He remembered when he was twenty: no bills to pay, no family to provide for and little to lose. Percentage-only worked just fine. A good trip and his boys saw good money, far more than is decent for a kid without a high-school diploma. A good trip, three to five days away from home, could bring in up to 2000 dollars each after Jeff had subtracted overheads.

A bad trip?… well that’s the way it works. Some good, some bad, you throw good dice then you get the super-big dollar prizes, you throw lame dice…

Well, look at it this way; at least you’ve been out in the fresh air.

Jeff smiled. That was something his old man used to say.

That’s the only game going round here, and them’s the rules.

That was another.

All three of the boys still lived at home with their folks as far as he knew. All the money they made was pretty much fun money. Booze, bikes, smokes, whatever.

Ritchie Bradden, a lad who used to crew for him last season, called it his ‘screw you’ money. He’d taken five days’ sick leave from his seven-dollars-an-hour job at Wallders, only to come back at the end of the week and walk off Jeff’s boat with nearly 3000 dollars in his back pocket. His first stop was Wallders to say ‘screw you’ to the store manager. Since then Ritchie had stuck with fishing.

Percentage-only worked just fine.

Jeff watched the line descending from the outrigger silhouetted against the last light on the horizon. It twitched and began to pull backwards with a creaking that could be heard above the chug of the engine.

‘Hey! We got a catch!’ one of the lads called out.

Jeff watched as it tightened. A school of mackerel could do that. They were dense, tightly packed. You knew it when you scored them.