Massiveness Cray Seasonry

Day 6

Day six all up in the cray season. You should know that this is a job for men. Men with beards. Both on their face and their chest. You’re growing chest hair just by reading this. I hope that’s alright with you, because it’s happening.

Today was the manliest day of my life so far. But let’s first go over what events carried me to this time.

We dudes 14 spread across two boats - The Shogun and The Jodee - left port the day after Australia Day on the 27th in damn near perfect weather, passing by sailboats and pleasure yachts on our way up north. The journey was to occupy the five days up to the start of cray season on the first of February. About three days into the trip, we started in on some basic training for us greenies (new folk). There are three of us this time out, only one of whom had any dinghy driving experience prior.

The first day had myself and the other inexperienced fellow practicing maneuvering our small boats. Forward. Reverse. Left. Right. Basic shizzle. Then we moved on to navigating around the hose which runs from the compressor at the bow of the boat down to the diver. They use this hookah system as opposed to oxygen tanks because it’s lightweight and easier to maintain. The diver does a whole lot of jumping in and out of the water and can’t be bogged down by heavy equipment. What this means though, is that someone has to sit at the outboard while the diver is below and follow the hose so the diver may swim freely.

The job involves a lot of throttle bursts forward and back as well as drifting in and out of gear. The ideal objective is to stay right alongside the hose so it hangs back in an slender loop to reduce drag on both the diver and the boat. The bare-bones goal is to not chop the hose in the prop, leaving the diver with nothing but a backup pony-bottle of air and a mouthful of water. Along the way I also need to pick up Greg (Lenny (my diver (George’s son))), bags of cray, throw and retrieve equipment as needed, and take way points. Probably other stuff too.

All these skills came through the few days leading up to the season, wherein we visited existing way points from last season and sought out other populated rocks for future spanking. Those days were extremely useful in understanding the mechanics and putting everything together. Fortunately the weather was calm and the water flat, making for ideal learning conditions. Sooner than later, opening day had arrived.

I was ripped out of bed at the crack of 4:30am to the sound of the captain (Kenny) screaming something like “Wake up, you slogs!” Word has it, if you don’t get up after two wake up attempts, you’re carried out of bed and thrown into the water. Haven’t seen it happen so far. But here’s hoping.

Upstairs we brought around our dinghies, leapt gracefully inside them and sped off to our opening spots to wait patiently for the sun to rise. When it did, BAM. Greg was in the blue, grabbing lobsters and shoving them in his sack (the divers collect cray in one-way, mesh bags). We all hit it and hit it hard that day. By then I had all the basics of driving down, so I was able to perform my job aptly. Though the very first time Greg came up after his very first dive I’d managed to get the hose wrapped around the outboard and was busy untangling it while he screamed at me to come pick him up. Not a fancy start.

But everything I’ve explained about what I do so far is not all so complicated once you get stuck into it. The opening quickly settled and I started putting all the pieces together. A little twist here and a throat punch there. Simple. MANLY. Essence.

However, in the meantime I’ve been dancing along the edges of my pain threshold. My hands and feet are covered in cuts, scrapes and bruises from cray and random, important shit that sits around the boat and is hard. My whole body aches from overuse and my skin is dry from constant exposure to the sun. This is the furthest I’ve ever been pushed physically and it’s only just begun. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be able to finish the 8 weeks. Then I remember I’m American, and not Canadian. So I stop whining. (Just kidding, Canadians. You guys are passionate about hockey.) Plus, I’m sure I’ll toughen up soon enough.

We filled up to capacity by day three, meaning it was time for an unload. “Oh hey! A day off!” said Jason. “Yeah, a day off from the dinghy” responded Greg. “WTF?” “Srsly.”

Srsly. We don’t gotta be in the boat, but unloading is certainly no picnic. In fact, I’d much rather be driving with my sore-ass hands than unloading. Half the guys from The Shogun transferred to The Jodee to continue working while two dudes from The Jodee joined us on The Shogun, leaving us a total of six guys to do the do. We chugged about ten hours up to a group of islands, one of which has an airstrip on it. The following process is simple when explained, but excruciating when executed.

We first stopped at a wharf to refuel. I mishandled a fender on the approach, which resulted in a nasty gash through the hull of the boat. Shit.

After that, we docked near a pontoon/loading ramp. Then began the process of grabbing all the cray from the live tanks, inspecting them one-by-one, tossing them into tubs, the tubs into dinghies. The dinghies were then driven to the unloading ramp where a trailer was waiting to take them to the airstrip.

