Salt Story

by Drummond, Sarah

  ‘There’s been rumours,’ Salt said as he drove away from the fishing camp. ‘It happens every year. Oh, there’s salmon over at Cheynes. There’s salmon at Nanarup. They’re coming. Every bastard’s heard a story about the salmon coming.’

  The massive schools of salmon that work their way from east to west against the Leeuwin Current are on the minds of every southern fishing community this time of year. Despite the death of the local cannery businesses – now the salmon is usually sold as pet food or cray bait – the salmon arrival still bugles the age-old call – the seasonal harvest, the abundance.

  I visited Cable Beach, where the Southern Ocean rolls in and deposits improbable boulders onto limestone plinths. A family of enthusiastic Noongars followed me down the steps, bristling with fishing rods. We reached the sea together. We all saw the small school of gathering salmon in the window of a wave and cried out, ‘There they are!’

  People make some fatal mistakes on the rocks during salmon season. The fish can mass at the base of granite slopes made slick with black algae. The southern sea is dangerous and unpredictable. Swell smashes into the rocks and occasionally, that bigger rogue wave will wash a hungry fisher away.

  After the yellow flowering of the Christmas tree comes the red flowering gum. These scarlet blooms herald the salmon run. The Menang people used to get together this time of year with neighbouring peoples to discuss things. From the ranges of the east and the inlets and tingle forests of the west, they came to talk business: the hatched, matched and dispatched, who was annoying who, and what the season was producing – and there was always enough food for everyone because the salmon were here.

  During World War II, Dan Hunt, an ex-copper, realised that the soldiers were tiring of bully beef and saw an excellent opportunity to sell salmon. This was the real beginning of the south coast commercial salmon industry. Fishers began to seine net salmon from the beaches. They used the detritus of war including blitz trucks for driving on the beaches and camouflage nets for catching the fish. Someone used an armoured tank to cart nets and fish over the sandhills. Dan Hunt flew a spotter plane, looking for big schools of salmon and, when he spotted a mob near a licensed beach, he would write its location on paper, wrap it around a stone and throw it down to the camp.

  The original purpose of the salmon camp was to catch salmon in huge seine nets. When a school comes into the bay, the fisher men and women row a boat around the school, spooling out the salmon net. Then they use tractors, four-wheel drives and bare hands to drag the net onto the beach. Big trucks from the processing factories drive onto the white, kelpy sands of the beach and are loaded up with salmon.

  The salmon season was a financial bonanza for the fishing families, who often struggled for the remaining year. Because of the money, squabbles were inevitable as fishers scrambled for position on the most lucrative beaches. Sometimes they waited weeks for a big school to come along the coast. Salt’s mate remembers the windscreen getting shot out of a truck by an irate competitor who had someone shoot a net inside of his own seine.

  Eventually it was organised so that certain licence holders stayed on their own beach and no other commercial salmon fisher could work that beach. And that’s the way it is today ... only those camps tend to be a lot quieter than they were in the heyday of the south coast salmon fishery.

  ARRIPIS TRUTTA

  During a period of time working another job with a more predictable income, I wasn’t always available as Salt’s deckie. He retired to the salmon camp and rang every other day entreating me with stories of massive schools of fish.

  ‘There’s salmon all around the bay. And mulies and birds working them. And there is mullet too, in the pool, right in front of me. The weather’s great. D’yer wanna go fishin’?’

  He knew that I was moving house this day but just thought he’d let me know, in case I was getting tired of lugging freezers and wardrobes on to the trailer.

  ‘I can’t come out today.’ I looked at the sky. Mares’ tails and mackerel scales. ‘I can come out tomorrow but it looks like it will blow up by then.’

  ‘Nah, it’ll be fine tomorrow. Bloody gorgeous out here right now. Can’t do a shot for mullet anyway. Too much weed onshore at the moment.’ So why did Salt ring me with mullet stories if we couldn’t even catch them?

  Because he knew my penchant for mullet and that I was moving house.

