Over the next two weeks I slowly learnt more and more about spearing. To my great joy Plukky started to treat my like a fellow spearo and taught me how to find the different species. This was a great time because I started to feel that I really got to know the ocean. Where I had previously only seen bream, batfish and small trouts I now started finding coral trouts weighing several kilos, barra cods , mangrove jacks and all the other fish that I had previously only seen dead in Plukky's boat.
With growing confidence I started to venture further out by myself, it is the best feeling, being alone in the ocean far away from the island - knowing that now it's up to you, you're on your own should anything happen. It's hard to explain but this makes you feel much more "at home" in the ocean, as if you belong there. As you get to know how the animals "think" you can get much closer to them, this is of course good for spearing but it can also be lots of fun, approaching eagle rays and turtles and swimming with them. There were setbacks of course. The first time I shot a spangled emperor (a big trophy) I wasn't quite close enough when I shot and he managed to get off my spear (I did the mistake of grabbing the spear instead of the fish when I tried to retreive him). Since he was badly wounded I still thought I had a chance of landing him and started swimming towards the surface to reload my gun. When I was about two meters up from the bottom something huge shot by underneath me, grabbed my fish and swam away. My heart rate rocketed up to 300 or so and I started swimming for shore. After about a minute I started to come down, realising that in reality that shark was just a blacktip, surely not larger than 5ft and absolutely harmless. Obviously he'd stayed away as long as I was down at the fish and didn't move in until I was swimming away. Still, he had been moving very fast, his teeth had looked very viscous and my rational conclusion that there hadn't been any danger didn't quite penetrate every part of my brain. I was still shivering when I got back to the camp and put on a sweater in spite of an airtemperature closer to 30 than 20.
The next day I was still very touchy about sharks and as me, Kris and Stewart were out diving the next day I was constantly looking around and wasn't very succesful in my hunting although there were loads of trout in the water. When we'd become tired and returned to the boat it turned out someone had accidentally shot a batfish (anglefish) by mistake (they don't taste very well). We decided to use him for a shark dive. I cut him up with my knife and let him sink to the bottom. With excited anticipation we waited, close by the boat in case something larger that the 6ft reefies should turn up. After a minute or so two whitetips and a blacktip moved in and started eating and trying to snatch the fish from each other. It was great fun watching. Then I got an impulse to check how afraid of humans they really were and started to swim down. My heart was racing as I swam straight for the remains of the fish that were lying on the bottom. But yes, the sharks did back off. I had just dropped the fish and turned to swim back when another shark that had just turned up swam by, just a foot or two away. I don't know what sort it was, possibly a small (5-6ft) silver whaler but he sure looked cooler that the reefies. It was the best feeling having that grand animal swimming close by checking me out but deciding not to molest me. In spite of my newly-won cockiness we decided not to push and got out of the water and drove back to the camp.
One morning we were raised by Lyndal screaming that the Tinny (our big boat) had turned over. Everyone quickly got into wetsuits and headed out there in the smaller boats. She had been all too accurate, the Tinny had indeed turned upside down and being a fairly large boat it would prove hard to get her back on her right keel. The first time we finally managed to get her around she was extremely unstable being full of water and continued in the roll to make a full 360 degree turn and end up in the same position as before. By this time we'd been working for almost two hours out there and during that time the wind had steadily increased. Should we decide to keep her out there and the wind picked up any more before we were able to set her to rights she would have been permanently lost. It was therefore decided that we were better off dragging her onto the reef flat while the tide was high enough. We managed to pull her over the reef but not without sacrificing her targa and smashing up the engines quite a bit. Once in the shallows it was not that hard to turn her over. We cleaned out the engines and tried to prepare her for being towed back to the mainland by a trawler the next day. This is what the motors looked like. A low water mark on the trip was when after the recovery we realised that someone had popped an eardrum and was feeling dizzy ... there's a "classic" photo of the chopper coming to pick him up with the smashed up Tinny in the background.
Lady Luck wasn't smiling at us the next day either though. When we had towed the Tinny out to the trawler and then got back to shore to recover from our trials someone called us on the radio from the trawler, it took him a while to convince us that he wasn't kidding when he told us the Tinny had turned over again ... Well, with our newly gained experience we soon dragged her back to the reef flat and got her turned over. This time she was left there until the charter boat came back five days later. It turned out the bilge pump had been propped up so the compartment between the two hulls and been full of water, thus the instability.
It turned out to be a really nice set of people on this trip, usually on the reef trips the group divides into smaller groups that don't get along very well, this time this didn't happen. Instead we had a really good time together and had it not been for the incident with the Tinny turning over this trip would have been perfect. Apart from the traditional cocktail and tequila nights (the latter was a bit softer than usual I'm sorry to say) we also had a charades night that was heaps fun and most of the other nights something fun was happening.
Something I can do for hours is stargazing, the island is so far from civilisation that you can see all the zillion of stars on the southern hemisphere. It's amazing, you just lie there and every five minutes or so you see a falling star.
The weather was great this time, 30-34C in the day and never below 20C at night. I slept on the beach most of the time but one evening it had been raining so I decided to sleep in the tent. After a few hours I woke up by hearing someone panting heavily next to the tent, I thought "what the hell ..." and started to get out of the tent when some sand was thrown onto the canvas. With a smile I realised a turtle had begun digging a hole for her eggs right next to my tent. Being pretty fed up with turtles I didn't think much of this and went back to sleep. But then a while later I woke when the whole tent started shaking, and all of a sudden I had 150 kg of turtle over my legs, I fought my way out of the tent to see the turtle that had tried to crawl right over the very low tent freeing itself of a tent line and "hurrying" back to the ocean. I guess I'm one of the few people who can claim to be the victims of attempted rape by a large female turtle.
