Fishing Boat REX

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 23, 15 January 1945, Page 18

Fishing Boat REX

a koreroßeport

To this cove Captain Cook made five visits while navigating the globe. On this beach he erected tents for his invalided sailors and from this stream he watered his vessels- -Nil Intentatum Reliquit. The first visit was on January-15, 1770, the last, February 12, 1777. To this same cove, November, 1944, came the fishing boat “ Rex.” On this same beach the crew gathered mussels and roasted crabs and from the sides of this same stream they cut supplejacks with which to make crayfish — Nil Intentatum Reliquit. The fishing boat “ Rex ” was looking for fish ; not fishing, but looking. She had been looking for four days when she tied up to the small wharf at Ship’s Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound. And the fish that give her all the trouble, the weary wet windy nights, the days away from home, the expense, the anxiety when they can’t be found are not the groper with their dilated Eddie Cantor eyes, the plump bass, the ling with their repulsive shrivelled gills, the long slim barracouta with those three fangs, cruel and razor sharp, the sharks with slit mouths, jagged files of teeth, the conger eels twisting and writhing treachery. Nor is the trouble from the mackarel, the blue cod, the blind eels, the skates, the dog fish. It isn’t the creepy-

scuttley-crawly crayfish, and mind out, be careful or they’ll pinch more than your toe. It isn’t the little ’uns, nor is it the big fellows. It’s the smallest fish that’s big enough to be called a fish. It’s the sardine. The sardines cause more trouble to the fishermen than the highest wind, the wildest sea, the rockiest coast. You set a fish to catch a fish. The sardines are used for that bait. They make the only good bait; and without good bait it doesn’t matter whether you use the best hemp line and the sharpest hooks in the country or a piece of string with a bent pin. Before the war 2S. spent at the grocer’s shop would keep you in sardines for a month : before the war a few hours in Queen Charlotte Sound would keep the fishermen in sardines for a month. Now you seldom see sardines. Often the fisherman isn’t any

luckier. Empty shelves in the grocer’s are explained by the war ; empty nets in the Sounds just cannot be explained at all. The shoals are still there in places to make the water black and alive with twisting thousands and hundreds of thousands, millions. But those shoals are fewer, much harder to find, sometimes impossible for weeks at a time. It’s not

that they have been fished out. It’s just that they have disappeared. It was sardines the “ Rex ” was looking for. Island Bay, Wellington, is the headquarters of a fishing fleet. Sheltered there are a dozen or more medium-sized boats, smaller craft besides, scores of dinghies. Mooring buoys are in the water. On the beach are nets drying in the sun, old boats with planks stove in, fish crates, crayfish pots, ropes, oars, barrels, men sitting in the sun in the way of fishermen, gossiping; smoking ; men with weather cut deep into their skin ; wind, rain, and sun, the sea on their faces and arms. The names on the boats tell you something : “St. Guiseppe,” “ Princess Jolanda,” “ Pincipe Umberto,” “ San Antonia,” “ Amondo Daiz,” “ Revittorio,” “ Rosalia,” “ St. Marie de Lobra,” “ Cita da Sovrento.” They tell you the boats are owned and worked mostly by Italians. Some of the other names tell you more : “ Wild Duck,” “ Nancy Lee,” “ Vagabond.” They tell you not all the boats have Italian owners or Italian crews. But most of them have ; and at Island Bay there is a colony of Italians that has been there many years. In the streets you notice the black hair, the olive skins. Sometimes you hear strange talk. On the gateways are Italian names of a music teacher, a dressmaker. There are probably several hundred Italians in that colony. The menfolk are mostly fishermen, and their work supplies Wellington with fish.

For the catching of that fish they use sardines as bait. And that’s why we were introduced to the “ Rex ” and her crew ; her crew of five—Zi, Marianna, Cos, Raphael (Fey for short) and Bill. All except Bill were either born in Italy or ini New Zealand of Italian parents. Large laughing fellows they are, carefree, with, huge appetites, and voices used to roaring above wind, sea, thunderstorm. They are skilled fishermen, and capable seamen. They have to be when their days are spent in Cook Strait, where the seas can lash from calm to waves, roaring houses high, in less than hours, where the rip of the tide can tear the bottom from a boat or a man from the deck, where the wind can be as dangerous in treachery as the grey hidden rocks often hardly covered. It was barely dawn, but just off the beach the gulls were working, diving, smack from sky into water. We were up with those birds that morning, and before the fishermen. It was cold waiting, cold in spite of fat layers of singlets, flannel shirts, cotton shirts, jerseys, wind jackets, heavy boots, two pairs of socks. The wind was cold from the sea. We shivered, and cursed every fish in the sea. Jump quickly, before boots are swamped full with water, into the dinghy. Shove off. One man, Marianna, rows, standing, legs braced, shoulders rhythmically heaving into even regular strokes. He faces forward, pulling the oars from that position. With Island Bay fishermen, this is the

