Vignette 18
Sprats R Us
Scott rowed out this morning to attach a bridle made of half inch nylon rope to the mooring, in the hope that this will provide additional stretch for the boat as she bucks the waves during the big blow heading our way. The weather report is predicting fifty knot winds with sixty five knot gusts from the southeast; tomorrow and Sunday. Southeast winds translate straight into our bay. It was sixty knot southeast winds that drove Sounding Free up onto the beach this time last year, so the weather forecast has made us up sit up and take notice. All morning long Scott has wrestled with the decision of whether he should move the boat over to an anchorage on Ponui Island that is sheltered from sou’easters or take our chances on the strength of the mooring. He knows that there is good chance that if we move the boat, we would be stuck onboard for several days.
I am secretly pleased that he decided to go with the bridle.
The weather has turned cold again. I tried to fish off the wharf yesterday and nearly froze from the icy gusts cranking down the channel. My fingers were ice cubes by the time I threw in the towel, but I didn’t miss the chance to come up on Scott from behind and find some warm flesh to sink them into. He needs to be reminded of what the real outdoors feels like. Scott is the kind of person who can completely immerse himself online. He is building a Physician’s office with examination rooms and reception area in a 3D world called Second Life. Building in Second Life gives him great joy. I become vexed with the amount of hours that he dwells in cyberspace, but I came to the conclusion long ago that I ain’t never gonna change him, especially if I nag. For this reason, I have become adept at doing my own thing.
My neighbor Stu is the polar opposite of Scott. He prefers being outdoors to anything else. His methods are worth observing and taking note of. One reason being that he can always amuse me with the way he goes about doing just about anything. The second, is that he reminds me that there are many ways for people to show their smarts. Yesterday I was down in my studio trying to rescue a painting that was in the act of suicide, when I heard a familiar voice say, “Oh Kelley.”
“Hi Stu, what are you up to?” I answered with my usual greeting.
“What I am up to, is my elbows in sprats,” he laughed.
“I’ll grab my camera and be right over,” I said.
I have learned to take my camera with me when Stu calls me over. I walked down the cement stairs into his backyard and immediately saw why he said he was up to his elbows in sprats. He was hunched over a huge container, his arms submerged up to his elbows, digging out freshly captured bait fish to put in the freezer.
“Do you need any sprats?” he asked.
“Not that many,” I said.
“Rita and I set the net this morning and couldn’t even haul it back in,” he explained.
“I had to tie one end of the net off to the quad bike, and the other end to the post,” Stu tells me.
“We waited until the tide went out and then we started filling the buckets,” he continued.
Stu has a small aluminum dinghy that he disperses his net from. The net is meticulously flake folded for smooth release. Rita holds one end of the net and Stu rows in a large arc about six yards off the shoreline. He rows in when the net is stretched taut, and grabs a hold of the other end of the net. The two then crouch down and slowly begin pulling in the net. Usually the net yields a reasonable quantity of sprats and a few other species that they throw back. Not today. I am not sure that I agree with the excessive amount of bait that he has decided to keep. I wish that he had rowed back out and released one edge of the net so that a good portion of the school could escape. But Stu is of a different mindset than I, and clearly takes great pleasure in his huge haul, not unlike Scott’s pleasure at constructing a 3D conference chair that allows you to raise your hand to ask a question when your avatar sits upon it. If you are not connecting with my references to Second Life, you must go there and find out what an avatar is and what this online world looks like. (www.secondlife.com) To each his own.
“Stu, would you mind looking up at the camera as you poor that bucket full of sprats into the bin?” I asked.
“Will you send Rita a copy?” Stu asked.
“Sure thing Mister,” I said.
I know that one day I will have to get his permission or denial to show this picture in my book, along with the use of his name. I decided to cross that bridge another day. At the moment he still trusts me and provides me with stories galore.
Rita came out and posed alongside Stu and their bins of sprats. He had on his uniform of white gum boots, shorts and floppy brimmed white hat. I took a photo to try and freeze the moment. I also took a few zoomed in shots of the large eyed sprats that I will incorporate into a painting at a later date. I have been working on an exhibition titled, Fish, Eat, Sleep; which takes a playful look at the obsession of fishing here in New Zealand.
“Gee Rita, I was wondering if you still lived here, I haven’t seen you in so long” I wise-cracked.
“The weather has been a real shocker,” Rita replied.
“I really miss our walks,” I added.
