Night Fishing

by Vicki Hastrich

  Hallstrom was speaking from long experience regarding the shortened lives of many of the zoo’s marine animals. During the first few years of the shark pool’s operation, nearly all the sharks died within days, prompting the zoo to pay generous rewards to any shark fishermen whose offerings stayed alive past a week. There was no trouble finding replacements. On one weekend alone in 1929, five sharks were brought in by different people, towed in behind boats to the little beach near the zoo’s wharf. Several thousand onlookers gathered to watch the landing of the largest, a big tiger shark. A horde of men pitched in to subdue it, passing ropes around it as it thrashed in the shallows; finally they got it onto a truck for the short road trip to the pool.

  Survival rates gradually improved for grey nurse sharks, and two individuals managed to live for five and thirteen years respectively, but other species continued to die rapidly. Even taking the attitudes of a different era into account, the zoo’s relentless acquisition of sharks seems obtuse, so lacking in appreciation for the animal beyond its function as an attraction as to be a kind of philistinism. Only public complaints about cruelty in the 1950s stopped the zoo advertising payments for capture. Removal of hooks and rough handling during transportation must have caused mortal damage, but the unsuitability of conditions in the pool, though not spoken of, were also surely to blame. My childhood impression of its being quite shallow was correct. It was 7 feet deep.

  •

  Sleek and powerful, the grey nurse sharks mesmerised one particular visitor to the aquarium in 1936, and he stayed to watch them for hours. It was Zane Grey. He was an American, a novelist, one of the first millionaire authors the world had seen. He was also a big-game fisherman. Like the shark pool and the giant ray I saw in it, Zane Grey has become lodged in my psyche. His restless inquiry into the sea and the creatures in it pre-echoes my obsessions. He’s a fascinating figure. For starters, he popularised the Western, writing more than 70 of them, the majority of which were made into movies.

  Grey wrote quickly, in longhand, working hard to keep up production while away on the trips he was constantly taking. Weeks or, more often, months were spent apart from his family, hunting, fishing and camping—pursuits he’d enjoyed since boyhood—but several major journeys undertaken between 1908 and 1913, early in his career, became crucial to his writing. Led by expert guides, these were physically taxing and dangerous affairs that took Grey into the desert heart of America to spectacular canyon and mesa country. Some locations, like the Rainbow Bridge National Monument, had only been seen by a handful of white people. Traditionally, these places were respected as so powerful, so forbidding, they were only infrequently visited by the Navajo, or avoided altogether, their mystery and potency thus conserved.

  Grey was difficult material as a husband, and not just because of his absences. A loner who nevertheless kept an entourage, he was loyal but not faithful; he was demanding; he suffered bouts of anger and sudden dips in mood. In the outdoors, a need in him for both peace and action seemed to be answered, but whatever the requirements of his soul, on a practical level the wilderness landscapes he observed and the encounters he had in them were worked into his books, giving authenticity to his words. Grey understood the power of truly remote and little-known places, and he understood what it was like to be somewhere and not know what would happen next.

  •

  In 1918 Grey moved his family from Pennsylvania to California to be near the movie industry and closer to the Pacific Ocean for game fishing. When we think of writers and fishing we think of Hemingway, but he was still in his teens when Zane Grey took up the new sport. It was Grey who first promoted it, sharing his experiences in the countless articles he wrote for outdoor magazines. It was already a rich man’s pursuit, especially the way Grey did it, which was to mount and equip his expeditions as if he were an explorer. In fact, he was an explorer, pioneering techniques and finding new fish and fishing grounds. He corresponded widely with scientists, missionaries, market fishermen and sportsmen all around the world to gather information, following up on big fish stories and likely haunts. Grey fished the waters of Florida, Cuba, Mexico and the Galápagos, going to ever more distant places during the 1920s, including Tahiti and New Zealand.

