Fishin’
They say to keep your body out of the water to prevent hypothermia. But I only shiver when I stand up, so I’m squatting down with only my head above the surface while I wait for my friends to wrap up the fishing net.
I look past them, where the brown rocks of the reef end and the ocean drops off steeply into deep blue that probably extends all the way to Antarctica. To the east and west the reef stretches as far as I can see, which isn’t very far in the steady rain. I can barely make out the silhouette of a small island that sits between us and Kuttu.
I think about what my friends might be doing on a Saturday in April, because I sometimes I can’t believe that I’m here. That and I don’t want to think about how cold I am. I realize a coffeeshop or a city park seem foreign to me. It’s been more than four months since I’ve seen a car. I’d really like a cup of hot chocolate or a hot shower right now–going on four months on that one too. When I’m sitting by the fire cooking rice later tonight I’ll remember the tingly, burning sensation in your toes when you jolt them back to life in the shower after being in the cold. Reality returns and I see three men collecting a net in a great expanse of nothing eight thousand miles from my home.
Erat carries the net back and we climb in the motorboat. “Omwi werei umule?” he asks.
“Ewer, ina epwe engol are engol me liman.”
“Ia werei nucha. Ái luku Samwei a ierló.”
I laugh.
I’ve spent the morning chasing a fish into a net on the reef, swimming or running around in my snorkel ans
Sambas. Just twenty minutes earlier I was trying to swim with two dead fish in my hands when Erat pointed out the spines that were about to cut up my hands. Doggie paddling in sneakers is not fun.
Erat poles the boat another hundred feet down the reef and we climb out to set the net again. He’s about to put it down when he stops. “Ucha.” Just in front of us in the waist deep water is a circle of blue shapes. I set my half of the net carefully, keeping an eye on the shapes and trying not to splash too much and scare them away. I put on my mask and duck under the water to check out the school of blue-green parrotfish slowly swirling.
I pick up some rocks and them off the side to scare them toward the center of the net. But when I check underwater again all I see is a black-tip shark cruising in a cloud of dust where the fish were. Gone. Stokichy and Samwei come running in and only one or two of the fish end up in the net.
We go a few more rounds with the net before we climb on the boat for lunch. There’s a container of rice, and some clams that Samwei found while Erat and I were setting the net. Erat cleans one of the umule we caught and hands it to me to eat off the boat. The other three laugh when, shivering, I put on my raincoat. They were just taking a break. I thought we were done.
There’s still another trip with the net and then some linefishing. They laugh at me again because after I pull in a few fish they can tell I’ve forgotten how cold I am (“Met Dan, a morokoló om féú?”). We’re still not done because they want to drop the net on the ocean side of the reef by the wreck of the Golden Pacific. When I rest by the side of the boat for too long Stokichy tells me to get because out here the sharks are bigger than the four-footer I just saw on the reef.
It’s four in the evening when we get back to land, and by the time I’ve shower (which made me shiver again) and had a cup of the coffee the sun is down.
Barbequed umule with two kinds of taro for dinner and I read for a bit before laying down on my pandanus mat at nine, listening to the wind and rain still coming down outside.
