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outboard arcs up again and they continue on to the factory. They pull the little boat up onto the rocks and drag it to their ute. We swing away with a wave and head back to our spot to see out the sunset.

NIGHT OFF
    The Southern Champion blew a con rod five days out of Mauritius and then laid up at sea for weeks, the crew borrowing each other’s DVDs and getting bored out of their brains. They limped into town recently for running repairs and have been setting hearts on fire ever since.
    I pedalled my bicycle off to the metropolis to attend an exhibition opening. Trousersnake boys mingled and shared canapés and a brilliant local whisky with the Glamazons. It was a glamorous affair. Lots of great shoes. But this story is more pressing than the international deep-sea fishing trade and the art scene. This is the sordid tale of how I fell off my bicycle that night. Twice.
    An artist at the exhibition criticised my new life as a deckie, plundering the ocean’s resources for cash. He took a pin to my ballooning ego right when I was being greased up as an oceangoing hero by everyone else – an intrepid fisher-she with a fisherwoman’s biceps. I went outside to sit and think quietly about this.
    The kind of fishing Salt and I do is small-scale when compared to the toothfish industry. The Patagonian toothfish have been discovered relatively recently in the deepest of Antarctic waters. They can grow to the size and weight of a big man. They are an oily, ice-water fish, so their omega-3 count is obscene. They are probably the ugliest fish you will ever see. And that is about the extent of humanity’s knowledge of thePatagonian toothfish. And the fact that people will pay lots of money for dead ones.
    A few years ago, toothfish poachers led the Australian Navy on a merry chase through the Antarctic. The poachers, those age-old chancers with one eye on the horizon, were portrayed in the media as mercenary thieves in their rusting hulk. The Feds’ issue with the toothfish poachers was not territory or ethics, but money – serious money. At least that is my take on it. If the Australian Government cared about territory or conservation then perhaps we would see the same action from the navy when the Japanese ‘scientists’ cruise through the Australian Whale Sanctuary to slaughter minkes.
    The fleet of Australian-owned toothfish boats (read Australian, i.e. non-poachers) heads down to the grounds of Heard Island for a bracing three months’ hunting. They used to return to Albany for the boat unload, an employment bonanza for strong young men who didn’t mind a touch of frostbite hurling one-hundred-kilo fish from one freezer to another. These days the boats unload closer to the market action in Mauritius, Star and Key of the Indian Ocean.
    As I justified my own fishing habits to myself, I was snapped out of my reverie by a bunch of sturdy young men, one of whom I’d met a few days earlier. What an assortment – Mauritian, Maori, South African – the United Nations of toothfishermen stood before me.
    â€˜Hey Sarah! Do you know where we can get some ... you know, some hootie?’
    (I thought: it’s the curly hair that makes me look like a shaggy stoner. That’s why I get asked this all the time. Hang on, he said ‘hootie’ not ‘hooch’. What the hell? O-oh. Ewwg!)
    â€˜I’m kind of out of the loop with that sort of thing,’ I explained apologetically. Why was this nice young man asking me to pimp for him? I got all flustered. His Mauritian mate smiled at me with carnivorous intent and took my photo with his mobile phone.
    Mr Mauritius took another couple of hours (roughly till closing time) to decide he was definitely following me home. There was no changing his mind. He was on a quest all of his own idea to uncover the sensual gifts of a true Albanian. He would not consider ‘fuck off’ as a reasonable obstacle. Unfortunately for him, at