Night Fishing

by Vicki Hastrich

  Now, finally, we were stirring ourselves to learn more. This time we were determined to see the other half of the show in detail. Our plan was to survey my usual territory to see what we could of the seafloor and underwater life while the inlet was shallowest, and to observe any other changes above the surface. We really had no clear expectations of the trip beyond adding to our personal body of knowledge about the estuary.

  But first we had to solve the problem of getting out in the boat. Although we might have made the trip without fuss in a hire boat from the marina, we scorned this as a buying of experience, as well as a betrayal of my beaten-up but much-loved vessel, the Squid. No—with scheming, teamwork and a tolerant approach to the probable inconveniences, we would overcome any logistical obstacles ourselves.

  While I like to do lots of things by myself, I knew this investigation would be all the easier and better if undertaken with Rog. He’s cheerful and confident, interested in everything and, like the schoolteacher he once was, loves a practical lesson. His knowledge is wide and useful, and taking after our long-gone engineer father, he relishes the puzzle of any problem, breaking it down into components.

  For all these reasons it would be good to have him with me, but mostly I valued his presence for his enthusiasm. Bring him something to marvel over and he’ll unfailingly oblige. After due admiration, he’s likely to assume a thoughtful pose, putting a hand to his close-cropped white beard while tilting his head for a fresh view out of his glasses. Then he’ll ask a question on an aspect of the marvel I hadn’t considered. A pleasant half-hour is bound to ensue as we kick around possible answers. As the middle sibling, he’s older than me by a couple of years, but he never takes over. Instead, our mutual understanding of the subject at hand is likely to be enlarged or, at the very least, our appreciation of what we do not understand improved. Afterwards the marvel is returned unharmed.

  The previous night, when we talked of our outing, we’d been equals in our excitement. It was laughable how long we discussed the sequence of our tasks and timings, checking and rechecking the tide chart and weather forecasts—cross-referencing with apps. Though we were hardly preparing for a rocket launch to Pluto, we felt intrepid, and madly pleased with ourselves.

  Prompted by his study of the chart, Rog asked an apparently simple question. Why are there two tides a day in most places, while in a few, seemingly random places, there is only one?

  For the past week or so I’d been doing our homework, so I was prepared. But when I embarked on an explanation of the multiple, interlinking factors behind ‘tidal bulges’, it soon became obvious the details were beyond me. I didn’t feel bad about my defeat.

  Nothing’s straightforward when it comes to tides, I told him. So much so that an ancient philosopher, exhausted by the complications and anomalies which he encountered, once described the study of tides as ‘the tomb of human curiosity’.

  ‘Wow,’ said Rog.

  •

  On the morning high we work well together as we launch the boat, stowing the few pieces of essential gear previously agreed upon. Rog climbs in first. Standing beside the boat in water just over my knees, I lean in to start the motor. Coughs of blue smoke and a rough idle until it warms up.

  I wade out with the boat a little further then hop in myself—a deft movement, I like to think, which also involves quickly flicking the motor into gear, then just as quickly leaning my weight towards the bow, thus lifting the stern a few inches higher to give the prop more clearance as we cross the shallows. When the water deepens I can relax, drop the leg of the motor fully down and rip the throttle to full bore. It’s a 3.5-horsepower engine, so we’re not exactly flying, but we grin.

  We pass by the cluster of moored boats in the bay and along the remaining line of sticks marking an old oyster lease. A hill shelters us from the breeze, so the water here is smooth and clear. Perhaps 4 metres beneath us is a broad belt of the seagrass I call ribbon weed, growing in dark health. As we look down, skimming over it, we’re greedy for it. It makes us smack our lips for what the afternoon might bring.

  Our trip is a short one and though we’re tempted to extend it (because the same sudden good feeling at being out on the water again has rushed over both of us), we stick to our plan. I steer in to our destination, a public wharf which is not much visited on a weekday, and which is only ten minutes’ walk from home. Rog runs a rope through a railing on the lower landing and we begin the business of tying up. We do a secure job of it, with Rog reminding me we need to pay out enough rope to accommodate the dropping water level. The tide will fall over 1.6 metres.