  It transpired that this was the first and only occasion I’ve out-forecast Salt. The next morning was wet and howled with a dirty south-easterly that turned around to the south-west by lunchtime to make a mess of the foreshore in town. The whole harbour was a creamy slush and seagulls fought the wind, like scraps of paper, on their daily flight from the rubbish tip to the new entertainment centre.

  ‘Never known you to be so wrong about the weather and me so right,’ I crowed to Salt. ‘No thanks. Maybe on the weekend.’ See? When not officially working for Salt, I can go fishing when I feel like it and I can give some lip. A few months before, this kind of behaviour would have earned an entirely different outcome.

  ‘Weather shithouse out here,’ he sent a message back, and then slapped me down anyway. ‘Don’t get too smug about 4casting. Once in 5 years no Einstein stuff.’

  I think Salt turned seventy-five this year and he knows his weather. The only other time I’ve heard a dodgy forecast from him is when he’s trying to keep me out at sea in order to get the nets picked up a bit later than I would like. ‘Oh the wind will drop at sunset,’ he says when he’s trying to bluff me into staying in a bay where the wind is blowing us into the surf.

  Salt stayed out at the camp and watched the salmon swim in and out of the bay. The market has crashed for this cheap, coarse fish. People are importing Asian fish or just not liking the flavour of Australian salmon. So Salt’s camp has morphed into a kind of seasonal village for retired salmon fishers.

  When the weather calmed down, I drove to the camp. We launched the dinghy into the surf and motored off to hook some salmon and set the whiting net at Dunsky’s. On the way is Forsyth Bluff where the southern swell crashes into barnacled granite. The heads, where granite protrudes from the land to create the separate bays, are always a good spot to troll for salmon. We watched for birds working. They are usually after the pilchards or whitebait, pushed to the surface by bigger schools of predatory fish. Salt ran the boat through the middle of one of these mobs, against the chop bouncing off the Bluff.

  Arripis trutta ... catching salmon is visceral and exciting: that sure yank against nylon, the fight that turns my fingers raw, the blue heads of the salmon surfing through the wake wave behind the boat, shrieking birds and finally hauling a big fish onto the deck. It’s enough to make me want to down a Bloody Mary at the end of the day and call myself Hemingway.

  On we went, the boat swilling with brine and the blood of salmon, past The Eyes, a ghostly pair of deep, round holes worn into the cliff’s face, past the murder scene where the burnt-out four-wheel drive crouched on the rocks, on past the turquoise waters of Shelley Beach and into Dunsky’s Bay.

  We set the whiting nets and waited, watched the smoke from a fire at West Cape Howe move over the sky. ‘We should sell those salmon all right down the markets,’ said Salt. ‘Ten bucks each.’

  On our way back to the camp we came across some albatrosses who were working the whitebait and pilchards with muttonbirds. The big ocean birds waddled over the water as we neared them, took off into the sky and settled again. Muttonbirds buzzed the boat, shearing so close that one nearly touched my hair.

  ‘I’ll do the next season at Pallinup,’ said Salt. ‘Then I might just finish up.’ He looked at the box of beautiful King George whiting. ‘Though pulling up those big bastards makes me think I’ll hang up my boots when I hang down my head. Days like this, I wouldn’t call the king my uncle.’

  MIRRONG, MUGIL, MULLET

  We used Salt’s salmon camp for a while as our base to go out hunting King George whiting. This day though, was all about sea mu
llet.

  When mullet spend a season in the estuary they get pretty fat but when they get outside in open waters they get leaner because they are chased around by sharks and dolphins. Despite this exertion, their oil content remains obscene. In an anthropologist’s terms, the calorific exchange in the process of catching and eating sea mullet is exceptional.

  In the camp, the grassed area by the sea was packed with caravans, ancient buses and tents. Parsley told Salt about the sea mullet he’d been watching.

  ‘Oh yeah, I seen them. A huge school and really moving, they were. I was out on the quad bike at six yesterday morning and followed them around the bay. Then they stopped at the pool right here. They were all jumpin’ outta the water...’

  ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ Salt looked like he was in great pain. His face was a bit red. Parsley was the third person who’d told him about this school of sea mullet.