usual way of rowing, and, after practice, it is more efficient than the more usual method. We smack gently against the side of the “ Rex.” Stores go aboard, nets, lines, buoys, crew, passengers, luggage, and we chug-chug, with oily smoke and foul fumes, out of the boat harbour, 5 knots full steam ahead. Three hours and more it takes from Island Bay to the calm of Queen Charlotte Sound. It is eighteen miles across these straits ; approximately the same distance as across the English Channel. But no person has ever swum Cook Strait. The coldness of the sea and a tearing rip even on the most peaceful of days will never allow that. They tell us the programme. Queen Charlotte Sound before noon, fix the nets, eat a meal, and between dusk and the rise of the moon the sardines. They are found by their phosphorescence in the water. A large shoal shines like fire; it can be seen a long distance off. By light of day or shine of moon that fire cannot be picked up ; it is only with the black of night that there can be any chance of success. Usually the fishing boats make the trip on the nights of no moon. This time, however, the weather had been impossible ; now the first quarter was almost a half. We would have to be ducky. If we were, we would be back at Island Bay early the next morning ; if we weren’t, it meant another night, perhaps even longer.

The fishermen’s luck was out —it was Friday when we left, Tuesday before we returned. Without sardines. But we had no complaint; a four-day cruise of Queen Charlotte Sound is an experience not to be forgotten, especially with a 50 ft. launch and five laughing fellows as ready to be as hungry as yourself. And Queen Charlotte Sound is a hungry place. We didn’t have any regular meals : all the time we weren’t sleeping we were eating. In Endeavour Inlet, Cos stopped the engines. Bill dropped a line with three hooks over the side. Fey lit and pumped the primus. And ten minutes later we were eating blue cod for our lunch ; blue cod cooked in olive oil, with wedges of bread and huge pots of tea. Olive oil before the war cost these fishermen 9s. 6d. a gallon. These wartime days the price is Z 4, but national customs are hard to forget. They told us, with cups of tea and cigarettes, with an English language that took them, and us, into strange corners and unexpected laughs, with gesticulating hands and heads and arms (to tie their hands, keep their bodies still, would be the same almost as striking them dumb) of Italy, of the country and living round Naples twenty years ago. Marianna started fishing on his father’s small boat when he was eight. All night and every night, for twelve hours at a

time, he had to work the• lines. The family was too poor, their standard of living too low, to eat the fish they caught. The only alternative to fishing was work on the heavily cultivated farms. Here the hours were as long, the work as tedious, the returns as poor, the prospects as gloomy. Marianna’s brothers emigrated to the United States, and left him and the parents behind. By the time Marianna was old enough to be allowed a permit to join them, the emigration laws had been tightened as hard as Marianna’s belt. So he caught the next ship to New Zealand. He’s been here for twenty years now and he’s grown to love this country and to appreciate its ways of living. He wants to visit his parents on a six months’ holiday, but he will never return permanently to his native land. He has no wish to. Marianna’s history is typical of many of the fishing men at Island Bay. An afternoon of sailing through still waters ; it was possible we would run into a shoal of that precious bait and be able to fill the dozens of crates before dusk. Behind us the dinghy flopped and jiggled through our wash, straining at its tow rope, always following. In it the fine-meshed net was stacked ready for use. No time would be lost if sardines were seen. Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock . . . the crew lounged on the deck, eyes on the water, in the sky, watching either, for a continuing ripple

or for gannets working. Either would show the presence of sardines. But we had no luck. We sailed in and out of the many bays, large and small, all beautiful, that make Queen Charlotte Sound, round islands, past spits and promontories. There would be a house, then a few miles on another house, and then another, all tucked snugly and peacefully into those bays like cats asleep on coloured cushions. Behind them the hills, rising high and steeply, are covered mostly with thick impenetrable bush. Where they are not there is bare rock, sliding boulders, little grass. We arrived in Fishburn Bay an hour after we had intended because of misdirection by one of those sheep-farmers. The helmsman of a launch towing a barge full of furniture put us right. Sardines were in the water as we sidled in. Away flashed the dinghy, net into the water, launch standing by : but it was too late. The shoal had moved on, it was the last of it we had seen. We cursed the farmer for the hour that he had made us waste. “ Just black with sardines, a moving mass. You could have walked over them,” said the Fishburh Bay farmer when he pulled out for a chat, a cup of tea, and some tobacco. This “ black moving mass ” that was here a few hours ago, the night before, all the week up to now, was a story we were to hear a dozen times in a dozen bays. In the end it was a joke. We would stop our