  At any sudden movement or weight-shift, the Squid tips and tilts dangerously, so we’re careful as we go about our unloading tasks, always telling each other in advance of our intentions so the other will automatically act to counterbalance. We leave nothing in the boat but the motor, which I padlock. We’re done. We’ll come back in six hours and twelve and a half minutes. That’s when the tide will be dead low.

  That’s when phase two will begin.

  •

  When I did my homework on tides, I tracked historical developments in thinking. Even though Isaac Newton was the breakthrough man, the one to correctly theorise that the combined gravity of the moon and the sun was the force pulling on oceans, it was his predecessor, Galileo, who snagged my attention.

  As a boy, Galileo considered becoming a painter. The natural artistic ability he possessed was put to good use when, years later, he tilted the new technology of his telescope to the night sky to draw the phases of the moon.

  He didn’t know it, but at the same time an Englishman, Thomas Harriot, was also experimenting with a telescope and training it moonwards. The Englishman made a drawing too, but it was a crude map, never published in his lifetime. Galileo’s drawings are of a whole different order, naturalistically reproducing what he saw, with more than ordinary skill. In a sequence of inky skies there is the modern moon as we know it—that rough golf ball—variously shaded, its cold topography finally revealed.

  What’s difficult to believe is that no one before Galileo had drawn the moon as they saw it: all known public or published depictions predating his are in one way or another symbolic. Throughout human history the dings and spots on the moon visible to the naked eye had gone unrecorded. It makes these first images of Galileo’s all the more haunting—how lucky we are they are also art. A creative confidence is apparent in their execution, but, more than that, an appreciative respect for the moon’s austerity is also communicated.

  Galileo’s telescope was not very sophisticated. It only brought us a little closer. His great achievement was to show us what was already in plain view.

  •

  Galileo’s observations of the moon and other heavenly bodies led him to believe the earth rotated, causing a shifting of the world’s waters in their basins, which generated tides. His proofs concerning the rotation of the earth supported the Copernican theory of the heavens—a dangerous theory to promote. Catholic authorities had burnt the astronomer Giordano Bruno at the stake for holding similar views, so when the Inquisition began to investigate Galileo, the seriousness of his predicament was not in doubt.

  Copernican theory contradicted the received thinking of centuries, but worse, it hinted at an impersonal universe, ungoverned. Man, labouring on a planet which was no longer central to the system, seemed incidental. This first glimpse of cosmic loneliness must have sent people reeling, but for the Church the problem was also political, calling into question its right to temporal power.

  Threatened with torture, Galileo recanted, but this didn’t save him from further punishment. A sentence of life imprisonment was commuted to house arrest and his remaining years were spent in a villa outside Florence, where he was forbidden to work.

  •

  Though closely supervised in his imprisonment, Galileo had one visitor in 1638. It was the English poet John Milton, author-to-be of Paradise Lost. We know this because Milton records the bare fact of the
ir interview in a tract he wrote defending free speech. Milton was 30 years old. The elderly astronomer was lonely and ill, and almost totally blind. I find the idea of their encounter compelling, coincidentally because Milton was already on my mind in relation to tides, but also because I think of the occasion as youth meeting age, as poetry meeting science. If anyone could fully appreciate the tragedy of a questing mind denied the chance to roam, it would be a writer.

  In his own cosmos of Paradise Lost, Milton honoured Galileo with a place, the only contemporary figure to be mentioned in the poem. He describes the shield Satan wears as hanging on his shoulders like the moon,

  … whose orb

  Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views

  At evening, from the top of Fesolè,

  Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,

  Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe.

  Paradise Lost was published in 1667.

  It would be another twenty years before Isaac Newton recognised the true power of the spotty globe to steer the seas, giving Rog and me the low low we desired.

  •

  At low tide, what I expected to see and what I hoped to see were two different things. All along when planning this enterprise, I secretly thought I’d see something biblical—something Miltonian. In Paradise Lost, the archangel Raphael tells Adam about the creation of the world and describes God commanding life into the oceans. To half quote, half paraphrase, God says that forthwith the seas, the creeks and bays will swarm with innumerable fry. Fish ‘with their Finns and shining Scales’ will glide under the green wave in banks of schools, they will ‘Graze the Sea-weed, their pasture, and through Groves of Coral stray, or sporting with quick glance, show to the Sun their waved coats dropped with Gold’.

