Salt Story (15 page)

Nails has a fearsome reputation. Everything about him is carved hard and grave and he's attractive in a flinty sort of way. Faces like his stared from eighteenth century daguerreotype images.

I had been working with Salt for one inlet season when I met Nails and saw that he was one of those blokes who'll not acknowledge a woman in a boat. I don't think I've ever even seen Nails look sideways at me aboard, let alone say hello. There's some kind of code there I don't understand. But once he'd pulled his boxes of fish from the deck and trudged through the silty shallows in his waders, dropped the boxes on the back of his ute, he would come through the paperbarks to say gidday.

He didn't stoop to that, the first time I saw him, hunkered down at a card table outside the maritime festival. He was collecting signatures to counter the latest campaign against the inlet fishermen. He was pissed off anyway and didn't want my cup of tea, wasn't interested in answering questions about the petition. Like granite, he sat there all day and didn't even get a drink of water.

As he stepped from the paperbarks this day, I saw the thermos in his hand. ‘So you
do
drink tea then?'

He shook his head, took two fingers from the open mouth of the flask. They were all white and swollen and flaky.

‘Cobbler. Oh. That must have hurt.'

Fishermen hold with the theory that keeping a cobbler-stung finger in hot water will ease the pain.

‘Didn't feel it go in,' he laughed. ‘Didn't feel it come out either.'

In the afternoon it was time to set the nets again. Severe weather warnings were spraying from the radio. Salt and I decided to pack up the camp and go back to Albany, rather than have nets full of weed dragging us around the inlet in the morning. We passed Nails at the rubbish tip and he pulled over.

‘Going home,' Salt said.

‘Yeah, Unruly took off too,' he said. ‘Jordie fucked off to Perth. No one's fishing tonight. Guess I'm the only crazy bastard around here.' He drove off with a wave.

‘He'll be happy anyway, gettin' the place to himself,' said Salt.

He went down the road a bit further, then stopped.

‘Bugger it. If he can fish, I can.'

Nails' truck was wedged into the paperbarks by the shore, laden with two big iceboxes, his elastic-sided boots stashed neatly under the tray, out of the rain. Out on the inlet I could see the low sun whitening his wake and the fluorescent green of his raincoat, just past the little island.

We launched the boat and I started the motor. Then I had to start it again.

‘Did you turn that thing off?'

‘No. It just stopped.'

It sputtered out again. I started it one more time and we ran for a few hundred metres before she stopped for good.

‘Give me a go.' Salt stumbled over the nets. He yanked and cursed for five minutes and then looked straight up into the squall. Squalls only ever hit us when the motor fails, we are setting net, or the bung is lost. I've never known it to be any other way.

The wind blew us towards the island. Salt threw me an oar and we both tried to punt against the wind to the car
park. His words, shouted into the mad blow, went something like this:

‘Push away from starboard, push the bow around. Keep 'er straight. Don't touch the gunwales with the oar, you're pushing the bow around too much. C'mon, you can do it. You know what you are doing. Push the fucking bow around. Don't lose that oar. It'll get stuck in the mud and you'll lose the bastard. Stop pushing the bow around...'

By this time, Salt had run out of breath and the oars made no difference.

‘Why don't we just blow over to the island and then row back when this storm is over?'

‘Because we'll be there all bloody night! Oh,
just let me do it.
' He punted harder against the wind and I threw down my oar because we were hurtling towards the island anyway. Being harangued like that makes me mutinously useless.

We blew to the island, the boat side-on to the wind like a sail.

‘There's some rocks ahead. Do you want to lift the motor?'

‘I don't give a flying fuck about that fucking piece of shit.'

The prop bunted over the submerged rocks. The boat edged into the reeds and stopped. I thought, I've always wanted to visit this island and we've always been too busy and now look, here I am.

