barefoot again

I finally threw out my deck boots the other day. They had been collecting spiders and dust for the last decade and somewhat piqued at shifting them to another shed for the 5th time, out they went. Expensive Ronstans, they were light, grippy and waterproof with a drawstring closure at the top. Aimed at the yachting crowd, they had caught my eye amongst the heavy, open topped boots the trawler trash wore. Three times the price, they had been on the chandlery shelf for a while, judging by their fine layer of red dust and wheat chaff. In a town where the value of an item was quickly calculated into how much booze, weed or speed you could consume if you went without the said item, it seemed these were not a good deal. 

Early on in the season I developed a couple of nasty cracks in my heels that would not heal due to my feet being continually wet. At the start of the day they always hurt like hell, the dry wounds, which had healed a little overnight, would open up fresh and raw again as soon as I got on deck. It had finally reached a point where I could hardly walk. The southerlies had harangued us for weeks on end, throwing up short, steep slop, which would lift off the bow in great plumes and wrap around the wheelhouse in a torrential drift. Our old fiberglass boat was a pig; blunt and narrow, it moaned, bucked and bitched in an unpredictable manner and worst of all, it was wet. I spent all day soaked head to toe, on waterlogged, slippery, carpets, dancing pots around deck in a convoluted, staggering waltz. In contrast the modern, alloy boats were broad and stable, with sharp, flared bows, which neatly turned down the sea, like they were ploughing a loamy paddock. Their shirtless, deckies wandered casually around dry, checker plate, decks in those useless, open topped, boots, which would fill in ten minutes if I wore them. The Ronstans went on the skippers account; it was his shitty, wet boat after all. 

I have always preferred to go bare foot. Shoes have fundamentally changed our relationship with the landscape and the way we move through it. No longer concerned with the tactile nature of the earth we walk on, our gaze has elevated and we glide over it, for the most part, disinterested and disconnected. Barefoot, you avert your gaze at your peril. Most of what I know on the nature of pain I have learnt with my feet. Hay stubble, pea gravel, coastal limestone, barnacles, hot coals, glass, bull ants, double gees, thistles, red ants, fish bones, cigarette butts, blackberries, bull ants, bees stings, melting asphalt and coral. Each inflicts their own peculiar quality and duration of suffering. Most vividly, as an 8 year old I drove a garden fork clean through my right foot and was left pinned to the back lawn, like an entomological specimen. My younger sisters ran screaming in circles around me, pausing briefly each lap to revisit the horror, re-inflate their lungs and high step on the spot; until after what seemed an eternity, my mother came and bravely removed it. 

Barefoot as a child, I meandered sheep and cattle trails, paused on the faint woodland traces of kangaroos; while bucks, scented with elemental sulphur pursued coy does, fed ferrets into rabbit warrens, dragged dogs out of fox holes, stomped to raise the heads of thick, black tiger snakes sunning on fishing tracks, fell though mutton bird burrows, and wandered the flotsam lines on solitary beaches. The wider panorama was punctuated by my deliberate footsteps, viewed at a reduced frame rate, as if shot with film. Constantly reframed and refocused, the finer detail in the vista became apparent, the changes noted frame by frame, before returning focus, always to the ground and the next step.

And it was here the real discoveries could be made. Furious trapdoor spiders that would chase when annoyed with a twig, tiny, delicate orchids and smelly flytraps, neon green aphids, meat ants battling locusts, ponderous stag beetles, tracks of dugites, racehorse goannas, brushtails and emus, fox scats; emerald and turquoise with the shells of nameless bugs, caravans of spiny caterpillars and anxious quail which jinkered hurriedly through the stubble before bursting into flight. My best find was a spider, which disguised itself as an ant. Walking on its three rearward pairs of legs, the front two were red and half moon shaped. The spider tightly held these together in front to create the ant's head. I spent hours spell bound by this tiny charlatan as it moved about, almost indistinguishable amongst its prey. 

My preference for working barefoot on deck was re enforced early on in my fishing career. The skipper had dropped the pick just off the Windy Harbour cliffs in a light South Easter. Tucked out of the relentless wind for the first time in days, we ate a relaxed meal, shared a joint and I slept soundly, free from the nagging fear that a wheat ship would run us down in the night. Unable to hold onto his crew, our downbeat skipper often dropped anchor in the shipping lane with no one on watch. My tiny bunk was barely long and wide enough for my frame and its similarity to a coffin was enhanced by the bunk above being so close my shoulders wedged if I turned in my sleep. I became obsessed by the radar, getting up to check it whenever claustrophobia got the better of me and I rarely slept for more than an hour at a time. 

