilament. So we decided to pick the whole lot up and unmesh them back at the shack. We hauled the net over the gunwale and it clanked, a heavy chain, of crustaceans.

And cobbler! Cobbler came up angry and poisonous with all their tri-spikes out to get us, their eel tails flickering against the nylon. Their treatment is never romantic – a fleshy thud of a waddy (or the ‘priest': administrator of a cobbler's last rites) against the aluminium thwart. There is no other way to get them out of the nets.

It just got worse and worse. The only saving grace for us was that all the crabs were oversized. Undersized and they would have to have been unmeshed out on the water.

By then the pelicans had given up their scabbing and wandered off. We had to get the boat, overburdened with wet net, crabs, cobbler and boxes of mullet and bream, back over the shallow sandbank to the car park, so we could load the whole lot and take it back to camp. We got out and pushed. At one stage, Salt fell over into what he calls a ‘swan hole', where the swans dig for worms. He filled up his waders but got to his feet pretty quickly when he thought about those crabs. ‘Like fleas on a dog they are. Don't fall overboard, cos they'll
get ya!
'

We spent five hours getting the crabs and cobbler out of the net, as the swell at Foul Bay got bigger and bigger. Cobbler venom worked its way into every fish spine and crab bite in my hands, making me ache and swear and bitch.
Both Salt and I worried about Bullet stuck up at the bar by the swell. Once an hour I took a break to make us a cup of coffee. Individually we went down to the beach to look along the stormy shores for his car. Neither of us had eaten anything and it was two o'clock.

Finally Bullet turned up. He'd left his boat at the bar and chanced the four-wheel drive along the beach where the lowering tide was still smashing into the sand dune.

‘Thought my job was done for the day,' he said, jumping into the boat to grab some net and help us with the crabs. ‘Obviously not! Hey, at least these guys are a good size. Last week, Nails said all the ones he was catchin' were smaller than his dick.'

‘...!' (That was me.)

‘Yeah fuck those crabs. They're bloody everywhere. They're plaguin'. Told yer, didn't I. Gotta do it yerself to find out, I know. But didn't I tell yer?'

I decided to have a week off, till my hands healed.