Still more cray seasonry

Day 30

We’ve been in the Torres Straits for nearly a week by now. Confusion has once again rapt my brain. Word had it a few days ago that we were probably going to be staying in the Straits for the rest of the trip, meaning that my week of boat duty would transform into an early ticket back to Cairns, as I still don’t qualify to work in this area. Now I hear talk of heading back down the coast. Whether or not it’s for good or not, I don’t know. I may or may not be leaving the boat early.

In the meantime, those red dots on my hands have essentially faded away since I haven’t really been back to work for several days. My second day as boat boy got interrupted when a boil on one of the other driver’s wrists popped, leaving a huge crater in his arm. Oddly enough, that same driver’s diver got some kind of infection in his lip a couple days later that caused the entire right side of his face to swell up. They’ve both been on the main boat with me for the past few days while that fixes itself.

Our water pump exploded again last night so, after a vigorous reaming from the captain this morning, we have no running fresh water on the boat.

We just got back from a mission to some nearby shallows in an effort to catch something for dinner tonight. That’s another thing we’re out of… food. Well, not food in general. But supplies are running low all around since we’re just about to go for another unload. We’re rationing milk and completely missing dinner meat. We’ve still got bacon, deli ham and a feck-load of cray meat in our freezer.

I’ve played some GTA during my free time. Plus my right hand looks like it’s falling apart. Dead skin and calluses are dropping off it like flies. My feet are armored enough now that I can stand on the sun-heated deck without crying.

My camera got dropped on its face a couple days ago and it won’t take pictures properly any more. I have to take short videos and grab a frame from them until I can get a new one.

The captain just wandered through the cabin and muttered something about “we’re definitely going down the coast now”. I’m not sure if that’s for good or not. “Unload” was also in his muttering, and that could mean we’re going down there just for a few days.

Let’s just hope that the future does that thing where it happens.

Day 35

Not a happy shiny day of farts today. Although, on the bright side, we’ve left the Straits. We’re two days into what’s supposed to be my last week aboard. We’ve steamed a ways down the coast as planned to get what we can here. Then it’s straight back up, and straight down for me from there… Straits. Boo… na.

The bad news comes from Kenny, the captain, learning that he’ll soon be fined between 50 and 70 thousand dollars for a diver who got bent two days into the season last year. He left when we unloaded at Horn Island (next to Thursday Island) to hear the verdict back in Cairns before we came down here. New regulations are also being put in place aboard our boat, though I can’t recite to you the specifics. Suffice it to say their purpose is to depose fun. The Shogun is essentially being made an example of. These rules apply to all cray boats, but we’re under the magnifying glass from that unfortunate incident. For now, Little (Luke (captain of The Jodee)) is in charge of The Shogun while The Jodee’s first mate, Dean (Kenny’s nephew) is taking care of The Jodee until Kenny gets back.

Not only that, but most of the divers had a pretty lousy day. Lenny and I came out alright with 60 kilo live and 14 in tails. But everyone else ended up with “fuck all” for their efforts. There are always those days. They suck ass, but you can’t win ‘em all. Unless you can. In which case you can.

Not everything’s gone to shit. Yesterday was a very nice welcome back to the water for me. We encountered several pilot whales in the morning, which ended up following us around for the better part of the day. They looked an awful lot like big dolphins… with round heads. Though they weren’t as spunky as dolphins. Except when we sped from spot to spot, they had no trouble keeping up under our hull. They figured we were there to play with them. Our outboard broke down once, and while we were trying to get it going again, a big male started flapping his tail on the surface, seemingly frustrated that we weren’t entertaining them enough. He got pretty freaking aggressive too. Each slap got closer and harder. Wasn’t but a few minutes till we got it going again and sped away. A little later they all faded away somewhere. Before they left I jumped in and had a little swim with them. I was told not to be afraid, but at the same time that if I was afraid, my heartbeat would rise and they’d sense it, and perhaps mistake me for prey. I didn’t stay in the water for long.

Plus today, a big (but actually small) sea turtle poked up and swung a generous half-lap around the dinghy. I reckon he was curious and cautiously checking it out. I had a nice time watching him swim, bobbing his head in and out of the water for a good couple minutes before swooping back down.

Weather was gorgeous on the ride back. It was nice the whole day, really. But the water waited till the end to glass out and give us a smooth ride home. My camera started working just in time to catch a few shots of the serenity. Strange that this is the same place that was hammering us last time we were through here.

The time break dances by much faster now that I’m back at work. Relaxing and healing on the boat is all well and good. But even I have my limits without internet.

Day 36

I’m back on the damn boat again! Son of a bitch! Just for one day this time. Our outboard is making a very alarming clicking sound. Tomorrow we’ll be swapping it for a different one. But today is lost. I’m sitting around the boat dreaming of getting within internet range. Got some emailing to do. We should be steaming tonight, and might hopefully stop by a barge as well to pick up the other, more delicious, half of our supplies which includes cereal, chips, biscuits and personals. Looking forward to that actionfest.