This was done twice, as our catch required two trips. I rode along to the airport with the first load and helped transfer the tubs onto palettes that were then wheeled to a small airplane and placed aboard. But after a warning about being barefoot on the airstrip (we’re barefoot all the time, so we didn’t notice), and me without any shoes, I was not invited for the second trip.

But I was in luck! I was crowned “Chief Crud Cleaner” back on the Shogun. Hooray! I know the title sounds fancy. But really it meant that it was my job to clean all the gore out of the live tanks while we had them empty.

F*******************************************K.

Dude. By now my hands and back ached, and I was wiped from only the first half of the unload. The last thing I wanted to do was crawl in and out of a bunch of smelly holes picking up cray body parts and hosing everything down. But there’s no “I” in “team”. There is, as you know, an “I” in “win”… as well as in “penis”. And in “nipple”. Sadly, there isn’t an “I” in “poop”. There is a “p” in “poop”. Pee and poop. Look at that.

Who’s worse: me for writing this, or you for continuing to read? I rest my case.

I got five out of eight tanks done. Another of the crew, Dean, did the last three as my pace was very slow. Moving freaking hurt so much. I was like a turtle at this point. But we got everything done in time, despite some screw ups from the sort the night before coming back to haunt us. Busted asses in half to do it. As a reward, that night we picked up some pizzas and beer and made merry back aboard the ship.

The next day it was right back to the grind, still with the six of us. The weather was starting to get a little rougher, but was still only a small taste of what was to come… today.

Holy shit on a shit shingle. Today was intense. It started ominously right when I back flipped out of bed. I was barely able to even stand, the boat was rocking so much. I bounced off railings and into walls and tables all my way upstairs. Much to my surprise/dismay, I noticed everyone gearing up above deck. You mean we’re actually going out in this?

F*******************************************K.

The water was lashing wildly all around us. I was barely able to mount my dinghy when we drove up to it. I mean, I’m barely ever able to get on properly anyway, but that’s because I don’t quite have my sea legs yet. This time it was because the freaking bow had a few feet of vertical travel when I jumped from one dinghy to t’other. I fell on my face on the hookah hatch immediately. But at least I landed on the boat. I’ve yet to fall into the water accidentally. I’m sure it’ll happen soon enough.

I rolled up to the main boat and picked up Greg. What followed was the second roughest commute to work I’ve ever experienced. The most rough came later that afternoon.

For now, the waves were intense but ridable. I manned the bow (the driver typically occupies the bow to weigh it down during rough weather, keeps it in the waves while the diver picks out the next spot) and held on tight.

The ride was rough as hell. Spit washed over the bow and soaked the entire boat. The hull would lift up, front first, then crash down, bottom flat on the next wave in spine-compressing impact. Every time I opened my eyes the were inundated with water and wind. My sunglasses did nothing to stop the elements and my body quickly began to ache too much for it being so early in the morning.

When we finally arrived at our spot, it became evident this would be the most challenging day so far. I was rolling over massive waves, taking care not to move the wrong way against the swell - lest the craft would fill with water and sink - and following a long yellow blur hidden inches beneath the tumult. It was all I could do to stay even in proximity of the hose and I couldn’t see Greg or his bubbles no matter how much I might have tried. The water would heave so much sometimes that I was sitting on the side of a wave, looking across at the hose facing me on the next.

Luckily the day was not so complex as Greg stayed down for the majority of it. We hit it pretty hard and had to drive back to the boat to unload our catch. The weather was getting steadily rougher, and now I had to ride up front both for the weight, and to keep the cray from dying from blunt trauma in the full live tank.

We got back and processed our cray. Processing entails separating the smaller, softer, or injured cray and tailing them. Tailing a cray is a pretty gruesome prospect that I’m thinking of explaining in a new section of my website I might make. But for now, you can know it’s the removal of the tail meat from the body shell of the animal after they’ve been bled. BTW, cray blood is one of the weirdest substances I’ve ever come in contact with. If you’ve played with Nickelodeon ooze, you’d know exactly what it is. It’s clear right out of the cray but congeals quickly and turns blue in the process becoming thick and sticky. It coats your hands and dries hard as a rock. I’m actually pretty sure Nickelodeon just packed up cray blood and sold it to kids. Or at least it was a primary ingredient. One minor difference is that if you don’t clean this blood off right away, it will eat your skin. Neat! The other healthy and full-sized cray are tagged and thrown in the live tanks. Simple enough. They aren’t fed when they’re kept alive. So when they’re all unloaded, a few severed heads and tails always turn up because they cannibalize each other in there. These things are messed up.

