In my dream, a blood covered human figure staggers towards me. Its eyes are missing, empty sockets stare back at me. Hands shake by its side and blood drips down, its fingertips reach to a white line. It’s like the figure is trying to say something to me but then it falls, hitting the ground hard. I believe I know this haunting apparition. I know this place, even in the darkness of death. Slowly I wake. The flashbacks in my head give me chills of dread and my mouth feels dry as I sit up in my bunk bed. The cabin rocks back and forth as I turn on the light above me and side step towards the bathroom. My sea legs haven’t woken up yet as I piss and wash my weary fisherman’s head.
“Who is that salty ugly thing in the mirror?” I groan as I turn off the bathroom light.
I get ready, taking a quick look at the time, 11.40 pm, almost midnight. My shift starts at 12.30 am and someone usually comes around to do wake-ups but I like to get up before that person turns up. I put on my flip-flops and when I leave my cabin, my door is latched and left open with the light on too. Moving quietly past other cabins, I just want to get up top to the ship’s galley for a midnight breakfast. Sitting at one of the tables, I notice other crew members start to drift into the galley. Someone says, “Two weeks to go, boys and girls,” and I think to myself, one shift at a time until freedom and homeward bound to Port Timaru.
First I’ll catch a bus to Christchurch Airport, then fly to Auckland and catch a smaller plane to Whakatāne, then catch a shuttle bus back to Ōpōtiki, home again for this Lone Seawolf. In the meantime, patience and a calculated routine is what will get me through this trawler fishing trip. The nightmares I’ve been having are a speed bump in my routine. Sleep deprivation is a real problem for a shift worker. Whether it’s out at sea on a fishing trawler or on land in the bush carrying a 10 kg chainsaw, felling huge pine trees on steep hills, sleep is important.
After breakfast, we make our way down to our changing room to get dressed to rumble in the fish factory below us. It’s an industrial war against the fish under our fishing trawler—shoot the huge fishing nets out from the back of the stern and then haul those fish up, tip them into the pounds, move them along the conveyor belts, process them, pack them, blast freeze the fish product, down to the freezers below. The product gets stacked and packed, one of the jobs I like doing. The frozen boxes weigh about 15 kg and the roof of the freezer room is getting closer with the height of the boxes. Stacking is really important because the load must be even all the way to the roof of the freezer hold. Uneven, the trawler could tip over and that would be the southern ocean pits. We train for that but hopefully it won’t happen.
My shift is done now, time for morning breakfast. After, I’ll do a few domestic things, hot shower, sleep. That’s basically the routine for six weeks at sea. I really hope these nightmares stop and after three days they do. It’s like a Stephen King horror movie. I know the road and the intersection behind the fallen blooded human figure, I believe it’s Tirohanga, a place about 15 km east of my home town of Ōpōtiki, a sacred place for Māori. I remember I found some little mussels in the shallows to eat—those little mussels were sweet as. Me and a friend of mine fished at the beach at Tirohanga, hoping to catch a fat, sweet as snapper but my fishing knowledge with the surf casting rod and reel sucked and my friend laughed at me. I’ll show him I work on a deep-sea fishing trawler and catch fish by the ton.
“Yeah, you skin head, just you wait and see, fish by the ton!”
With a few days left of this fishing trip, I reflect on working back in forestry. “We don’t need you anymore so eff off,” so I was told by the narcissistic forestry contractor. The only thing that matters to forestry contractors is profit and money, dumped on the scrap heap. I thought I’d do something else then, so I signed up for a fishing course based in Westport down in the South Island. It seemed better than what I was doing at the time—nothing!
My working life was mostly in the bush. Forestry work was hard, dangerous at times, tough when you’re laid off and made redundant. I wasn’t afraid of hard work and going out to sea didn’t bother me either. Being out of work really sucked, plus this deep-sea fishing course was all paid for anyway by the New Zealand taxpayer.
So I was off down the South Island for four months. I packed my big, green backpack with my bright shiny face, ready to become a fisherman. We flew from Whakatāne to Wellington, then caught another plane to fly to Westport, me and four other shiny Māori faces. Westport is like a different country to this unemployed Māori. It was like going back to school, shiny faces and all. Subject: work on a fishing boat.
I got into a routine rhythm. We stayed at an ex-nursing accommodation filled with people from different parts of Aotearoa, cadets numbering about thirty men and women. I got to know some of them and dislike a few of them. One young guy from Taranaki committed suicide in one of the dorms. That was really heart-breaking. Maybe life in that place was overwhelming for him. I’ll never forget that or him, no matter how long I live.
