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I asked for their phone number and if they enjoyed dogsitting.
    But when Digger started coming fishing with me and Salt, the perfect fishing dog was born. The myriad stinking things he could find on a small boat probably helped. He would sprawl over the nets, his puppy guts bulging with fish frames, rotten starfish and crab claws. He grew. And grew. He was putting on ten kilos a month. I trained him to sit quietly on the thwart while we played out net and how not to get tangled up in the mesh.
    These days, Digger jumps down as the last buoy is thrown into the water and noses around the deck for last week’s remnant trumpeters. When it is time to pick up, he leans over the gunwale and watches every fish that comes up. He knows the silver bellies are for him. He thinks we catch all fish just for him. He is so robust in his motivation for food that he sees off anything threatening his feed. Pelicans can make him quite hysterical when they crowd the boat, pulling black bream and mullet out of the net. He’s gone over the side after them a few times, dived in headfirst and surfaced like an ungainly seal, spouting brine, circled by smirking birds.
    Digger finally grew out of chewing up my furniture and attempting to dismantle the house, not long after my last failed attempt to send him north on the plane. He seems to have finished teething and is evolving from a disaster puppy into a great solid rock of a mastiff mate. But he’s not my dog.
    Recently, his owner flew into town and picked him up for a few days. I arrived home to a strange stillness and keenly felt the absence of that joyful wriggling lump of sea-doggery. ‘Welcome home Sarah! I’m so happy you are back! When are we going fishing?’ He’s made himself indispensable, it seems.

WHILE WE WAITED
    The lee of Point Possession, a thermos of coffee, an orange and the talking music of water against the sides of the boat: all these things make the brutal southerly almost bearable. We wait for fish to mesh in nets spread across the sandy bottom where there still lies the remains of another net: made from thick cables to thwart wartime submarine interlopers.
    I can hear a two-stroke flogging at top revs and see, way off beyond the wreck of the whale chaser, the speck of another boat.
    Salt hears it too. ‘Hope they don’t run out of fuel before they get wherever they’re going.’
    We drink some coffee and I smoke a rollie. Salt throws his orange peel into the green water and looks around for the boat. The dinghy doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.
    â€˜Are they fishermen?’
    â€˜Nah,’ I say. I can see them now. ‘They’re both sitting down.’ There’s only one local commercial fisher who sits at the tiller.
    â€˜They’re not fishermen anyway. I can hear them talking to each other,’ Salt laughs. ‘Fishermen know every other bastard can hear them across the water.’
    I have to laugh when they finally motor by. Two men singing their hearts into the gathering dusk. Their boat is the size of my twelve-foot Lightburn and, like the Selkie, the motor is a brave little six. Full throttle, she is wallowing like a beetle through honey, weighed down to her gunwales by the happy drunken sailors.
    â€˜That’s just like my Selkie! ’
    â€˜Maybe it is your boat.’
    For a moment I feed that thought corn-chips and chilliphilly in the scenario-party that is my head. ‘Now wouldn’t that be fun?’
    They cross the channel and head for the abandoned frozen-food factory. Salt and I watch them in mounting consternation.
    â€˜They’re gonna run into our net!’ It’s getting dark. I don’t want to peel them off the rocks when their prop fouls.
    Their motor stops and so does the singing. One man gets up and stumbles to the stern.
    â€˜Oh shit.’
    â€˜All right.’ Salt starts his motor and we head towards them. But just before we get to them, their