Patagonia NZ

The excitement of catching a fish, then to crumb and fry it, was the driving force of this adventure in the first place. Every time I eat or think of crumbed fish, it takes me directly back to being five years old again, sitting on the bench, crumbing fish with Dad. Flour, egg, breadcrumbs. He was the crumbs; I was the flour and the egg. The incredible gift of food, it can send us straight back in time.

We pull the backpack from the rear of the truck. I check over what’s inside: chopping board, knives, sharpening stone, Pop’s scaler I’ve had since I was 10, all the teeth worn off. I see a couple of hooks and sinkers. There’s a few swivels floating around at the bottom. I wrap my belt on, holding my diving knife on the hip, a gimbal and a bait holster. “It’s gonna be a hot one today Charlzy,” I say. “I reckon it will go 40-plus.”

We whack a bit of zinc on our snouts, do the last check and lock the truck. I grab my trusty rod and Alvey reel off the roof. I love these reels; something also passed down to me. They last 10 lifetimes. I never wash them with fresh water. All they need is a dunk in the ocean and you’re on your way. That’s the beauty of using strong old equipment, you can fix and repair it yourself. It’s like the ability we have to repair and fix ourselves. Our bodies are so powerful beyond measures, and I know for one, growing wholesome food, good exercise, good hunting, love and gratitude brings nourishment to me. That in itself is a remedy for most illnesses.

We scour down the cliff’s edge, leaving the truck in the distance. The day is glorious. Richest of blue skies, the ocean like looking into the eyes of my grandfather, steel-blue yet blank, unpredictable. It’s a present, rugged beauty. I watch each step to cushion my knees, carefully deciding where to place my feet on the crumbled cliff. I think to myself, take it easy and you’ll be surfing tomorrow. The feeling of reaching the bottom of the cliff is somewhat like the feeling of climbing a mountain, in reverse. It’s the same rush of excitement and relief.

The first thing I can think of is getting nude and diving into that steely blue ocean. There is no freer feeling than running around on the rocks with your two best friends, nude, salty and burnt. Annie comes out of the water more drowned rat than kelpie. Charlz and I lay, soaking up the warmth of the rocks beneath us.

We lay for what feels like a lifetime, floating into complete nothingness, peace. It’s my dream here with my girls and I get to live it every day. I feel a sense of gratitude, the abundance of love. I open my eyes and instantly snap back. The tide is dropping. Charlz suggests we start fishing.

This day, we are on the hunt for a groper. We have been eating small fish for the past month, living on ceviche and not chasing larger fish, giving our bodies a rest from cooked meat. The days before though were filled with a lot of big surf, and I said to Charlz, “I think we need a good feed of cooked fish.” It’s more dense energy, more calories. I was craving that and so was Charlz. Groper are full of good fat. They’re a high energy fish and that’s why I love eating them.

I only catch one or two of these fish a year. We respect the coast we travel, live and fish on, only taking what we need and then leaving it alone, giving it time to rejuvenate, walking away from good fishing ground, preserving it for generations to come. It’s all balance and if we find that balance, we can live in harmony, and it will always be there for us.

We’re crawling over the rocks, hopping one foot to the next. It’s a shadow-like dance. Arriving, the water is gleaming back at us. We unzip the backpack, reaching among the loose hooks and stray leader to the bottom, eventually digging out a swivel and a sinker. Picking through my hooks there’s one that needs a touch up, covered by rust and the tip quite blunt. I grab the cracked piece of sharpening stone, another hand-me-down from Grandad. It does the trick on the old hooks. I start to run the hook over and over, back and forth, feeling the tip each time for a sharp, supreme edge, the rusty old hook coming back to life.

I look over to see two sooty oystercatchers foraging amongst the rocky shoreline, richest of red beaming from their magnificent feet and beaks as they wander from crack to crack, looking for their next feed, possibly a crab.

I’ve managed to get a swivel on, and the leader too. I feed the sinker on and begin to tie my hook. I stare in awe of Charlz, who’s flicking her rod to my left. Coming from the mountains far away in Switzerland, surrounded by walls of snow and streams of ice, her flick has become an art to watch. I’m thinking how proud and how happy I am to have shared that with her, to see her flourishing, to have passed on what was passed on to me. It makes my heart sing.