After that, it was hard to get to grips with this fishing course but I did. From our accommodation, we would walk to the fishing school in the morning. We exercised, then showered and after that we would go into a classroom to learn about the fishing industry. We did hands-on training: net mending, tying knots, splicing rope. We learnt about the use of flares, we did raft survival skills in the dirty water of the Buller. What was completed went into our New Zealand Qualifications modules for NZQA. I already had forestry modules, so I was familiar with this process. Learning the knife skills was interesting to me. I spent years learning the art of keeping my chainsaw sharp when I worked in the forestry. The knife edge does the work, whether it’s cutting down a tree or filleting a fish. It’s important to keep the blade and cutting teeth sharp.
After about two months at the Westport fishing school, I was sent on a training trip. Me and another cadet went on an inshore fishing boat departing from Greymouth. The mouth of the Grey River, I was told, is one of the most dangerous in the country. That morning, it was pretty calm. We were a crew of four—we cadets are free slave labour so we didn’t really matter to those two fisherman dudes. Me and my cadet mate were still on the benefit anyway, both us hoping to get a job after this fishing course and to be free of being stigmatised as worthless Māori.
We steamed south to start trawling, turning around somewhere off the coast of Hokitika on day two to trawl back up north. We hauled up flatfish and red cod. The fisherman were old school, hard-as-nails dudes. We worked day and night for those two, we learnt, we asked, we got sworn at, we got hurt. My cadet mate almost lost a finger.
One clear night on the fishing trawler under a full moon, I could see the whole of the Southern Alps. It was beautiful. The moon made the mountain tops look like vanilla ice cream, towering towards the heavens. I thought of my sick mum back in Ōpōtiki and I wished she could see this, it would make her heart ache. We steamed past Westport, still heading north and still trawling for fish.
It was day six when we got to Farewell Spit and that’s when the fishing stopped. I felt like a real broken ass Māori. We had started a clean-up of the fishing trawler when the Skipper told us we were bound for the Port of Nelson. The waters there are really scary; the power of the strait by Farewell Spit can be heard as well as seen. My elders went sailing on wooden canoes on those unnatural waters just to trade for pounamu. Gives real meaning to that, how important greenstone was and is to Māori.
It took a day’s steaming to get into Port Nelson and when we docked, me and my cadet mate just left and walked into town to catch a bus back to Westport, back to school. We had weekends off, more time to get to know each other. Back at the Westport fishing school, I got to know another young guy from Tokoroa, I think he was Tongan. He liked all things hip hop: music, dance, clothes, especially shoes. Me I’m more of a blues and heavy metal mullet man.
We got on well and one of the Westport tutors noticed that, so he asked me first if I wanted to go on another cadet trip, this time for six weeks on a deep sea fishing trawler. The only catch was that it was during Christmas time. “Like what?” I thought. Foolishly I said “Yes” to going on the deep sea fishing trawler and my Tokoroa Tongan fellow cadet said “Yes” foolishly too, so the two of us fools caught a shuttle bus from Westport to Timaru the following week, in the name and year of our lord, 18/12/2004. We were two cadets bound for the Port of Timaru.
On the shuttle bus, I thought about Ōpōtiki—my home town—my family, my friends. I mostly thought of my sick mum, a widow alone in her kaumātua flat in Ōpōtiki, cooking all the kai I love, fried bread, mutton bird with prickly puha, dough boys—a Māori heaven’s boil up. I hoped someone was looking out for my 70-plus-year-old mum.
After a long drive, we got to Timaru. We were dropped off at the bus depo, so we both walked to the wharf carrying heavy bags. We could see our fishing boat tied up at the Timaru Wharf. As we got closer, the fishing trawler got bigger; the fishing boat in Greymouth I went on before was just a tiny dinghy compared to this steel monster. We walked up the gang plank and my Tongan friend had a piece of paper with instructions on where to go and who to see. Some big rough-looking tattooed Pākehā told us to go up to the wheel house and ask for the factory manager.
We put our bags in a safe place before going up some steel steps to the wheel house. We introduced ourselves and the factory manager welcomed us before introducing us to the other people in the wheel house, first the skipper, then the first mate, then the bosun; the chief engineer and the cook were somewhere else but that was basically the hierarchy on this fishing trawler. We both knew our place as cadets, somewhere below rotten fish guts.
After showing us around the wheel house, the factory manager told us to follow him. We went down some stairs to the galley below and said hello to the cook who was working in the kitchen. We followed the factory manager down some more stairs, down to the changing and smoko rooms, then we went into the factory. The manager showed us the meal room, then the freezer plates, the packing area, the gut table, the sorting area where the fish above us would be tipped into the holding pounds. The manager even took us down a ladder to the huge freezer hold.