  ‘Well, we got the net onto the boat–’

  ‘With the cork line and lead line back to front–’

  ‘And then they were gone! Dunno where they went. Out to sea, I s’pect.’

  ‘Then they came back this mornin’. Why didn’t you ring me this mornin’?’ Salt leaned against the trailer and kicked the wheel. Hard.

  ‘They’da been gone by the time you got here.’

  ‘I can be here in twenny,’ said Salt. He was beyond looking pained. He wanted to hurt someone, I could tell.

  ‘Your van’s here, Salt. Why don’t you stay here and keep an eye out for them yourself?’

  I like Parsley and I was beginning to feel sorry for him.

  I’ve known Parsley for a long time and only ever on the stretch of beach between Muttonbird and Migo islands. His face is brown and cracked and permanently crowned with an old beanie. Even though he owns a house in town, Parsley seems happiest in his ancient caravan by the beach or camping on a friend’s farm. During the off-season he works fencing. He is kind and gossipy and rather old-fashioned. Salt asked him recently if he wanted some fresh plums from his overloaded tree and Parsley replied, ‘Oh, no thanks, Salt. I’ve got no taste for those new things. I like the old things, the tinned plums.’

  After the excitement of the salmon season beginning, things quietened down at the camp.

  ‘I don’t even want to come out here sometimes,’ Salt said, as he did the country fisherman’s version of an intergalactic space drive: dodging peppermint trees in the dark on a sandy black track, boat and trailer kerthunking behind us. ‘We used to all sit up in the shed, all get together at night, cook and drink piss and carry on ... now everyone is in their own caravan at eight o’clock, watching TV.’

  They haven’t been fishing either. It seems at the moment that there is no market for this oily, fishy fish. After the salmon season, most south coast camps work the herring schools but, due to the recent decline in the cray industry, the local processors are not buying bait fish and will only buy herring for human consumption if it is iced down by the beach seiners. At dawn.

  One family out of the three who usually work this beach hasn’t turned up this year. Salt Sister had a baby a few weeks before, so she won’t be swimming out the anchor for the herring net and there’s not even enough reason to hire a tractor.

  Salt may have been annoyed at missing out on such a beautiful school of sea mullet but he is probably even more annoyed at seeing such an abundance of salmon swim by the camp that there is no point in catching. Who in the whole world could possibly want tons of cheap, sustainable run fish, drenched in omega-3s from the clean Southern Ocean? Anyone?

  AND THEN THERE WAS AN OCTOPUS

  An octopus in the net out near Migo Island is a good starting point for our weekly argument.

  ‘He’ll do for bait.’ That’s Salt. ‘We’re going out hookin’ tomorra.’

  My son, Stormboy, who knows these things, says, ‘Octopus are so smart, if they weren’t underwater, they would have learned how to make fire.’

  Tom Robbins hypothesised that because octopus are so emotional that they can become apoplectic when overwrought, it is perfectly plausible that an octopus might die of embarrassment.

  ‘Bite ’im between the eyes and turn ’im inside out,’ says Salt.

  I remember Dunedin and the lovely wahine Donna Toa. She told me stories of living on octopus and fish from the bay and described to me the traps they set.

  My take this night in the channel near the island?

  ‘I’ll eat him. Lightly blanched, dropped in vinegar. Otherwise the octopus goes back. Bait? No way.’

  I put the octopus in the box with a lonely squid and shut tight the lid. Half an hour later in the midst of hauling the night nets in and the motor cutting on the windward side of a snarly reef:

  ‘Jesus Fucking Christ!’

  The critter was crawling over my bare feet and heading for the sides. I watched that octopus. The dog watched too. How the hell did it get out of the box? The lid was still on. Stormboy, the dog and I watched it creep along, tentacle after tentacle. We didn’t say anything to Salt.

  We headed to shore, stowed the nets and crunched onto the beach. Salt was trying to lift the new two-stroke’s propeller out of the sand. I watched the octopus heave his way up the side of the boat. He got one tentacle over the side.

  Salt was going over the side too. He saw the octopus plop into the water under the fluorescent light, fly past his feet, heading for the open sea.

  ‘Didya see that occy? Bastard got away.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You were watching the whole time.’