Reaching into the bait holster, I wrap my hands around something smooth, yet gooey – a bit of abalone gut from the day before. I thread the bait onto the hook, lower my line and give a big cast into the sea. I let some line out and click the reel back over, tightening up the slack. I’m fishing with gear that I know isn’t going to let me down. I know it’s strong and if I have a good fish on, it’s not going to take me for a ride and wrap me around the bottom. I don’t want to just catch fish for fun or pleasure by fishing light for the thrill. I want to feed myself and my family.

I’m retrieving, feeding the line back through my fingers, guiding each wind, mind empty, mind still, completely present but floating somewhere between the here and now and nothingness. When you’re completely in the moment, beauty unfolds. Suddenly I feel a huge crack on the end of my line. My rod almost gets pulled from my grasp. I’m thinking to myself, that was a groper.

But then, just like that, the line goes slack. The hook hasn’t set. A memory plays in my head. I’m six, and Dad and I are snapper fishing in the middle of the night, staring up at the stars from opposite ends of our 10-foot tinny. We both get a hook-up, and shout, “I’m on!” at the same time. Seconds later both fish throw the hooks, and we both go flying backwards into each other, onto the floor of the boat, laughing uncontrollably as we lay together, staring into the darkness amongst the rich smell of pillies and fuel.

I rebait and have another flick. As I tighten up the slack, all of a sudden, my line starts racing back into the sea. I clench the back of the reel and pull back on the rod, feeling a heaving weight on the other end. “Charlz! Charlz! I’m on!”

This fish was so powerful. I felt his power the moment I hooked him, and I knew it wasn’t the fish I was looking for. I knew it was a big male, and I just wanted to get him to shore and release him back to the sea. My heart was racing.

As line peels off my Alvey, my hand is burning. He takes a couple of huge runs; the rod bent to the water. I’m trying to hold him off the bottom. “He’s a big fish, Charlz!“ I’m gritting my teeth, trying to turn him around. I feel his head coming to the surface and I get a look. I glance at Charlotte. “Charlz, he’s special. We gotta get him back in the water as soon as we land him.”

Five minutes pass. The fight above the surface and below continues. “I’m going to try and land him.” I pull the tension high, keeping his head up and wash him in with the next swell, gliding his big blue body onto the rocks. I let my line slack and run down, popping the hook from his mouth. I pick him up, one hand under his belly, the other supporting his head. We jump into the ocean with him, holding his body as I wash him back and forth to revive him, the waves washing over all of us. Annie has jumped in too.

We fill his gills with movements back and forth, but there’s nothing. “He’s so tired,” I say in resignation. “I think we’re going to keep him. He’s just not going.” Charlz stares at me with sadness in her eyes. I can barely carry his weight as I use all my strength to climb out of the water. I look at him, and say, “I’m sorry mate… but thank you.”

I bring him up to a pool that sits below our bag. I get my knife and kill him straight away, holding his head. I give gratitude and say many thanks to him for feeding us. I tell him, I’m grateful for his life and that nothing will go to waste, that we will cherish the food that comes from him, that he will feed us and our family. Charlz is in tears, and I whisper, “It’s okay, bub. He didn’t want to go. He’s a gift. It’s okay.”

I always let those big ones go. I always give them that chance to swim off and nine times out of ten they do. But on this day that didn’t happen. In return we now had an abundance of beautiful fish to live on, to share, and to cherish in our bellies. It’s good to find your own food, be that hunting a kangaroo or foraging for shellfish or possibly finding your own leaves and plants to eat. Everything has a heartbeat. Everything has a soul, and we are all entwined in this fragile web. The trees talk to each other. The animals talk to each other. Just like us we all feel. We all love. We feel compassion. We’re connected to all this too. We’re a part of all this.