I stepped out of the boat and into the reedy skirts of the island. Salt didn't see me because he was hunched over the innards of the outboard. I scrambled past a tea-tree thicket and found myself in a flat, stone clearing, thick with orange and khaki lichen, surrounded in soft white paperbarks and tea-trees. Around the stone lay swathes of brilliant green moss, glistening with rain and studded with tiny red flowers.

I wanted to stay there forever.

The horizon brightened with sunlight and the wind and the rain ceased their harrying. I went back to the boat.

Salt was replacing the lid to the outboard, cursing.

‘I'll row back.' I fitted the oars to the rowlock.

‘Yeah, we'll give it a miss today.'

Nails rounded the island in his big flat-bottomed punt.

‘I'll row,' said Salt and got to the thwart before I could sit down. ‘Haven't rowed for ages. Like rowing.'

So he rowed and I stood at the stern feeling useless again. Nails motored closer and I waved him over, hoping for a tow.

‘What the hell are yer doin'?' Salt sure was grumpy that day. ‘Never call another fisherman over! Fuck!' He rowed harder.

Nails was just ahead. I smiled but he didn't look at me. He asked Salt what was wrong with the motor. I scrambled up to the bow and pulled the rope out from under the boxes and anchors and fuel tank. I threw him the rope. Then I remembered the big U-bolt on the end. ‘Watch out. There's a weight on it.' To his credit, he ducked.

Back on shore the two fishermen spent half an hour talking about busted outboards and cobbler and yelloweye mullet. Nails glanced at my hair hanging all kelpy and dripping. ‘Probly should let you fellas go and get dry.'

I drove. Salt got out his mobile phone. ‘Dusty. I wanna talk to you about that outboard you sold me for a pup ... yeah ... The prop's not going around enough to get us underway. You know what I mean? I tried turning the bastard by hand but it just doesn't go round fast enough. Gotta crank handle you can sell me?'

We set some whiting net along the cockle banks. Salt threw over the last buoy and checked his bearings so we could find the net in the early morning.

‘That sand spit is under the hill that looks like a tit.' He turned around and surveyed the flat landscape ringing the inlet on the northern side. ‘And bugger all that way.'

He grabbed the rope. I gunned the motor, heading for the car park. The problem was that Salt had fumbled and not grabbed the rope at all. The forward momentum of the boat sent him into an amazing spear manoeuvre, a kind of horizontal pole vault, his body straight as a ladder, over the thwart, over the deck and he landed on his head on a pile of chains at my feet. There he stayed, his eyes wide open and the colour of curdled milk.

I fumbled about for the kill switch. Then I changed my mind. What if he was badly injured and the cranky outboard wouldn't start again? So I yanked the gear into neutral instead. If he didn't come to, there was no way I was getting him out of the boat. He must weigh thirteen, fourteen stone. We were sixty kilometres from the nearest town. I'd have to winch him and the boat onto the trailer and drive miles and miles to a nursing post with him bouncing around on the deck.

It took a long minute for him to regain consciousness and another ten before he was able to get to his feet and pat himself down. He thought he may have broken a rib. The rest of the Irwin's trip was peppered with Panadol and pain for Salt. He had to sleep on the floor of the shack like the rest of us – getting in and out of the swag must have hurt.

A week later we were dropping pots in Oyster Harbour, with the mistaken idea there may have been crabs there.

‘I reckon you gave me a good kicking when I was knocked out,' said Salt, feeling his ribs. ‘It's still bloody sore.'

I didn't say anything but scanned the seagrass for a pot we'd lost, and smiled.

‘I take it from your silence that I'm right.'

Of course he wasn't but, ‘It does sound appealing sometimes.'

Accidents can happen in the most banal of circumstances. Just a fumble with a rope, dropping a spanner, fiddling with a car radio ... Salt on his lonesome in a boat can be dangerous. After he dropped me off on Breaksea Island, he was knocked out when he fell over. He woke to the big Quintrex slewing around in the swell. I think he's glad I'm around, mostly. The day I was there to put his nose back together and call an ambulance could have turned out rather different.