Just a couple new, quick random observations about Australian people:

1. They put the word “but” at the end of sentences in place of “though”. And they do it very often. As in “Good day, Carlton! Could you perhaps deposit this clutch of berries into the appropriate refrigerator compartment?” “Why Fenwick! Those berries are spoilt, but!”

2. They spell and pronounce “film” as “fillum”. Wtf? At first I just thought they were saying it weird because they say everything weird. But then I finally saw it spelled and… I’ll never forget the day my world collapsed around me.

3. “Rooted” means both “had sex with” (v) and “tired” (adj). Genius.

I managed to spank the back of my head on an icicle in the freezer this morning. Got some blood out of it too! What an uncomfortable thing to have happen.

…later that night:

We just now had to haul the main anchor up by hand because of some mechanical problem. Pretty heavy piece of gear (it is an anchor, after all), but when you’ve got eight dudes dragging it up it’s not difficult.

*insert shit I’ve forgotten here*

Day 37

And what a day! Last night even! We’ll start there…

The anchor winch is out of order, explaining why we had to get the anchor up by hand earlier last night. No big deal. But what really sucked nuts was even later last night - technically early this morning - at about 2:00am, when we finished steaming a few hours and it was time to anchor up once more. Except wait, our anchor don’t work!

First plan of attack was to transfer all the dinghies to the The Shogun so we could tie up to the back of The Jodee and use their anchorage that way. After maneuvering around trying to get in proper position for what must have been a half an hour, the idea was abandoned and Plan B stepped up to the plate: borrow a smaller, spare anchor from The Jodee, attach it to some heavy duty rope, lower it by hand into the water and hope it bites. We did all that and started hoping for the best as we all settled back into our still warm beds.

Must have been ten minutes later that we were roused once more and told the anchor wasn’t working. Back to Plan A. We yanked the failed anchor back out of the water and once more attempted to attach to The Jodee. This time meeting with immediate success! Back to bed again and for good! The entire ordeal, summed up here in only a few sentences, actually swallowed up about two hours in the middle of the night. I had hoped, in light of that fact, we would at least get an extra hour to sleep in. Nope. 6:30am wake up call as usual. Back to work, tired and all. But the sadness didn’t end there.

Since our dinghy’s outboard needed replacing, we were given another one from a diver who had to stay on The Jodee for two days because he bent his dive computer. Lemme tell you, this thing is a BEAST. It looks like a cracked up whore and handles like a refrigerator. However, it’s got a kick-ass outboard on it which I enjoyed using to race up the line all day. But that was far outweighed by its assness.

We steamed about 20k away to our first spot and fired up the hookah. On the way to a rock, the damn thing died! I checked the fuel level to find that it hadn’t been refueled the night before, which is always supposed to be done. I grabbed the small fuel can only to discover that it was entirely empty. The only fuel we had for the hookah was in the spare fuel drum which doesn’t lend itself gracefully to this kind of delicate pouring. No worries at all though! There was a syphoning hose nestled in its handle. That’s really the only way to extract fuel from this container. Greg handled getting it started to fill the hookah can. But once that was full, he was busy at the back of the dinghy doing something probably important.

Now was my turn to attempt my first fuel syphoning so we could fill the hookah itself. I recreated what I saw Greg do and ended up with a mouth-/beard-full of the gasoline/outboard oil mixture. Holy crapzilla was that completely gross! It both had no taste and the most awful taste I’ve ever experienced at the same time. I spat it overboard and saw that nothing was coming out of the hose. Damn it! When I called back to Greg to see if he’d get it started once more, I noticed that there actually WAS some fuel flowing. I placed the hose properly and discovered I’d actually done it right on my first attempt. Hooray!

Now that the hookah was all gassed up, it was time to get to work… DAMN IT AGAIN. THE HOOKAH WON’T START. Couple minutes of ripping on the starter cable later, we found out it was a loose spark plug. Our dinghy actually suffers from the same problem. Some polite jiggling got the machine up and running… finally. Although Greg was now already more than reasonably pissed considering the early hour. They say divers have short fuses because of the extra nitrogen in their systems all the time. That theory certainly proves itself day in and day out on this boat.

Bags for the morning varied from extremely light to completely empty. But the real show was in the crap dinghy we were in. When a hose gets chopped in the prop, it isn’t replaced. Only repaired. A hose joiner is used to clamp the two severed sections back together. Most boat’s hoses have at least a few battle wounds like this in them. This one was no exception, and one of the connections refused to stay together. About three or four times throughout the day the hose would spontaneously pop apart. Luckily it was only under enough stress to do so when Greg was driving from spot to spot. So he never lost his air supply due to this gayness.

There’s more! Each dinghy is equipped with hose holders at the back, there to clamp the hose leading to the diver’s back so it doesn’t pull when motoring around. The clamps on this boat sucked balls and kept losing their grip on the hose. So every now and then when we were moving fast enough, I’d just hear a sharp “OW” from behind me and look back to see Greg angrily reattaching the hose to the clamp. This happened several times.

Probably around 11:30am, the suspect hose connector once again severed. That, combined with the faulty hose clamp and our meager catch, persuaded Greg to make the wise decision of taking an early lunch so he could cool his temper. We sided up next to another dinghy of ours to have lunch. They were also catching next to nothing.

