The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest by Graeme Lay

Author:Graeme Lay [Graeme Lay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551062
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

These ones are banded, usually yellow and black, and venomous, although their mouths are so small they find it difficult to get a grip on a human. The skin between the fingers is something they can get their teeth into, Faama tells me.

Curious, I scoop up a couple in my net, but they slip through the mesh. Then Faama nets a bigger one, pulls it aboard and drops it into the bucket. It convulses, writhes its way up and out, and slithers across the bottom of the boat towards me. I have seldom seen anything so repulsive, and I’m about to leap overboard when I remember that there are many more out there in the water waiting, so instead I jump up on to the gunwale until Faama, laughing helplessly, snatches up the snake and throws it back in the sea.

At half-past eleven, with sixteen flying fish in the bucket, we draw up alongside the wharf. Ernie’s wife Hine is there with the tractor. Tuaki is hooked up to the derrick, Hine drives the tractor off a few metres and the boat is hoisted from the water and lowered on to her trailer. It’s quicker than using a boat ramp, and besides, there is no ramp, even on this, the sheltered side of the island, because of the persistent swell.

Under the wharf light I examine the catch. Flying fish are shaped like big herrings, though they have much larger eyes and their skin is slimier – to assist, I assume, their egress from the water. Their strong tail is used to break the tension between water and air; the large, delicate, folding wings are used for gliding, and can keep them airborne for fifty metres or so. They’re good eating, if rather bony, but Ernie takes this catch to use as bait for larger prey the next day.

At dawn we pull away from the wharf on Tuaki again. Ernie has rigged her with two rods, one on each gunwale, and two reel lines. Faama attaches lures to the reel lines and bait to the rod lines. The reels are made, with typical island ingenuity, from old motorbike hubs with handles welded to them, and they trail plastic lures about ten metres behind the boat. These are teasers for the main bait, the flying fish, which troll much further behind. The two dead fish are attached to traces attached to the rods, and inside the bait are concealed two large, lethal-looking double hooks.

As we roll slowly along Niue’s western coast, the horizon turns apricot and a molten sun rises from the sea, turning the sky bright and clear apart from a trail of small grey clouds just above the horizon. To starboard, the island is a long, black, level expanse, like the profile of a slumbering whale. By the time we round the northern end of the island, daybreak is complete and the coastal features are very clear. The grey-brown cliffs are about twenty metres high, notched where fresh water has emerged at the foot of the water-table edge and neatly undercut by the sea.

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