  Shellfish in pearly shells are mentioned, crustaceans in jointed armour, seals, dolphins, whales.

  Somehow I half believed the contents of Milton’s beautiful teeming sea would be thickly visible when low tide reduced the estuary’s channels to gutters. All life poured in there and flapping. Hardly enough water left for them to breathe. Pink snapper, parrotfish and bream, brown-striped trumpeter, dory and shovel-nosed sharks, pineapple fish and prawns, blennies and gobbies, squid, bonito and yellowtail, scaly mackerel, octopus, flounder, flathead, leatherjacket, morwong, whiting, blue swimmer crab, rock cod, wrasse and more besides. They could not all ride the ebb out to sea. Surely, on a low low, with so little water left, the reduced passageways might be mythically populated with rivers of fish?

  •

  After lunch we pack the bathyscope into the car, along with fishing gear and all the other stuff we didn’t feel it was wise to leave in the boat while waiting for the tide to fall. We drive around to the wharf, which juts out from a thin band of mangroves growing close to the road. The wharf stands knobble-kneed, arthritic with encrustations of oysters on its pilings. As we get out of the car the aromatics of the ecosystem hit us—an iron, mollusc smell, tinged with an under-scent of rottenness, yet lung-floodingly wholesome.

  At the start of the wharf we pause to listen to the crackle of the silty mud releasing air from the many little crab and worm holes. Between the upright fingers of the mangroves’ pneumatophores, a few tiny grey crabs sidle, but we see no other creatures as we cart our things up the wharf, though we look carefully, noting the subtle changes as the water gradually deepens. In the first, fully exposed zone, a few dotted clumps of pop-weed grow—their leathery beads, filled with water, must help them withstand the drying. And then, in puddled water, the short eelgrass starts, though it looks collapsed and gasping. After that, the ribbon grass begins, just as soon as the water is deep enough to offer at least partial support for its strap leaves, which can grow over half a metre long. In fact, strap weed is its correct common name, but the labels of childhood stick fast.

  Fortune has smiled on us. On this warm afternoon in late October, the water is clear and the cloud cover has burnt off to leave us with plenty of blue sky. Conditions are close to peak.

  As it happens, we weren’t so smart after all with our boat tie-up, but it’s only a minor setback. A change in wind direction has jammed the boat partially underneath the main landing, wedging it in the oystery grasp of a couple of pilings. No choice but to wrench the Squid free. The brittle edges of the shells crumble as the gunwales of the boat grind against them, and I wince, not out of regret for any probable worsening of the boat’s appearance, but out of sympathy for the imagined pain inflicted on my trusty fibreglass friend.

  We are careful lowering ourselves down into the tippy boat, but once each of us commits, the downward pressure on the hull is sudden and I privately worry how my DIY fibreglass patches will hold up, especially given the man-size of Rog. He’s tall but also carries a bit more weight than is healthy for his heart, which concerns me. Our dad died of a cardiac arrest at much the same age Rog is now.

  In the event, we get ourselves in without mishap and the Squid stays watertight. Rog puts on his new sunglasses, which he calls his old bastards’ sunnies. They fit over his normal spectacles, so they’re not exactly cool, but he cheerfully declares he doesn’t give a rat’s. They’re polarised so he’ll be able to see into the water beyond the glare. He’s also wearing a seaman’s peaked cap over his short, snowy white hair, but I don’t think his choice of headgear is intentionally nautical, because I’ve seen him wear it to the shops. My own Squid fashions are not exactly haute: an ancient maroon t-shirt; shorts, clean but marked by previous boating trips; a baby-blue baseball cap embroidered with Davistown Putt Putt Regatta. We’re a right pair.

  We set off.