I scale and clean him, leaving his remains for the Pacific gulls. Pieces of the sea floor fill his stomach – sea urchin spikes, a crab leg. The smell is a mixture of fermented kelp and sea floor. It doesn’t smell of a fish that eat other fish. It’s a sweet, ocean smell. We pack our small array of things into the backpack. I always carry two ropes in case we catch a good fish to carry it home. In this case I begin tying him onto the backpack, the rope just fitting around him. I successfully secure him, and Charlz lifts the bag onto my back. I brace for the weight and we’re off. We start to scale the cliff. The rocks are loose, spitting out from beneath my booties. We get to the top. By this time, its late afternoon, and we still have to walk a few kilometres back to the truck. One foot to the next, counting each step in unison, minds wandering yet again into the abyss. I laugh at Charlz, “We’re gunna sleep good tonight!”

My throat is dry and I’m thinking of water. I think of the honey in the truck we’d swapped with a friend for a fish frame two months earlier. I think of making a refreshing honey drink, mixed with salt and water, a bush sports drink. “Let’s make a big honey drink when we get home,” I suggest. It would be the first actual source of energy we’d consume that day, at five o’clock in the afternoon. We were a touch ecstatic at the thought of it.

The truck comes into view. The bluest of blue skies, richest of blue against the red dirt, still counting the steps back to where we started eight hours earlier. Feels like a lifetime ago.

Opening the back of the truck and flipping out the table, I grab my stone out of the draw and begin to sharpen my knife. “I’m gunna start filleting him. There’s plenty of flies… we need to work as a team.” Bending my knees I lift him onto the table. I insert my first cut into one side of his backbone, running my knife along it, feeling each movement, each knuckle, taking my time, no mistakes, giving that respect, doing it slow.

A funny memory pops to my mind. Dad always filleted quick and fast, leaving half the fillet on the backbone, the main attraction especially when we smoked the frames. One of my favourite times growing up was mackerel season. We would fill the freezer ready for winter. We had three 44-gallon drums made into smokers. Dad would smoke all the frames and wings. I could smell it up the street getting off the school bus. I would get so excited, I would run home. Having three kids and half the neighbourhood at our place for dinner, Dad always had fish on the table. It was fish and three veg, mostly. A snag night was a special occasion. It was a cheap way to live. Looking back now I think how blessed I was to have it like that and not the other way around.

Fifteen minutes have passed, and we’ve taken the sides off and are packing the fillets into the fridge. We’ve wrapped the backbones and wings in a towel knowing we’re going to eat them tonight, cooked over a fire. There is plenty of food for us and plenty to share. I've always been big on food swap. As a little girl of six years old, Dad would get me to run fish on my bike around the neighbourhood. But the one that stuck with me was our beautiful neighbour. She was in her late seventies and would always swap me a cuppa and as many biscuits as I could eat. We would sit and dunk our biccies and talk about our day. I swap fish with my close friends and people who are truly grateful. We swap fish for salt, fruit, veggies, honey and nuts or even for someone’s time and help. It makes my heart sing. To give is the most rewarding feeling of all, especially when nature is gifting it to us for free.

“I’m keen for a tub,” I say to Charlz. “Let’s stop up the road and wash off.” There’s nothing better than rinsing off after a big day fishing. It’s like a fresh start. Wash the grime off, the blood, the sweat from the walk. It’s the other piece to the journey for me. It’s a sense of resetting. We’ve got our food for the next month or so. Now it’s time to surf and explore in other ways. That’s the balance for me between surfing and fishing.

We drive to a nearby rockpool and wash the grime off. We dry off with a towel saltier and grimier than we were originally. We gather back to the truck. Annie has already jumped in – her greatest fear is getting left behind. She looks at me, implying that we should get moving. It’s getting late. The sun is doing her last dance before she too says her goodbye for the day.

We pull up overlooking the ocean, get out of the truck and open the back door. There’s shit everywhere, but this is the time to piece the puzzle back together. For me it’s that feeling of coming back after a big day’s work. That sense of relief and security of being home. That’s what I love about the car. Home is with me wherever I go, especially with Charlz and Annie by my side. And the ability to pack up and move wherever we please, whenever we please. We’re creatures of movement and for me this is such a huge piece of my life. It’s that balance for me. Just like surfing. Just like fishing. Moving around the seasons. They say we should eat around the seasons; I think movement is just as important as our bellies. That movement for me is my happiness. It is my sanity.

This story features in Roaring Journals, Edition Two: order your copy here.