Sea Life

Leaving the beach behind and with a fishing rod and bucket in hand I bush bashed my way upwards through pandanus palms, papyrus and thick woodland before entering a patch of grass rimmed by a raspy cliff. My secret fishing spot lay 70 metres below.

Beginning the decent, I inched along like a limpet. The bucket cracked against the cliff face and the mushy contents of bread, squid and thawed prawns oozed through the base, creating a burley trail dribbling down my leg. My sunglasses fell from my head and plopped into the ocean.

Safely back at sea level I caught sight of my quarry. Big and blue they were: Girella cyanea; an azure frenzy of fish that soon stripped bait and snapped my line with frustrating regularity. I caught two trophy-size beauties but lost a lot of tackle in the process and was determined to rescue the last hook snagged on a rock at the water’s edge. That’s when my world turned upside down.

Picked up by a voluminous swell of seawater, within seconds I was ocean bound and on a water slide without the squeaky plastic feel of a slippery dip. Instead, bum-grating molluscs shredded my board shorts and backside on the ride seawards.

With the fishing rod tightly grasped my body bombed into the ocean and I began dogpaddling one handed at the speed of a greyhound. Still within range of the rocky platform from which I’d been unceremoniously sucked from, I hoicked the rod back onto land, only to watch it swept up by the next slosh of sea and returned to the ocean for good.

Riding waves of emotion brought about by thoughts of a three-metre Tiger shark recently spotted in the area, I bobbed up and down, one minute in Jules Verne territory as water draining from the rocks took me down to basement levels, and then with every returning surge I was pushed agonisingly close to reclaiming dry land.

It took three attempts before I latched onto terra firma. Blood gushed from my left kneecap and inner thigh as I flapped about like a fish out of water. Fingertips were numbed, shredded and impregnated with an aquarium’s worth of marine fragments. The fight-or-flight response had summoned untapped strength to get a grip at all costs.

I looked for a calm sea pool away from the water’s edge to clean the fish. Feeling proud as punch with my kilo-plus catch scaled and gutted, Neptune’s fury returned. One last lift from the sea sent a torrent of foaming brine my way creating an instant whirlpool that ripped the fish of the day from my clasp. They returned from whence they came, but this time belly up. I stared tridents at Neptune.

Back in the home of a friend who had just cooked a pile of the Bluefish that I had nearly lost my life for, I asked her to make some sense of the day’s disaster? “We didn’t need fish tonight,” she replied.