After lunch, we got straight back into it, and straight back to the poor numbers. But even though we weren’t catching much, the ones we were catching were big’nes and made up for some of the scant bags.

Somewhere around 3:30 I was chugging along the hose as usual, no fancy maneuvering or nothin’, when I looked back to discover the hose had become shockingly entangled in itself. Like, really effing entangled. I hope this is some kind of world record for how much a hose has been tangled. Because damn. The thing had been wrapped up so tight in itself that no air could pass, and it wasn’t long before Greg came up blaring “WTF?”. He yelled at me to “just come and pick me up!” I informed him that the hose was wrapped, so he told me to just drag him in. Only then did he see just how mangled it was. Surprisingly enough though, he didn’t scream or get mad or anything. Later, he even said “I bet you’re wondering why I didn’t go off on you earlier.” I totally was. But I’ll take it.

But that’s not it. While we shut down the hookah to untangle that impossible mess, the driver of the nearby dinghy we lunched with suddenly crackled onto the radio asking us to come help him quickly. His outboard had broken down and his attempts to raise his diver were failing, leading us to believe something had gone wrong below the surface. Obviously this is a very serious situation. We quickly ripped in the mass of hose. But as soon as we had it all in, we were told that the diver had surfaced after all. Whew.

The outboard was still out of action so we continued over to see what was up, picking up the diver on our way. Something was hindering the shifter and they were unable to switch between forward, neutral and reverse without reaching into the outboard with the cowling off. They were able to drive home, but not to continue work. Which turned out to be a happy coincidence. We swapped our useless hose for theirs which would be in no further use. Since they were knocking off early, they even untangled ours for us. Bonus! We finished work, only discovering a couple more cray.

The ride home was a bit hazardous in itself. We had the option to either take a long way around some reef which had shallowed with the low tide or to make the riskier passage through an ambiguous channel in that same reef. For me, noticing the day we’d just endured, it seemed like the safer, though longer, way around would be best. Greg decided otherwise! And since he was at the stick, look which direction we went in! Ended up not being so bad though. It was kinda like a videogame… except not - drifting through the shady patches of shallow reeftop.

That took only about 10 minutes followed by us getting home normally. Similarly average evening operations. Except I had to re-swap the hoses.

Another random thing about the dudes on this boat that I’ve forgotten to mention so far is that if you say anything that has at least 2% sexual content in it, your words will be contorted in some variation of you being gay and taking it in the mouth or something like that.

Day 38

The whales came back today! And I got tons of pictures of them! This time they were a lot more playful, surfing waves and jumping out of the water. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of them in midair… DAMN IT. The rest of the day was much better than yesterday. Ended up with 64 kilos in our live tank.

When we got back to the boat, I noticed a small cray sitting on the back deck that looked like a painted up hussy. It had a strange, green shell with black and white highlights and much more pronounced and dangerous spikes. I was quickly informed that it was a “green cray.” I didn’t get any sort of clarification about how prevalent they are or if we usually see many of them. But the thing was freaky!

Another, ‘nother random thing I forgot to mention is that we’re out of food pretty much. Not in the sense that there’s absolutely nothing to eat. Just the everyday stuff is missing, like cereal, chips, biscuits, candy, and peanut butter, to name a few. We also ran out of meat for dinner again. Tonight we had spaghetti, and tomorrow we’ll be having fish, some of which we already caught today.

Day 39

…the final day. Yes, it’s official. We’re steaming to TI once more for yet another unload - and my last. I’ll be flying out on some manner of plane-craft along with our catch… I think. Either way I’m off. Just in time too. I mean, actually really late. But the ball of my right foot got wrecked somehow and I’ve been limping around like a punk for half the day. That and my right thumb goes into a painful sleep when I’m in bed. I think it has something to do with the way I’ve been tailing the cray. At least that seems to aggravate it.

The rough plan now is that when I get back to Cairns, I’ll wait there for two weeks for Greg to return as well. Then he plans to buy a car which we’ll use to take a trip to see the outback, where maybe I can FINALLY fight a kangaroo with my bare hands and settle the score made so long ago… on that day. Then Japan probably maybe. I haven’t heard from any of my douche friends living there for a while. But hopefully the plan’s still on because I’m stoked all over that.

Oh, and today was a piece of floating crap. Racked up 32 kilo altogether, plus Greg speared three red emperors and a coral trout. One of the emperors is in a home box for me, which Greg has promised to add to and send back to his folks place, where from I’ll send it on home to the states. Get ready for that, mom and dad!

I had a great time out here, and am really glad I made it this far. But I think I’m ready to relax and do nothing for a while.

Back in Cairns:

The flight out of Thursday Island was really cool. Some of the most beautiful bird’s eye scenery I’ve ever seen when we took off. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember to get my camera out until later on.

Landed last night in a tropical-sized downpoor. I had to walk through the stuff in my t-shirt and trunks - not exactly the right apparel for the weather. On the plus side, my shorts dried very quickly!

My right foot now has a tangible lump on the bottom of it. VERY uncomfortable to walk on, so I’m just hobbling around everywhere for the time being.