Before the FV Warrior before the road there was the first boat.
That's where the water got into me. She was called the Heritage. My first skipper was a man called Bill Orchard a hard man the old kind, hard the way the sea makes them. He'd built her with his own two hands, and I was a green deckhand who didn't know a thing, and I loved it from the first day.
We were shark fishing. Bottom-lining. You lower the long lines down out into the water, line and hooks and hooks and hooks all the way along, set it on the bottom and wait, then haul the whole lot back up to see what the dark's given you. Cold, dirty, endless work. I took to it like I was made for it.
The best trip I ever had on her, we came home with two thousand sharks to our name mostly grey shark, and a couple of big mako in among them. Ten ton of shark, the one trip. Ten ton. We'd haul them up three hundred at a time onto the deck, then fillet them and get the whole lot straight away below into the ice before the next haul came up. She carried a fourteen-tonne freezer, the Heritage, and everything went down clean as we went, batch by batch, not piled up waiting for someone to deal with it. Those big makos, before they went below, I cut their jaws right out and kept them the way my grandad used to take the jaws out of the great whites. Same hands, same sea, the same blood doing the same thing, and I never once stopped to think about it back then. And that was Bill he could always land you right on the fish. Whatever the water was doing, however far out, he'd put the boat straight on top of them. He was good like that.
This one trip we were up around Stephens, working out that way, and we were coming in at dark. It was just the three of us aboard me Bill and a fella called Gerald Timms my own blood, a Timms off my nan's line, though I was too green then to think about what that even meant. A Timms and me, out on a boat called the Heritage, and I never once clocked I was standing in my own whakapapa. Once the sun went we started spotlighting off the boat. Bill had the torch, sweeping the beam along the shore. I was just standing there watching it all, taking it in, the way you do when everything's still new and every bit of it is a marvel.
The beam swept the shore and caught two deer.
One shot. Gerald Timms dropped both of them off the deck of the boat, across the water, two deer with the one bullet in the dark. They went down on the beach. We rowed in and I followed them up the sand with the torch, holding the light steady over Gerald while he worked. He cupped his hands right inside the deer's belly, up to the wrists in it in the dark and then he lifted his arms and sprayed the whole lot over me. Warm. All of it. Blood and worse, right across my face.
"Now you're a hunter," he said.
And I stood there on a black beach in the middle of nowhere, mid-twenties, dripping, and I don't think I'd ever felt more like I belonged somewhere in my life. I loved it. God help me, I loved every second of it.
He had the pair of them gutted on that beach in no time quick and clean, like he'd done it a thousand times. We had a long rope, and he tied the two deer up, and we rowed back out to the boat.
When Bill saw me come over the side dripping, painted head to foot in it, he said, What the bloody hell happened to you And Gerald just laughed. I made him a hunter.
We hauled the deer up onto the deck and Gerald chopped them down all the steak the lot. And before we were done he cut the teeth out and put them in my hand. Shaped like teardrops, pure ivory smooth as anything.
Because that's the thing. I was good. I got a name for myself quick a good pair of hands a good deckhand the kind that can walk onto any boat on the coast and get a start. I had it. The work I loved the man teaching me and a girl to take the ivory home to.
I did three or four years on the Heritage. And it wasn't just sharks harpuka that's grouper, bluenose, ling, all the good deep-water fish came up on those lines. But I could never stay put. Come winter I'd be off chasing the hoki, boat to boat, whoever was heading out the Lady Anna, crewed with a couple of jokers I only ever knew as Dago and Killer I never did learn their real names. The Kathleen G. The Tenacity, where Killer was skipper we were the top tuna boat in the whole fleet for a season. Top boat. And I left him too. And the Warrior, eventually but that one's a story of its own.
And I jumped ship.
Course I did. I looked at all of it the best thing I'd ever had and something in me said there's better out there, there's more, and I went off looking for it. First time of a thousand. I didn't know yet that the wanting-more was the whole sickness. I thought it was ambition.
I'd find out. It'd take me the length of my life to find out.
But before I go on, I have to finish Bill, because he was the best there was and he deserves that much.
Years on, Bill started building himself a new boat, up at his place. Another one, from nothing, with his own two hands, same as he'd built the Heritage. And I got to work on it with him the two of us back at it after all that time, me and my old skipper on a boat again.
Then he got cancer. Eight months, and he was gone.
The best skipper I ever had. The best boat mate. Bill Orchard. I still talk to him. I still tell him I'm sorry, and that I miss him. Because some men get right into you and they stay there, and Bill's one of mine.
And Gerald. My second cousin by blood, but he's always been more uncle to me than cousin that's just what he is. I'd do anything for that man. The cleaner I get, the more I want to be around family, all of them, not running from any of it anymore. And I miss him. I think about that beach more than he probably knows.
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