engines, a boat would leave the shore. We would start to laugh. We knew what to expect. Saturday passed from 3 o’clock in the morning when the moon set to afternoon. Six meals, ten pots of tea, sleeping in the sun. Not a breath of wind, no. ripple on the water. Stories of old Italian sailing ships, of wild whirling days, weeks without a breath of wind. A yarn about the sailing custom of “ scratching the boom ” to raise a breeze. We were sitting on the deck when this story was told. The “ Rex ” had a boom. So I scratched ; a good solid scratch. And five minutes later I scratched again. That night, for seven hours, there was a gale, a gale that was almost a hurricane, the worst Queen Charlotte Sound had experienced for years. Indeed, the Wellington newspapers said it was one of the worst ever. The report to the outside world was days late. Telegraph and power lines had been blown down, trees uprooted, launches and yachts torn from their moorings, roofs lifted, windows smashed, buildings damaged. The fishing boat “ Rex ” was lying quietly, crew sleeping, in a small bay when the sky went mad with wind. She started to drift. We dropped a second anchor, but it was no use. We had to run for shelter. We tried other bays, but they were of no use either. So it was all the way to Picton, three hours’

steaming, to tie up to the wharf. We found later the storm had been local. It’s the last time I scratch a boom. The Italians of that crew speak English, but not the English sort of English. To understand them takes some time : to understand them properly would take about three months. Either they add a syllable or two or three, or they drop a syllable or two or three. “We will-a have-a to find-a the coup for da butch and we need-a the tobacc,” said Marianna, when we woke in Picton the next-a day-a. It seemed we needed coupons for the butcher and would have to buy some tobacco. Hosp for hospital, barb for barber, rhub for rhubarb, monk for monkey. So it went on. In Picton we bought bread, groceries, meat, vegetables, tobacco. We would have liked a pot of beer, too' but it was Sunday. We couldn’t make any telephone calls because the lines were down. Picton is a pretty but sleepy place, lively through the holiday summer perhaps, but that Sunday it was neither holiday nor summer. Still blowing. Hours from Picton to Ship’s Cove, and we stayed there a night, tied up to a small wharf, close against high hills and steep cliffs. In Queen Charlotte Sound the water is fathoms deep right to the shore. The wind had dropped and the afternoon sun was warm. After three days it was pleasant to walk from the continually ‘ slipping deck to the shore.

only a few steps to narrow paths through bush, to the sandy beach. The obelisk erected to the memory and honour of Captain Cook Nil Intentatum Reliquit was surrounded by blue sea, deep bush, sandy beach, galvanized-iron buildings, empty beer bottles, pineapple tins, old newspapers. A picnic ground. As a memorial to Captain Cook I prefer to remember the wild pig we heard angrily rooting in the bush at dawn the next morning, or the glowworms we saw in the bush that night. At dusk on Monday, after four days, we still had no sardines. Back at Fishburn Bay Zi threw overboard a long drifting line with no sinker. Perhaps there would be the chance of a few barracouta, enough to set the groper lines on the way home the next day. In a second there was a tug to that line, and a long slimy barracouta lay writhing on the deck. In twenty minutes there were fifty of them, knocking their tails desperately on the planking, almost lifeless, but still waiting their chance to sink the three J in. teeth in the front of their mouths into human arm or leg. They are the scavengers of the sea ; they are also the fish you have to be most careful of. But next to sardines they are the most satisfactory bait. We landed four cases. We washed down the decks, had a meal, and went early to bed. At 3 o’clock in the morning we would be off, in time for a making tide, and the chance of groper. Two chocolate-coloured whale-chasers were lying still in the dawn at the entrance to the Sound. In Picton we had tied up alongside their mother ship.

Sardines and whales. We hoped their season had been more successful than our four days. Off we chugged through the swell and choppiness. Could Cook Strait never be still and calm ? Not directly across to Island Bay, but north-west to the reef, we steamed. The fishing bank. The catch was poor, not worth the extra fuel we burned. Soon after noon we were on the beach, the “ Rex ” tied to her moorings. The sardine cases were empty, two 45 gallon drums of Diesel oil had been emptied, five days had been wasted, the catches for two weeks would probably be poor because of inferior bait. But the crew of the “ Rex ” were still cheerful, as shouting with laughter as they had been on the journey over, and eager for news, too. In fishermen’s lives anything can happen in five days. But there was nothing worse than a broken wrist and one of the boys in hospital with a fish hook through his leg.

The ground, the road, the buildings, even the sky rocked with the motion of the fishing boat we had

left behind in the bay. For five days we hadn’t been out of our clothes, hadn’t shaved. We caught our reflection in a shop window. All we needed to complete the picture, we reckoned, was a parrot on our shoulders, a hook for an arm, a treasure chest on our back.