A Calm Day

A DEPRESSION which had been hesitant to move on from the south-eastern coast of Australia, and thereby had for a period of days sent mountainous seas crashing against the rock-armoured headland protecting the township of Bermagui, finally passed away over the Southern Tasman Sea. Its influence rapidly waning, the wind shifted to the north, the spring sunshine became warm, the grassy slopes back from the river gleamed like velvet, and Jack Wilton and his partner, Joe Peace, continued their work on the hull of theMarlin.

At high tide a week earlier the sleek ocean launch had been hauled to the foot of a narrow beach well inside the river’s mouth. Like many rivers along this coast the Bermaguee has teeth in its mouth in the shape of a bar, a bar perfectly safe to navigate in all weather save when the easterly gales roar across the great bay into which flows the river. The bar is something of a dividing line: outside it is the ocean, a despot of capricious moods; inside it the river provides shelter for many fishing launches, their slender jetty, a huge fish-trap, and migrating birds.

Although the tuna season was in full swing, Wilton had taken the opportunity provided by a week’s gap in his engagements with anglers to clean and treat the hull of his twenty-eight-foot-long marine engine-driven launch. After the tuna season would follow the more important swordfishing season, lasting from December to April. There would be little chance for a clean-up then; besides, at the end of long days at sea the anglers liked to be speedily taken back to port.

Work on theMarlin was completed this calm day the third of October; at midnight when the tide was high the craft would be refloated and taken to her berth at the jetty. Of the dozen launches that lay o’nights against this splinter of iron-bolted baulks of timber, eight had been there all this day. The other four had taken anglers to sea after the vast shoals of tuna and kingfish, anglers who came from Melbourne and Sydney, and as far afield as New Zealand, England and America.