Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [6]
Accompanying them was Jack Bellamy, who would comprise one-third of our ship’s crew. The blue-collar third. The one who does the dirty work. He was tall, limber, and bore a perfectly uncanny resemblance to a certain mythical sailor inordinately fond of spinach, except he had no pipe clenched between his teeth. His strine (Aussie dialect) was thicker than that of a beer-soaked koala. The rest of us nonetheless managed communication without benefit of a translator.
The picturesque Port Lincoln harbor was home to a number of pleasure craft and numerous hardworking fishing boats. Since the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese had joined the locals in seriously depleting the area’s tuna, these boats had turned to catching shrimp and other fish. Abalone and crayfish (or crays, a kind of slipper lobster) are also profitably taken in the nearby waters.
Far from being a luxury vessel, the boat for our expedition, the Nenad, was a working shrimper, identical to the craft you see in those oversize photos that decorate the walls of every Red Lobster restaurant. Two shark cages secured atop an open platform above the rear deck constituted exceptions to the typical shrimping gear. One was fashioned from aluminum, the other steel. Each was about six feet square by seven tall, with twin cylindrical metal float tanks welded to the top and a horizontal camera port encircling the entire cage at shoulder level. This unbarred opening was at least a foot high. Everyone’s silent gaze was drawn immediately to the place where there were no protective bars. The gap looked bigger than I imagined it might be.
Joining up with us in Port Lincoln along with Sebastian Horseley were Klaus and Renate Reith from Stuttgart, a delightful couple in their mid-thirties who made their living as professional photographers and multimedia show presenters. Their arrival led to an entirely unforeseen difficulty. It seems they had brought their daughter along with them. This, in itself, was not a problem. The problem arose from the fact that their daughter was . . . five.
Presented with this potential fait accompli, a clearly troubled Carl and Rodney caucused. They then asked the opinion of the rest of us. We eyed one another uneasily. The gist of our conclusion was that what to do and how to proceed was not for us to say. I mumbled something about adequate insurance. Someone made the inevitable unseemly joke about five-year-olds being just the right size to serve as shark bait.
The Reiths had traveled farther and spent more than anyone else in order to participate in the expedition. Bearing this in mind, everyone reluctantly swallowed their concerns and agreed they could come along.
As we started to load the Nenad, out of dark depths redolent not of orcs but of prawns burst an Australian-Slav hobbit named Mateo Ricov. Swarthy, ebullient Captain Ricov looked exactly like one of the Greek resistance fighters from The Guns of Navarone. I peered past him, but Anthony Quinn and Gregory Peck were nowhere to be seen. As we prepared to depart, Mateo was everywhere, loudly and enthusiastically attending to last-minute details.
Also making an appearance at this time was Silvy Slausen, our cook. In her early twenties, affable and attractive, she was to be one of only two women on board a small boat for eight days with twelve men. I could not but admire her self-assurance. The bachelors among us admired her even more, until everyone was tactfully but in no uncertain terms informed that she was the fiancée of the very large and perhaps not altogether shy Andrew Fox.
After much picture taking, the Nenad’s sturdy diesels were fired