  ‘Yep.’

  STINGRAY STEAK

  Standing waist-high in the turquoise waters of Whalers Cove I saw the stingrays come a’hunting, their shadowy pirate sails varnished and black. It was a nervous moment but they swept around me in wide arcs, looking for herring and whitebait along the seashore.

  I’ve loved stingrays since that encounter. I feed them mullet frames from the beach and try to keep the dog from retrieving them. We’ve pulled up a few in the nets too. Most of the time I let them go, much to Salt’s annoyance. When they have munched on every other fish in the net, I take them home and eat them.

  At the Sunday markets I have an English customer who relishes stingray. She poaches it and serves it up with butter and capers. I use my own antipodean’s recipe.

  Hopefully you’ve got a Salt or a fisherwoman in the neighbourhood who can deal with the killing and cutting of a stingray because landing it involves lots of blood and wriggling and squabbles, especially in a little boat.

  The flesh is a strange, grainy texture with a sheet of cartilage through the wing holding the whole thing together. Cut the wings straight down, into one-inch steaks. A sharp, flexible knife will deal with the skin and the cartilage. Make up a mix of soy sauce, olive oil and freshly grated ginger. Marinate the stingray steaks in this mix for a few hours. Then cook the stingray steaks quick and hot on a barbeque.

  HOW TO FEED A FISHERMAN

  Apart from sea mullet and salmon cooked in huge slabs in a frypan, Salt’s idea of culinary delight is mustard pickles or corn relish on white bread with cold meat, or boiled potatoes and lamb chops. He also likes Spam.

  I told Salt I may be late getting to the fishing camp. Just not how late. Originally I was intent on getting to Pallinup in time to set nets but I got stuck up the mountain I’d been climbing. As soon I was within range, I sent him a message to say that I’d be there before dawn.

  Salt and I have had plenty of conversations about me being late.

  Sandy was standing by the fire a week later and laughing about the debacle. ‘Oh yeah, Salt, I had one of those deckies who could never turn up on time come Saturday morning.’

  Salt looked at me. ‘We’ve always had a problem with Saturday mornings, haven’t we Sarah?’

  Sandy said, ‘I’d ask him on Fridays, You going to the pub tonight? Nah, nah, he’d say. The next day I’d be waiting at the jetty for him. By seven thirty I’d have to drive around to his house and wake hi
m up.’

  ‘Seven?’ I said. ‘Seven is a completely respectable hour. Who can’t make it to a boat ramp by seven? Now, four thirty on a Saturday morning is a different matter.’

  Salt groaned and rolled his eyes at me.

  ‘Well. Four thirty. C’mon Salt. It’s not always achievable. It means three forty-five out of bed after sitting with my friends around a fire, playing guitars till one in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah, I always hate the summer crab season around you social butterflies,’ he said.

  On this occasion, I didn’t make it by dawn. After sleeping under a rock in the dirt, it took me till lunchtime the next day to trek across the north face of the mountain to the car park. Hungry, scratched and bruised, with an eye suffering from a misanthropic spider, I got a message from Salt once I’d arrived back at my car: ‘Eight boxes.’

  Damn. The last time he caught that much I was camping on Breaksea Island. He’s never caught that many fish when I’m around. At this point I began to entertain the women-and-bananas-on-boats superstition.

  I met him at the roadhouse on his way into town. He was sleeping in his car when I pulled over. I showed him some bruises as evidence of my mountain misadventure but he was having none of it.

  ‘You know, last night the caravan went up on three wheels in that storm. This morning I was trying to pick up, and nearly rolled the boat in the wind. I had to tie the net onto the bow and pick up fish and all. And that was only the first fuckin’ net! The boat filled with water. I had to come in. Sandy saw me come in and asked if I needed a hand pickin’ up the other two nets. Of course I said no but he insisted.’

  Sandy had then helped Salt unmesh his fish and pack them into boxes. Once Unruly had finished with his own catch, he came and helped too.

  ‘You owe them both a slab,’ Salt told me. ‘They were bloody good blokes, those two. I always thought fishermen are bastards but those two ... they’re really good, they are.’