Yesterday an elfin seal visited while I was in the whalers' lookout, so I sang to her. I think she liked me. Seals and dolphins always enjoy a song, even a version of the Ship Song from mine own rusty chords ...
You are a little mystery
to me,
every time you come around ...
Today was a roaster, with north easterly winds blowing bees, flying ants and globs of foam from the inlet around the camp. Unruly and Grievous' Bro got out of their hollow where the wind was stalled and mosquitoes rampant, parked their utes up at the point, trying to get some air. Unruly did his bookwork on the lap top. Grievous' Bro put his seat back and slept and later he drove up the hill, sat in the gravel pit and cooled off in the muddy pool, returned all windswept and red.
I'm still fascinated with these guys. I've been fishing with them for five or six years now. Recently I saw Bullet swinging his boat trailer around the corner of Frenchman's Bay road. I thought, following him, that commercial fishermen drive their boats like dodgems, cruising through the gloaming in a loose, nasty, casual way that guys do when they do it every day. Their old dinghies clank along behind their dusty utes loaded with ice boxes and they swing their cars wide on the corners, letting the boats splay across the road.
Reccies do it all different. On the weekends, they carefully tow their boats around the corner and head for the boat ramp, the boats bristling with fishing rods. (Fisheries do it quiet and grey like sharks). The whole process from driveway to ramp is an orchestrated dawn operation. They've got a weekend plan. By the time Old Salt and I are back at the slip after dawn on Saturday morn, we are part of their voyager foibles and deep sea angler dreams. I can see it as the rising sun hits their faces.
Alpine folk do the same thing when driving in deep snow, overtaking lowland visitors on hairpin bends.
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