  His fishing forays extended as his interest in travelling to the American West diminished. By the end of the decade he vowed he would never go back to Arizona again—it was ruined, he claimed, by the motor car. New roads had opened up the country and it was ‘overrun’ by tourists. He thought the Navajo doomed. The romance and solitude of the West were lost, he said, without taking into account his own contribution to its demise. It was he, after all, who first exposed the secrets of the place through his bestselling novels. But in any event, he did not need to go back. He had all he required. Those landscapes had become a place in, and of, his imagination, ever productive for him, and mutable, just as the larger myth of ‘the West’ was to be for generations of Americans—and others too: because it was, of course, an idea that went global.

  Grey owned many vessels in his time, and on a trip to New Zealand he commissioned another, the 50-foot Avalon, built to his own specifications. He was back home in California when reports came to him of swordfish caught in the relatively unexplored and unfished waters of Australia. A new frontier was on offer, and Grey could not resist. Orders went out for the Avalon to cross the Tasman.

  Grey arrived in Sydney by passenger liner, to a celebrity’s welcome. In his early sixties with thick, silver hair cut in a boyish style, he was vital and attractive. With his wealth, his Hollywood connections and his adventurous intentions, he was an exotic creature himself, and irresistible news. But the sights of the city did not hold him long and he soon headed south by road to meet the Avalon at the coastal town of Bermagui. In the seas around Montague Island, where the continental shelf comes closest to the Australian mainland, Grey expected action.

  Nothing was done by halves and a substantial beachside camp was established. Personnel included additional boatmen, some with specialist local knowledge, and a camera crew of three for whom a second boat was leased. They would shoot footage for a feature film Grey planned to make on the Great Barrier Reef, but their pictures would be important for another reason. Without pictures, who would believe a fisherman’s stories?

  For three months the two boats fished off the south coast, and big game was plentiful. Grey caught marlin and sharks, some so rarely hooked at that time that they were difficult to identify: one, a green thresher shark, was the first ever known to be captured. Grey’s most significant catch was a yellowfin tuna. Although vast schools of these fish appeared each year, they had never been properly identified. Grey alerted locals to a valuable fishery they hadn’t known to harvest.

  Content with his catch, Grey moved north, stopping off in Sydney briefly on the way to Queensland. In Sydney, the idea came to him that he’d like to be the first person to catch a marlin off the Heads. What an arresting photo it would make—in the foreground a leaping fish, and behind it the harbour entrance, the city and even the curve of the new Harbour Bridge.

  For two days he and his crew caught nothing. Some hours into the third morning they hooked a small bronze whaler and cut it up for bait, hoping to attract something much bigger. As Grey tells the story in his book An American Angler in Australia, the day was hot and the sea blue and a lazy mood settled over the boat. There were no bites. Lunch was served and the table cleared away. The crew dozed. Hours slipped by but Grey was content watching the water and the birds; he stayed in his fishing chair. Dreamy but attuned.

  By four o’clock in the afternoon and still with no bites, the crew were bored, ready to give up and go home. But Grey demurred, mildly reproaching them, reminding them of the time he fished for 83 days without a bite before catching a giant Tahitian striped marlin on the eighty-fourth. The boatmen, the camera boys, he was paying their wages. There was no question of any real dissent. He was the boss. But it was clear to Grey his crew thought staying on was a waste of ti
me. He said no more to convince them but settled in his chair. A feeling of sureness was growing in him. Something was out there. It was as if, in his state of languid alertness, he was calling it up. Patiently creating the right conditions for it to arrive.

  And then it happened. Slowly but firmly the line on Grey’s reel began to pull out. He told his head boatman it was like nothing he’d ever felt before, like someone with their fingers on his coat sleeve drawing him slowly towards them. In this inexorable way, 400 metres of line were taken in no time. Grey struck, then reeled in slack, fast and hard. When he came upon the full weight of the fish the response was so violent it lifted him clear of his chair.

  What sort of fish it was they couldn’t tell, but they knew it wasn’t a marlin. Its behaviour was changeable. For a while it went light, then it went heavy; heavy in the way of something more than ordinarily huge. Forced after one run to apply more drag on his reel than he’d ever done in his life, Grey thought it must be a shark, but maybe a species no one had ever seen.