I can make mistakes though, and Salt falling over in boats is often my fault. I missed the starboard channel marker once, tipping Salt into the life jackets and anchors in the bow as I ploughed straight into the sandbank. One night Salt was sitting on the pile of nets as we returned home from the Sound. He slid sideways when I broached the boat on a channel wave and he fell against the gunwale with one arm trailing in the water. I kept going, thinking he would right himself, wondering why he stayed there. He told me later that his raincoat was collecting water and turning him into a sea anchor.

Sometimes, late at night, the only other fishers around in the Sound are Grievous, and Gawain checking his leatherjacket pots. Catching leatheries is not his day job though. Gawain is also the director of a local seafood company. I see Gawain and Kilpatrick at the Sunday markets every week but the source of the creamy, salty oysters that they sell has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

The first time I saw the oyster farm from a distance I thought it was a conglomerate of old wire fences that a farmer had built into the sea to stop cows from crossing paddocks along the beach. I had no idea it was an oyster farm. Then, one morning picking up nets on the east side of the harbour, I saw the barge out there and the figures of men in bright orange rain coats moving about the ‘fences'.

I asked Gawain if I could go out on the barge with them and he rang me at six o'clock one morning. ‘We're leaving in twenty minutes, Sarah. Are you coming out?'

I drove down to the Emu Point shipyards where ancient wooden boats lined up with newer steel jobs, past the seafood restaurant, the chandler's shop and the slipway manager's sheds. Gawain had the tractor hooked up to the barge. Men donned wetsuits, getting ready for the trip.

‘Sarah, have you met Diesel?' Gawain introduced me to the crew: Diesel, a bluff, hulking, fisherman sort; Turk, tattooed with sunnies and a long beard; Jason, whippet-lean in his sealskin, beanie and sunnies. The two German backpackers in bright orange sou'-westers, Chris and John, nodded hello. Kilpatrick was staying to shuck oysters in the shed.

‘Where's yer boots?' Diesel said to one of the Germans. ‘You got any gumboots mate?' He looked at me and rolled his eyes. ‘Wellingtons? Galoshes? Ahh. Whatever. You right then, everyone? Ready. Let's go.'

Once the boat was launched, Gawain jumped in and Diesel dropped the propeller and started her up. We backed into the shallow waters around the service jetty. ‘Tide's still going down,' muttered Diesel. ‘Better get a move on.' Despite the early hour, a wind blew in from the east. Two men stood in the water on the sandbar with fishing rods. We motored towards Green Island.

Diesel and Turk lit up tailor-mades in the shelter of the cabin and then put on their white cotton gloves. Diesel looked like he had always been a fisherman. He has been working the oysters for ten years now but before that he was a diesel mechanic. I looked at his boots. He wore diving boots with white gumboot tops elastic-banded around them, like gaiters.

‘What are they all about?' I asked him.

‘I invented them myself,' he said. ‘You see, all the stingray wounds I've ever heard of go in at the ankle or the top of the foot, or the sides. Never the bottom. So this is my protection. Don't know if the theory's right but I've never been barbed yet.'

‘We get those little purple stingrays,' Gawain explained to me. ‘Those buggers with the pink undersides. They're the worst ones.'

‘Cobbler?'

The men shuddered in unison. ‘We don't talk about cobbler.'

The oyster racks are lined up in hundreds of rows in the still, shallow waters of the eastern side. There is something very beautiful about their barnacled repetitions. Held together with sticks the size of tomato stakes, black rubber bands and rope, the racks reminded me of bamboo pathways through some kind of Asian water village. Their rickety regularity and the olive-hued beauty of tidal Oyster Harbour make the structures a kind of art.

The barge was loaded with trays of oysters that had already
been graded for size and were being returned to the racks. Diesel steered the barge into a channel just wide enough and killed the motor.

‘Watch out for blue-rings,' warned Gawain.

I'd forgotten all about the blue-ringed octopus. When we were kids swimming at Emu Point, much mention was made not to fiddle with underwater containers or grottos where the deadly critters lived.