I woke sometime around 3 am with the boat rocking wildly from side to side; to the sickening realisation we were dragging the pick back towards the surf at the base of the cliffs. At some stage in the night a deep low had swept up out of the Antarctic and on the passage of the front the wind had swung back around the compass to the SW and the building swell had wrenched the anchor free. Now just off the back of the breakers, the skipper had fired the boat into life, we cut the pick and roared out to sea, thudding into the darkness off the back of ugly swells, crew madly securing the deck while the skipper fired abuse over the radio at the BOM for fucking up the forecast. As we bottomed out in a valley, the pot tipper catch released and started banging against the hull. The new bloke on board, half asleep and quietly cursing ever going to sea, made a dash to lock it back in place and slipped as one of his thong straps gave way. He flipped, silently, backwards over the rail into the darkness. I thought he was gone until I realised seconds later that there was a pair of thonged feet grimly clamping the gunwale. When we hauled him upright he was deathly pale, owl eyed and speechless and remained that way until he told the skipper to "go fuck your cunt of a job" when we finally hit port. I followed him a few trips later.

After that I avoided foot wear of any type on deck, experience telling me that nothing could match the purchase and dexterity of bare feet or allow you to know instantly if the surface was slippery or not. 

So pulling on those Ronstans was a big deal. They turned out to be very good, my feet dried out and healed, they gripped pretty well and I only came unstuck in the boots once. Every now and again a pot would come up with a Wobbegong in it. These bottom dwelling sharks would somehow manage to curl themselves into the pot and eat the crays. The one that had come up on this day was big, 4 or 5 foot long and heavy. The best way to get rid of them was to open the pot door and drop them on deck before throwing them back overboard. Now Wobbies can bite their tails and therefore, it also follows, the hand of whoever has hold of it. The best technique involved grabbing the tail and quickly hammer throwing the shark up and over the rail while the gravitational force of the spin prevented the shark getting at your hand. With the big ones this often required a full rotation to clear the gunwales. This particular day I had grabbed hold of the shark with both hands and completed almost a full turn when my feet slid out from under me on some weed on the deck. The shark went straight up and I went down hard on the deck, winding myself in the process. The shark came down next to me and started wildly thrashing against the gunwale. The Skipper turned to ask what fuck I was up to, before dryly noting it was no time lie down on the job. 

I wore the boots for the best part of a month before they got wet inside one day and by the time they dried out again I was happily barefoot once more. I can remember the last day I wore them pretty well. The crays had just disappeared, entire lines of pots had been coming up empty for days and the skipper was getting despondent. Prone to bouts of self-pity, he hated days like this and would blow off the gear in long lines, over weedy bottom. We would steam at 8 or 9 knots and drop a pot every 50m or so. This kept me moving from pot to pot pretty quickly. The sequence would involve standing with the pot on the rail with the short leader rope in one hand. On the skippers call, I would throw the pot and leader, scoop the 20-fathom coil off the deck, throw that, before finally collecting the floats and throwing them over last of all. Halfway down the second line of the day it all went pear shaped. I threw the pot and the coil but the floats had fallen down into the neck of another pot on the stack. I reached in to free the floats, as I had done hundreds of times before, but this time as I did, the pressure came on the rope as we started dragging the pot I had just thrown. My gloved hand was jammed hard up into the neck and as the weight really started to come on I thought, oh fuck there go my fingers. I shouted wildly at the skipper, "OHY OHY OHY" which usually signalled a serious problem but the boat just kept steaming. I was leaning over the pot trying to take some of the pressure off my trapped hand, pulling frantically on the rope with my other arm, when finally the motor cut and at that instant we took up the full weight of the pot. Suddenly I was airborne, 8 foot up and heading straight over the bait box at the back of the boat. The pot on deck catapulting me overboard as the floats, thankfully, were ripped free from the neck. Had I remained tangled in the neck, the pot and I would have been heading for the bottom, every deckies worst nightmare. There I was floundering in the foaming wake, fully dressed in apron, overalls and those boots.  I floated on my back for a bit and took in the clouds and blueness of the sky while waiting for the boat to turn and come back alongside and tried to recall if I had seen any of the big bronze whalers, who always shadowed the boats, today. 

We gave it away after that, the rest of that day and the next. We went to the pub and the boots went in the shed to dry out, never to return.