  With the creature taking line and Grey struggling to get it back, the fight seesawed, becoming more and more operatic as the afternoon wore on, played out just as Grey originally envisaged, albeit with a different fish, in front of one of the world’s great backdrops. Sunset came, lighting the sandstone cliffs of the Heads and turning the sea to Egyptian gold-blue. And when the sky further darkened, three towering ocean liners, with lights glittering, passed within 100 metres of Grey’s boat on their way out of port.

  Just as the battle between man and fish reached a desperate stage, the revolving beam of the nearby lighthouse at Watsons Bay switched on, raking the Avalon’s deck and surrounding ocean.

  Grey, drawing on his last reserves of energy, got back more line, and when finally the leader of the line sprang into view, men leapt to action and adrenaline surged. Beside the boat the water boiled then split open to show the wide flat back of an enormous shark, pearl grey in colour, with dark tiger stripes and a huge rounded head. Grey, expecting a hideous beast, was shocked by its beauty.

  Amid churning water and roaring shouts the shark rolled, showing its white belly and opening its mouth wide enough to take a barrel, before snapping its jaws audibly shut.

  Grey had a rod-fishing world record. When measured, the tiger shark was 13 feet 10 inches long. It weighed 1036 pounds.

  •

  Zane Grey considered himself part of the quest for knowledge. He revered the natural world and spent his life contemplating the majesty of wild places and things, about which much was still unknown. What might he bring up from the sea next? Great white sharks and tiger sharks were known to grow to 20 feet, but stories came to him of monsters far exceeding this: sharks bigger than the boats of commercial fishermen; a 39-foot great white sighted near Montague Island; dredged-up teeth from the ocean floor so big that one scientist calculated they must belong to a shark of 80 feet or more. Grey wrote, ‘The waters around Australia are alive with many species of sharks. Why not some unknown species, huge and terrible? Who can tell what forms of life swim and battle in ocean depths?’ With the enthusiasm of a zealot he said, I believe.

  I believe there are eighty-foot sharks. Rare, surely, but they occur … It takes imagination to be a fisherman—to envision things and captures to be. Every fisherman, even if he is a sceptic and ridicules me and my supporters about these great fish, betrays himself when he goes fishing, for he surely goes because he imagines there are trout or salmon or Marlin, and surely a big one, waiting to strike for him.

  Zane Grey was not just a fisherman, he was a writer. He knew about imagination. He had fished within sight of a modern city and brought something huge and fearsome and wonderful out of the waters, first divining its presence where there was no evidence for it, and when others doubted the possibility.

  In his day, still so brimming with mystery, it would seem inconceivable to most people that only one long lifetime later the seas around the world would be not only raked over and used up in innumerable ways, but also in parts significantly destroyed. But Grey had an inkling it might happen: cases of overfishing by commercial operators already had him worried, and he urged sport fishermen to practise catch-and-release once self-imposed quotas were reached. He had seen it before: the unstoppable march of people marring the purity of wilderness landscapes.

  •

  Today, there are almost no hidden places left in the natural world to discover, though our requirement for the wonder they furnish goes undiminished. Cognisant of this, perhaps we should be more protective of our own internal spaces, for it may be that these last deeps are also endangered. We have psychoanalysed our minds, mapped our brains with imaging machines, sought constant stimulation for our grey matter, seemingly afraid to let our heads go quiet for a minute. But we need our private recesses in order to survive well, and to create. In those deeps imagination lives. Awe reposes. A strange alchemy takes place there: present experience mixes with memory, and associations knit. It’s a process that’s resistant to inquiry and logical sense, but rising up out of that waiting space, something marvellous or roaring or provoking might come: an image, an idea, or both merged as one. The new thing.

  I believe.