‘Do you get many here?'

‘Yeah, we get a few. Years ago, we were getting ten, twenty a day in the cages. Bloody awful. Then that hundred-year flood came through. Remember that? All the fresh water coming out of the rivers got rid of them. But they're coming back now.'

Diesel, Turk, Chris and Gawain jumped overboard into knee-deep water. Chris held the barge in position against the wind. Jason stayed on the deck with John and started throwing out the trays to them. The three waders clipped the cages full of oysters onto the racks.

‘Hey, Gawain, did I tell yer about my blue-ring dream?'

I wouldn't recognise Jason in his civvies. His wetsuit, beanie and sunglasses made him a deckie creature. ‘The night after I got that one on me leg, I dreamt there was one on me arm and I kept trying to shake it off, flaring up its bastard rings all blue at me. Shit. What a dream.'

‘Sounds like a nightmare,' Gawain sighed over a broken tray clip and said, ‘lacky band, please.'

‘Oh, nah,' Jason said, handing him an elastic. ‘Nah, just a dream.'

‘I've never seen one before, and I've lived here all my life,' I said.

Turk handed me a stake with a blue-ringed octopus clinging to it. ‘Here's one I prepared earlier.' The tiny, slimy creature with electric blue marks jumped off the stick and slid into the sea around the legs of the men.

‘Lacky band, please.'

The deckies threw the trays and lacky bands to the waders
until the deck was clear except for remnants of broken cages, barnacles and algae. Turk kept straightening up in the water and rubbing the small of his spine. I could see he suffered the same back as Salt.

Once the trays were done, the oystermen turned to harvesting. Diesel started up the motor again and moved the barge into another row further to the west, where the burnt out hill loomed brindle against silver water. He dropped into the water and counted the oysters in a random tray. ‘Forty-five.'

Some swift mathematics flew around between the crew.

‘Forty-five per unit?'

‘Four dozen.'

‘Fifty dozen times four dozen is...' Jason was onto it.

‘Nah, fifty times forty-five!'

It was all too fast for me. Within minutes the crew worked out how many units they needed to load for the Perth markets.

Black bream swam around Turk's feet, feeding on the nutrients that his movements were stirring up, amongst the ferny brown weed and seagrass.

‘They're a good size too,' Turk said. ‘Should get that line out!'

‘Turk, you got a fisherwoman on board! Don't tell her where the bream are.'

‘Do you chuck a line in ever?' I asked, trying not to eye those fat bream any more than was respectable.

‘Nah,' Turk said, grinning at his boss. ‘We're here to work, mate, not go fishing.'

After about forty minutes of throwing racks of oysters up to the men on board, who stacked them neatly against the cabin, the day's quota was fulfilled. By then the wind and the sun had opened up the clouds. The men climbed into the boat and Diesel started up the motor again.

‘What species are they, these oysters?'

‘Sydney rock oysters. They don't spawn in these cold waters, so they don't get away. We're not allowed to use Pacific oysters here because they might get away. But South Australia
uses them, so I dunno. These ones we are bringing in now, they're bistro oysters, a bit smaller. They'll get graded and sent off today.'

‘These are from Carnarvon aren't they?' Diesel asked Gawain.

‘Sydney rock oysters from Carnarvon?'

‘Yeah, I think they got bred up there.'

‘How many did you pick up today?'

‘Two thousand dozen.'

Diesel found his shucking knife. ‘Grab one of those things.'

I picked out a nice fat oyster. He prised it open while Turk held the steering wheel for him, flicked the top shell overboard and turned the oyster flesh over in its base. Then he handed it to me.

There is nothing quite like a fresh oyster, with the liquor still liquoring and all that salty sweet creaminess going on.

Back at the boat yards, Gawain backed the tractor down to the ramp and Diesel drove the boat straight onto the jinker. The others piled out and headed for the hose, past the neatly swept piles of barnacle shells below the sorting racks, to rinse off their gear before their nine o'clock coffee break.

Oystermen.