  Immediately, we’re onstage. Crowning up out of the middle of the bay ahead of us is the biggest oyster lease, about 2 hectares in area. Beyond it, the estuary widens, the channels carving their way left towards the ocean; to our right, up the waterway, is the Rip Bridge, past which the water splits into multiple arms, all beyond the normal operating range of the Squid. The steepness of the hills near us, and in the distance in their sloping layers of hazy eucalypt greys, adds to the psychology of low tide, making the idea of the draining of the trough of the estuary seem all the more striking.

  We turn the boat into the nearby channel—a favoured stretch of mine for fishing—and slow up, ready to look for the first time through the bathyscope.

  •

  What we see is nothing.

  For all the hours of that long afternoon, the bathyscope reveals cool, lovely emptiness. No creatures. No Miltonian rivers of fish, not even what I had realistically expected: the odd, igniting glimpse of something swimming along the bottom.

  Whatever hasn’t been disgorged into the ocean is certainly well hidden, or nowhere near us.

  •

  We conduct our survey work first, travelling the length of the sandy-bottomed strip between the lease and the shore, checking each edge in turn to see where the weed bellies out and in. By the changing colour we can tell the difference in the bottom with the naked eye, but with the bathyscope we have detail. The sand is pocked and deserted; flecks of nutriment drift between it and the bathyscope glass in a grand sweep of particles. The ribbon weed is downy with algal growth, and some of its brown-green leaves are also flecked with a kind of white hoar. No fish from Paradise Lost graze over it, or nudge between its fronds.

  We move into Rileys Bay and motor into the corner where the bush comes down to mangroves and a tidal flat. Between that shore and us is a large meadow of seagrass—the ubiquitous ribbon weed again—starting in shallow water and growing out into deeper. I cut the motor and we nose in. In perhaps half a metre of water we drift over the meadow.

  We are somewhere magical.

  Thriving on the increased sun and freer of algae, some of the leaves are lime green. They bend over at the surface, but wherever tiny edges pierce the surface tension, light catches, so that we sit in an acre of sparkles.

  The bathyscope adds another dimension to the experience, taking us closer—like Galileo’s telescope—inside the m
eadow, the grasses nodding and parting to the slow advance of the glass. A couple of times we disturb a strange brown fish seeming to sunbake on the surface, but each flips away at great speed before we can see it properly. Other than that, we see only a few whelk shells, grey with sediment, resting at the base of grasses. Reflected onto the green mat of the meadow is the transparent blue film of the sky, and so it simultaneously seems we are gliding through water and air.

  We stay there for a long time. It’s hard to drag ourselves away.

  At one point I tell Rog that right up until the Middle Ages many people believed tides were caused by the world breathing in and out.

  There in the ribbon grass meadow, that explanation makes perfect sense to us both.

  •

  When we return to our planned work we chug around to the far side of the big lease to explore the bottom there, then we head off to the sandbars. What surprises me is that several are already submerged. From the shore at low tide, it seems like they’re all high and dry for hours.

  Pleasure boats the size of small ships come uncomfortably close in the narrow channels, so we skedaddle. We can’t go home—not enough water there—so we head off to experiment with fishing the rising low.

  •

  We take up our customary drift, and although the line of it is hard to hold with the breeze picking up, we at once get bites. Hard to believe when not long before all signs of fishy life had been absent.

  After an hour or so we’ve got a feed of big whiting and Rog has caught a nice flathead. We anchor to try for crabs. There’s no action but we don’t care. We settle in for the wide-ranging chat we couldn’t have when busy earlier.

  We talk about Roger’s grown-up son, Carl, who lives in Canada, and whose wedding we’d been to four months earlier. I felt for my brother and sister-in-law that day as they gave away their only child to another country, to another family eager to take him over. Though it was obvious how much their son meant to them, they did not speak of any loss to themselves, but showed only a fierce pride in his happiness, and confidence in the future he’d chosen. Rog was subdued, though not in a manner that drew the attention of others. I only knew it myself because I’ve seen him go that way once or twice before in times of great moment. Right now he’s his usual self, chirping away, telling me Carl has been to the famous Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, where the world’s biggest tides rush in and out, rising a whopping 14 metres. I shake off my memories of the wedding reception and of Rog struggling to manage the complex feelings of the occasion, and I join in.