The way out was again even worse. The conditions were getting absurd and all I could think about was the painful ride back, as my bones compacted together with each raw hit against the water. And if we weren’t airborne and preparing for impact, we were leaned back at what must have been a 45+ degree angle above the raging sea.

Same old story when we began working again. Except this time I managed to rip open Greg’s float bag when he sent it up carrying a heft of cray. I only looked away for a moment to take a way point, then suddenly it was swept up into the prop which sliced a gash through it, draining its air and sending it back to the bottom. I hailed Greg to the surface with three tugs on the line and we raced back to my way point to retrieve the bag. After another dive, word came out over the radio that it was time to head in. I couldn’t hear the reason why because I can never tell what those jackasses are saying even in person, let alone through a shrieking robot. It must have had something to do with the increasingly violent weather.

On the way back, the conditions were nearly impossible to bear. I honestly feared for my safety most of the way because the waves were so massive. Swelling up above the boat, then ramping us into the air. We were literally completely out of the water several times. All I could do was hold on tight. But the spray down the side of the boat was whipping my hand from its grip and still slapping me in the face from the bow. I ended up standing up on the back deck holding onto the console railing, doing my best to move with the bucking waves and not slam into anything solid. I stood there, gritting my teeth and spitting the ocean’s salt back at it, watching the small shadow of the Shogun grow larger all too slowly.

Farts.

We finally arrived after probably 20 solid minutes of carrying on this way. But the day was not done. We still had to get our catch and ourselves back on the main boat. This task is normally easy. The weather had gotten so bad that we had to make special accommodation to ensure no one was hurt. We set our live baskets on the front of a dinghy which was then carefully maneuvered to the stern of the main boat. The moment the front cleat of the dinghy tagged the fenders of the main boat, the basket was handed swiftly over the railing. My dismount consisted of a graceless flop onto the railing, followed by a roll onto the deck, right into the deck wash. I just stayed there for a moment, taking in the somewhat more solid ground and feeling the painful sensations returning to my hands as the adrenaline ebbed.

The dinghies were then first tied together remotely. Then the lead one quickly tagged the stern one last time, and its bow line was affixed to the bridal ropes. Done and done. Except there were still two divers on the dinghy and the conditions had grown too hazardous to even approach the stern one last time in order for them to board. I guess they’d seen these kinds of situations before, because they both quickly dove into the water and swam the gap, pulling themselves up over the fenders.

Tailing and sorting followed. Then the normal cleanup and a steam to nearby, calmer water where we’re currently anchored. We just had dinner and the evening’s winding down. A couple of the guys have assured me that I haven’t even seen the worst yet. Those jerks.

I’m going to try a trick before bed involving baby rash cream and surgical gloves (in a non-gay way) to help ease my hands’ healing. I’m quite certain I’ve left large chunks of information out. If anything’s unclear, feel free to ask questions that will get answered in an untimely fashion. Internet is sparse to non-existant lately.

Pee and poop.

Day 19

Hey there, snuggle bear.

We’re plenty into the season now and pooping along like the wind. Tons has happened since I last laid my hands sensually on this keyboard. I really should do this more often while I’m out here, but by the time I get back from a long day on the water, I’m so rooted all I feel like doing is eating dinner and staring blankly at the television before creaking off to bed.

Speaking of which, yesterday was an extra special long day. We started out the morning by ramping all of the dinghies up on a beach to scrub the hulls clean. After about an hour of that/beach rugby the boats were heaved back into the water for work as usual. I put on a spare mask and stabbed my face in the water a couple times to observe Greg yanking cray out of their rocks. I even strapped on some gear and tried for a dive myself except my ears wouldn’t equalize properly so I couldn’t go more than about 10 feet deep before it felt like my sinuses were ready to explode.

On the way back to the mothership at about 6:00 we came across an alarmingly still and large dorsal fin sticking up out the water above an ominous shadow. From a couple meters away we were all like “WTF shark?”. That is until two massive wings swung out of the water right before the entire shape disappeared entirely. To answer your question, it was a manta ray. A big one and the first I’ve seen so far. But I have seen plenty of other crap jump out the water, including sting rays, flying fish, dolphins, non-flying fish and other beautiful crap I can’t remember about. I try to stop regularly and appreciate the amazing surroundings when I can, but we gots work to do, beotch.