“Me too, and we were just beginning to get in shape,” she laughed.
“Yeah I hate having to start over, it is so painful,” I whined.
Dodging rain squalls isn’t Rita’s idea of fun so sometimes I go it alone. My friend Barb is joining me in Feb. for an eight and a half hour hike called, the Tongirigo Crossing. We have made our reservations at a five star accommodation called The Chateau for a before and after hike reward. Walking regularly with Rita is an important attempt to get myself ready for this upcoming challenge. I wonder if I will be the first middle aged woman to call life flight on her cell phone from atop Mt. Tongiriro asking if “just this once might they give someone whose life is not in danger, a lift down?”
After I snapped as many shots of the sprat slaughter as I could manage, I wandered back home to look at them on my computer. I refrained from telling Stu my opinion, because it would only cause him to think that I was one of those people. Those people are the environmentalists who have taken away his favorite flounder fishing grounds. Stu is not concerned with ocean ecology, or man’s detrimental impact on it. He wants to live the way he has always lived…and be left alone while he does it.
It occurred to me as I walked back downstairs to check on my paintings that Stu would have to do something with the remainder of sprats that wouldn’t fit into his deep freeze. I didn’t have to wonder about this for too long. For the first time in a year, Stu was using a shovel to dig trenches in his terraced vegetable garden. He then proceeded to fill the trenches up with bucketfuls of sprats. He completed the first tier, covered them up with soil and called it a day.
Another day passed and I heard Stu out at his sidewalk garden early in the morning, repeating his sprat trench fertilizer routine.
“Oh my God Stu, that smells bad,” I yelled down to him.
“You should smell it from down here,” Stu yelled back, “it’s not bad.”
“I reckon this should be good for my garden.”
“It should be, as long as you don’t piss of the tomatoes again by planting them where you had the potatoes from the year before,” I told him smugly.
I had been reading about companion planting and found this to be a perfect time to show off my new knowledge. Stu’s fight to grow tomatoes last year was the stuff of legend. He had lines crisscrossing and tied every which way trying to support his gangly tomato vines. Up until then, his veggie patch had been created spontaneously from whatever erupted from the organic material he dumped into his make shift compost pile located in the corner of the first level of his garden. Whatever came out of the ground is what he tended that season.
In the past he has had big crops of parsley and potatoes. Last year he got tricky and planted some store bought tomatoes, which soon became the Bain of his existence. They grew tall quickly, and then turned black and unhealthy looking. He nursed them along by tying each branch to some kind of support: all to no avail. So this year, he hopes that the sprats will change all that.
It has been cold as I have mentioned, so that may be why we hadn’t noticed a new smell emanating from Stu’s garden; which borders our property and is upwind from my studio I might add. As the day progressed, the sun made an unusual appearance. Its short intense heat, blasted goodness in and around our yards for a couple of hours around midday. When Scott got back from securing the boat I suggested that we sit out on the deck for lunch. I was anxious for him to see how well the table had cleaned up from my recent dabbling in local sparrow feeding. We sat down, and remained quiet for a moment, taking in the scene; the birds seemed very vocal for this time of the day. Then it hit us, full frontal; wafting upward from Stu’s garden; the pungent aroma of rotting fish. I looked at Scott and he shook his head.
“Wait until we get a couple of good inches of rain by tomorrow,” Scott said, “that will really help it kick off nicely.”
“And I have people coming to see my studio next week,” I growled. “Just imagine what it will be like by then.”
“It is going to get worse before it gets better,” Scott stated the obvious.
“This is going to be like the time that he decided to burn that huge pile of rubbish out in the paddock while we were having guests for an outside brunch,” I said. “Remember how we were trapped inside the entire time, trying to breathe?”
“You know that he is oblivious to what we consider neighborly conduct,” Scott reminded me.
“Without Stu and Murphy for entertainment I would have gone crazy by now,” I said, “I guess this is just another one for my journal.”
It really doesn’t pay to get in a twist over little things; but what’s the harm if I have a secret fantasy about a hot muggy day with breezes floating into Stu’s yard, the heavy smell of ripe sprats in the air. Scott and I are standing on the sidelines, snickering to ourselves, while a backyard full of Stu’s guests are turning green around the gills and trying to keep their food down.
If this fantasy really did come true, my vindictiveness would be immediately thwarted by Stu himself. In true Stu fashion, he would just shrug and announce to his guests, “have another brew mate, and you won’t smell it at all.”
