It was still dark when the pounding started on my door. I didn’t know where I was and it took me a minute to work out how to turn on the light and open the front door.
“Get a shirt on. It’s time for work,” Skipper told me, as he turned away to head down his jetty.
I grabbed the nearest shirt and stepped into my rubber thongs. I put the shirt on as I followed him down the jetty.
My first morning fishing was an unmitigated disaster.
I looked for buoys in the water when Skipper told me to, but I couldn’t see in the pitch dark. He always ended up spotting them. Then I had to hook the rope up to the winch, which pulled the craypot (a big, slotted box around a metre to a side and maybe half that high) out of the water. When I opened the pot, all the lobsters fell out. I learned that if I didn’t have the tub in place just right, then they spilled out onto the deck, snapping like a pack of crocodiles.
I picked one up, looking for claws that just didn’t seem to be there, and felt something close over my toe with a snap. I looked down to find one of the bastards had clamped its tail on my toe. I dropped the one I was holding into the tub and tried to shake its mate off my foot. When Skipper finally pulled the bastard off me, he measured it up, said, “Nah, she’s too small,” and threw her over the side.
My toe was bleeding and it felt like it was broken. Bitch, I thought. Wish I’d brought my steel-capped boots.
“Get a band aid on that before you start attracting sharks. First aid kit’s in the cabin, with the life jackets,” Skipper ordered, throwing lobsters rapidly from the deck into the tub, never missing.
It took me ages to find the first aid kit. It was buried underneath the life jackets and a nest of ropes, in a cabin that looked like the shed of some kind of hoarder boatie.
My toe still hurt like hell as I limped back on deck. “What next?”
I want to go back to bed.
I saw stars as something hit me in the face. The stench hit me next.
“Get out the way or you’ll get a rotten cray in the face,” Skipper shouted.
I looked down at the rotting remains of a lobster on the deck. Bits of it were still on the shoulder of my shirt.
“Don’t just stand there. Bait the pot up and drop it back over the side.” Skipper sounded even more annoyed.
Still covered in rotten lobster, I grabbed some fish heads and stuffed them into the craypot.
I couldn’t bait a pot to save my life. I put too much in, I put them in the wrong place, I didn’t put enough in, or I forgot to bait the pots up at all before I dropped them over the side. Then I had to winch them up and try again.
Another of the lobster bitches clipped my finger with her tail. It wasn’t broken, but it still bled, so I was sent back into the cabin for the first aid kit. Every pot after that, my hand stung like hell from the salt water. The only good thing about it was that it kept me awake.
I got hit by another flying dead lobster, this time in the stomach. It was so far gone that it splattered. The stench was unbelievable. Maybe Skipper’ll smell me coming in the dark, so he won’t throw another one at me.
I wanted breakfast, I wanted to go back to bed and most of all, I wanted a shower. Fuck fishing. I want to go home.
I barely noticed the sun coming up, until I realised I could see Skipper’s face clearly in the daylight. He was steering the boat back to Rat Island, not saying a word to me.
I helped him tie up at the jetty and climbed off the boat dejectedly.
“Hey, Joe,” Skipper called after me.
I turned, not really interested in how bad a deckie he thought I was, but it was too ingrained in me not to be rude if I could avoid it.
“Not bad for a first day,” Skipper said. “We got a fair catch. You’re faster than the last bloke I had. Go grab some breakfast and I’ll see you again, same time tomorrow.”
I have to do this again? Fuck. Dean is not going to know a night of peace, he’ll be sleeping with spiders for the next MONTH.
I nodded vaguely in his direction and dragged myself down the jetty back to my veranda.
“Good morning. How was your first day fishing?” a friendly female voice called.
Sitting on her veranda, her hair a glowing gold in the watery early morning sunlight, was Vanessa. She sipped from a steaming cup in her hand, her knees bent up and to one side. In her shorts and singlet, she looked like she was posing for a photo shoot on beach house holidays. Fishing might be worth it if I get greeted by a sight like this at the end of every trip.
Shit, I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud. I struggled to find a way to make it sound like I wasn’t the most useless deckie ever.
“Did Skipper tell you that you’d be more useful as cray bait than as a deckie?” She looked like she was trying not to laugh.
I shook my head, annoyed, and found my voice. “No. We had a good catch today. He told me I wasn’t bad and I was better than the last bloke.”
“From him, that’s high praise, then. But you still had a run in with a few crays.” She laughed. “You’ve got rotten cray guts all over your shirt, I can smell it from here. Ugh, don’t get any closer until you’ve had a shower.”
I stumbled up the steps to my veranda, eager for a hot shower.
I shut the door behind me and staggered toward the tiny bathroom. I dropped my daks on the concrete of the bunkroom floor and grabbed a threadbare towel from the hook on the wall.
I hung the towel over the bathroom door and squeezed inside. I turned the water on in the shower and waited for it to heat up.
I heard voices outside, close enough to make out every word.
“So, how bad is your new deckie, Skipper?” Vanessa asked sympathetically.
The bathroom window must be right next to her veranda, I thought.
“He’s not as bad as the last bloke. He didn’t drop any of our catch over the side, he didn’t fall in and he didn’t fall asleep. He might end up being a good deckie, if he doesn’t do anything stupid so he ends up in hospital.”
The shower’s taking forever to warm up, I thought impatiently.
Vanessa sounded serious. “Did you give him the safety talk, like I told you?”
Vanessa’s the local safety rep? Shit, I better wear my steel-capped boots tomorrow, so she notices I work safe.
“Yeah, I did. I can’t afford to lose another deckie this season. I’m behind already.” Skipper sounded grumpy. His tone changed. “So what did you think of him?”
“Well, if he’s as quick to learn as you say, he might last out the season. He doesn’t seem as stupid as the last one. Maybe…” Vanessa tailed off, without finishing her sentence.
Skipper cleared his throat. “He still has a fair bit to learn, though. He’s good for target practice when he gets confused.”
Vanessa laughed. “Did you have to throw the rotten crays at him?”
I heard Skipper laugh. “The first one was an accident, he got in the way. The second one...well, he was already wearing one and he looked like he might fall asleep. I figured the smell might wake him up a bit.”
“You know, you’ll need to replace those gas bottles. He’ll need hot water to wash the smell off. A cold shower won’t cut it.” Vanessa had stopped laughing.
“Yeah, I got some coming over on the carrier boat tomorrow,” Skipper said. “A couple of days of cold showers won’t hurt him.”
No hot water? Shit! I stepped into the water. Oh, it’s fucking cold, too! Give me a river with crocs in it. At least those rivers were warm.