We had become heavy enough with cray to warrant another unload. This time in a place named Cooktown - a 27 hour steam south. This meant that after a long day we still had lots of work to do transferring all the live cray from the Jodee to the Shogun. Since we weren’t going to be needing our dinghies, we left them all with the Jodee, along with our remaining outboard fuel. Pumping the fuel was incredibly more difficult than it needed to be. And to make it worse the Jodee tards were being lazy and gay. As of now, we’ve been steaming all night and still have the rest of the day to chillax having boxed up yesterday’s frozen tails and cleaned up inside and out. That’s the only damn reason I’m able to type this up right now.

We actually did another unload about five days ago which went much better than the first’ne as we had everyone from both boats there and time to get it done proper. Afterwards we were let loose on Thursday Island for a couple hours. Greg tried to help me find a place to get some internet access but everything was closed already. Then people started to hand me drinks and I forgot about things. We grabbed several pizzas and many more drinks on the way back to the boat. It was the first good relaxing evening we’d had since embarking. Straight back to work the next morning. A few hangovers to sweat off during the day. One of the newbies actually left us because he couldn’t handle the thrashing we take jumping over big swells to and from dive spots. He surrendered his chest hair and smoking jacket before finally leaving the vessel.

I’ve got the driving thing down. Just been sharpening my gizame on all fronts. Gotta get my skillz ready for the ladies. “And this is how you gut a cray!” *produces live cray from pocket and proceeds to sever the body and tail sections* But seriously, things are going well. Unadulterated manliness has become an everyday thing. We slam dance over massive swells and shallow reef-tops and through stinging sideways rain all the time. My skin/bones are toughening up. At least waking up is less excruciating than before. BONUS. Notable injuries currently plaguing me: ingrown thumbnail (on the mend), I dropped a knife tip down on my toe just where the nail starts, the outer side of my left foot is riddled with abrasions, I have painful blisters on my heel and pinky that I’m told are caused by cray blood as well as a pair of lacerations across that same left foot from a cray frantically whipping across it. One of the divers found a pair of size 10 booties on the reef a few days ago, so I’ve since protected my feet against further injury. And that’s all just he big’ns. Rest assured the entire list of wounds is much more extensive.

Had an interesting day about a week ago. We were nearly 30 kilometers from the main boat doing our thing when we managed to fill our live tank at around 1:00, which means we must return to the main boat, unload and get back out there. Fire up the outboard and lets!… oh fuck me in the hat the outboard’s broken down. Hell yes it did. 30k away from home and the best our engine can do is 9k/hr. It doesn’t take a stadium full of monkeys to figure out how fecking long it took us go get back. Instead of a quick trip back and forth, our afternoon turned into an epic, but very very slow, journey. By the end of the trip, mild insanity had gripped Greg and he was singing and shouting random stuff that he thought of at the back of the boat, as I stood up front, rolling over the waves. It was one of those bizarre situations that seems like a dream a couple hours later.

Another good story had Greg hanging a crap one day over the side of the dinghy when he noticed another dinghy of ours working nearby on the side Greg was violating. Greg quickly grabbed the radio and asked Sam - the driver of the other boat - what he thought of the view. Sam told him frantically to put it away, but his pleads went unheeded as Greg dropped all the kids off at the ocean on schedule.

There’s probably so much more to tell, but I can’t remember it all. I’ll make a concerted effort to type some every night such that I won’t forget the juicy bits. Enjoy your evening. I know I will. *raises a snifter to his thinly mustached lips*

PS: Just found out Cooktown is too flooded to unload. Instead we’re now headed all the way to Cairns. What this seems to mean is no free time when we get there, and another day of work lost to steaming. I also just this moment learned that the guy-who-left’s replacement is now considering leaving. But it’s not for weakness or anything. He’s a seasoned vet. I guess he’s just not digging it out here. I also also just learned the details of the sitch if we head to the straits. If we do indeed go there, laws dictate that there has to be a certain number of master divers working which means I’ll be bumped to “boat bitch” for about a week while a qualified someone takes my place. I’ll have to cook and clean and do pretty much all the on-boat chores that we normally share. Sounds like an interesting change of pace. But it may not be completely set in stone.

Tunza funza.