His Dad

I watched the resident weathervane today, the satiny red flag that spins on its bamboo stake with the wind. I watched it turn towards the north and then change its mind again and again.
Old Salt rang. "Whaddaya reckon?"
"It's a bit weird. What's it going to do?"
"It's blowing its guts out this side of town. The Met. say it'll turn to the sou'west soon and then it might get interesting. I 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 because Dylan's here and we're going to the Hurl for a drink. Do you want to come up?"
"Mmm. Can I get back to you on that one?"
"We won't be there for long. Just a quick drink."
Dylan. Pub. Just a quick drink. These three elements only work together when there is a bouncer involved.
Old Salt rang, uncanny in his ability to sniff out the fact I may be considering other options. "Ahh bugger it," he says. "Let's go."

So we were out on the water, setting nets near the island. The sky gleamed a strange kind of sulphurous yellow, even though the sun was not yet beyond the hills. The south westerly began to freshen. Huge swell rolled in from the east.
It felt wrong. We were both jittery, me because I didn't know what the weather was going to do and Old Salt - because he did.


"We shouldn't really be out here, by rights," he said.
"Yeah thanks, that's great." I motored up another mountain that was getting pushed up even taller by the wind. I noticed then, that no other fishing boats were in the Sound.
He quite often picks up on what I'm thinking. "How abouts we take this net off halfway? And chuck the buoy on it?"
"Good idea." It meant about seven hundred metres less to deal with.
"And we'll start picking up that first net, as soon as we're done here."
"Yes please."

A shark meandered past the bow, its charcoal-lined silver fin slicing though the chop, its tail sluicing a little eddy in its wake. A better excuse to pick up early is to avoid causing the death of those sharks that must swim to stay alive, to keep the water moving through their gills. It's not the scary weather. We have to save the sharks. Good.

We motored in circles out by the mussel lease, avoiding the random ropes beneath the surface. One eye on the horizon, watching those clouds. A mussel buoy bobbed, hairy with algae and weed. It bobbed just above the water, its hairy skull revealed and then cloaked beneath the next swell. Round and black, with short brown hair waving in the sea.

"Looks like my old man's head." Old Salt looked at me.
I was so ... off on the horizon and thinking about writing and stories and the sea and the pub and fretting about the brewing storm, that I nearly missed that look. But not quite. Something made me switch back to his words.
"What did you say?"
"That buoy. Looks like my old man's head. When I found him."

Old Salt was fishing east, at Cape Riche when he got the call that his father was missing. His boat was found washed up on the banks at Floodgates, the red dog waiting on deck, nets stowed neat. Just no father.
Old Salt found his body in the river, after searching with his brothers and police divers for three days. The man of incredible strength, the one-armed poacher of legend, had come fatally unstuck.
Old Salt Senior rowed a wooden boat one armed, 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 foot. He had so many camps up and down the coast that he used to bury his food for 'Ron.

" 'Lest we get stuck one day,” Old Bill exclaimed loudly to my father. Unexpected visitors to these camps were treated to a piece of month-old bread which Old Bill deftly sliced with an axe, using one foot to steady the loaf.
“Yellow,” Old Bill branded his men when they refused to take the boat out in heavy seas.
“Pig-headed,” our father called him when they pulled the old man out from beneath an upturned dinghy, halfdrowned and entangled in a mass of nets and ropes."
This quote is taken from Valma Parker's memoir, Voyage of the Fisher Urchins.

It is a mysterious end, shared by none when drowning alone, yet it is experienced intimately in the ropey, briny dreams of all fishermen. The treacle swim, the sound of crystalline bubbles and the tinny talking against the waves.
"The best way to go," said Old Salt.

No wonder people like Old Salt struggle to make sense of the rules these days. He used to chuck a match into the bush on occasions when the wind was right, to rid the dry autumn scrub of ticks and keep the kangaroos happy with fresh new shoots, just like the Nyungars did. His family camped for weeks around the smouldering stump of a long dead Karri by Wilson Inlet, netting bream, fat oily mullet and those big grunters, the mulloway. If they needed to drive a truck into the beach, to save their backs from hauling tons of salmon up the sand hills, they'd just build a road - with mattocks and axes. They built a shack on Muttonbird! How cool is that!

There's a history there of drowners, of ancestors being mistaken for seals and shot, (or so the story goes ...) and even stranger events you can observe at sea. I get sucked into all of that stuff. It's so rich and ripe.

But that look of his, out in the Sound, with my whole being all scared and grumpy, brought things back into perspective for me. I stopped my yearnings for the relative sanity of wine, friends and a spot out of the wind at the pub, and ceased to worry needlessly about what will or won't happen with the weather. It's like being tattooed. There is no point going through it all twice.

So we picked up early and happened across a nice school of rainbowy leather jackets and some K.Gs. Then, as the storm gathered momentum, we charged across the bay, into the wind, laden with fish and nets, a sense of our own mortality, a sense of occasion, and soaked to our very flesh by the bow wave hurled up in our faces by that nasty sou'westerly.