  And so it is I let memory and imagination go, and metaphors mix. And it comes to me. Why should the aquarium of my childhood not change, the shark pool become, instead, the Pantheon in Rome—flooded?

  In shallow water, over the marble floor, my stingray gliding. Around and around. Snow drifting down from the oculus. The giant ray passing in silence by Raphael’s tomb.

  For what is a pantheon, if not a zoo for gods?

  The Tomb of Human Curiosity

  It’s 3 am. The front deck of the house and the road beyond are a silver gelatin photograph—fine-grained, sharply delineated, seven different shades of monochrome. I could step out there right now and perform any daytime activity: mow the lawn or ride a bicycle. Instead I pad to the bathroom and back. In a few hours my brother and I will get up to go tide-hunting.

  The moon, spreading her unordinary grey light, has everything to do with our plans.

  •

  The alarm goes off. Coffee. I move quietly about, pausing again at the glass sliding door to check the weather and the state of the bay at the end of the street. It’s overcast, a light breeze, but the prediction is for sun later. Sun and no wind are what we need for optimum viewing.

  Back to bed for a short read. Just as long as it takes to drink the coffee.

  Roger has come last night from Melbourne and I want to let him sleep for a bit. Though I feel like an impatient child on Christmas morning, there’s really no need to rush. Phase one is not time critical as long as we launch the boat in the next two hours, and phase two will not happen until after lunch.

  We’ve wanted to do this for a long time—experience a low low tide while out on the water—and talking over the phone ten days ago got serious enough to check our commitments and calendars against tide charts, only to find the best opportunity in the next three months was soon. Quickly we made the most important arrangements: Rog booked a flight and I bought a bathyscope.

  I suppose few 56-year-old women yearn for a bathyscope, but I have rarely felt more cheerful than when I brought mine home. Looking like a big orange traffic cone, it’s a refined version of a glass-bottomed bucket. It has a handle, so the viewer can lean over the side of the boat and tilt it into the surface of the water, and it’s tapered so you may, if you wish, put your face to the narrowed end, blocking out extraneous light.

  A simple, well-made object, the bathyscope promised something impressive and secret beyond itself. It was a spy-hole into another realm. But at low tide, what is newly above the water is just as interesting as what is below, so using the scope was only part of our expedition.

  We wanted to see it all: the waterway of our childhood drained and transformed.

  •

  You’d think we’d have witnessed it before, but our custom was to only fish the high end of the risin
g tide. By repute, this is the best time to fish, but it’s also the only time I can easily get out on the water. My little dinghy can only be launched from the foreshore where it’s kept when enough water creeps in over the mudflats. I fish always with one eye on the clock, mindful of having enough water to get back in. A rookie miscalculation in the distant past was a humiliating lesson I swore not to repeat. Half sobbing, I had to drag the boat across mud, sinking up to my knees, fretful I would be stuck myself. It was hardly a life-threatening situation, as my struggle was played out in full sight of the road, but for a shy person that was almost the worst part. The stupid truth is, I would rather have died than been helped.

  Tidal effects on the inlet where the family holiday shack is located tend to the dramatic because of the local geography. The water system is complicated. From the bar at the ocean mouth through to the broadwater upstream, the water pours through channels, past sandbars and mangrove islands, into bays deep and shallow, repeatedly squeezing and spreading between landforms. My brother and I find the movements fascinating. How could we not, having both, as children, daydreamed on wharves, watching the current slide by, forever making then undoing itself in paisley whorls. We did not understand the exaggerating influence of different phases of the moon, but loved the periodic high high of spring tides when the lower landings of the wharves were underwater and the world seemed drowned, and when, on the corresponding low lows, the shoreline extended impossibly and oyster leases rose up, exposed. Discussing it over the years, we often remarked on our continuing ignorance, for as adults we still had only the sketchiest grasp of the physical laws governing this phenomenon, though it must rank as one of the planet’s most fundamental. This seemed inexcusable to us when we lived so intimately with the inlet when we holidayed, and when, right in front of our eyes, the tides went on with their obvious business.