The packed frozen fish went down a conveyor elevator to a long conveyor belt at the bottom; the freezer held 600 tons of frozen boxed fish and that was the name of the game for the next six weeks: Fill the freezer, get to a certain tonnage, and anything above that quota was a bonus.
We were taken back upstairs and shown to our sleeping quarters. My Tongan friend was put in a different cabin. As I would find out later, he was on a different shift. I had to meet and greet other crew members, some belonging to certain groups who didn’t really like Māori people. Then we were sent straight to work, stowing food, then packaging it.
It was a good time to get to know some of the 45 crew members on this boat. Trucks were turning up with supplies. The dickies did most of the crane work, lifting loaded pallets on to the vessel. We unloaded and stored them. We were told we would sail the next day. Destination: the Chatham Rise, target catch: orange roughie. Some crew went out for a night on the Timaru town. The next morning, we untied the fishing trawler and headed out to open water, good-bye land. That’s when the eight-hour shifts started. Once we got to our fishing grounds, the huge net was shot over the stern of the trawler. The two massive steel doors took the net down to the depths of the sea. Everything was connected by steel wrench ropes and chains; after a while the net was hauled up with a huge catch of orange roughie and the relentless processing of fish began. It was hard work and I just stuck to a routine of working, eating, sleeping.
During downtime, I would go up on deck. The sea was beautiful and sea birds were everywhere, no land to be seen for miles. I remember one time the whole sea was dead flat, it looked like glass. It was like our 65-metre iron vessel was floating on a shiny bubble. Two days into the fishing trip, we went to the Chatham Islands to trade for crayfish, pāua, kina and wild pork, trading coffee mostly. All that kai for Christmas day dinner on the fishing trawler, what a meal that was!
Then New Year 2005 came and went, and we steamed back to Port of Timaru at the end of that tough trip. My Tongan cadet mate was offered a job but for me, I got a job on a different fishing trawler. I had to go to Port Lyttleton in Christchurch to catch up with the boat.
I’ve done two fishing trips on this fishing boat now, made friends with haters, suffered from sleep deprivation, felt loneliness like a lone sea wolf howling at the moon. I’m glad this fishing trip is over. So that is the end of this epic endurance nightmare trip and all, time to go home to Ōpōtiki.
When I reached Whakatāne, I was so tired. I caught a taxi into town and stayed at a hotel, thinking I would catch a shuttle bus the next day to Ōpōtiki. After settling in my hotel, I thought, “Bugger it, I’ll go out for a night’s pub crawl in Whakatāne.” In one pub, I bumped into an old rugby team mate. We talked about rugby, work, the sea, then he told me a shocking nightmare of a story. “Bro, one of your mates from Ōpo was killed over two weeks ago.” I replied, “True? Whereabouts, bro?” He told me. “Tirohanga bro. Your mate was walking home in the early hours in the morning on the main road when he was hit from behind and killed instantly. The driver didn’t even stop!” I was in shock and I remembered the nightmares I had had out at sea. The connection was haunting. My old rugby friend said, “Sorry to tell you brother, I know you guys were best mates.” I told him, “Thanks for telling me, my bro,” and we shook hands and then he left. The pub in Whakatāne was pretty packed and noisy but all I could hear was my broken heart pounding. Going back to Ōpōtiki the next day was going to be very hard. I rang up a relative to come and pick me up at the hotel. I didn’t want to cry on a shuttle bus in front of strangers.
On the way home to Ōpōtiki, my nephew filled me in on what happened to my friend. He told me they had tried to contact me but failed. I would have been gutting squid on the gut table kilometres out at sea on the fishing trawler at the time. It made sense now: my friend was the person in my nightmare. I didn’t tell my nephew that and I told no one at home of my nightmare. I did tell someone on the fishing trawler about my nightmares but I was ignored. No one cared really, the sea people can be heartless.
In Ōpōtiki, my mum was fit and healthy. I went to the Ōpōtiki cemetery to see where my friend was buried. I stood in front of a pile of brown dirt and weathered flowers lying on that pile of earth. My friend could be at the bottom of the Hokitika trench covered in salt water, such was the sadness I felt at that moment. I thought of the good things and the times with my friend, like working with him in the forestry, getting into trouble and up to no good with him. Hanging out with him and his kids and one time fishing at Tirohanga Beach and being useless with the surf casting reel and rod.
I thought of my friend’s daughter and how he had told me her name, Sage, named after a tiny herb. I remember my friend asking me if I wanted to be her godfather. At the time, I was holding her in my hand, she was only a week old. I was speechless like a flat, blue, glass sea. I replied, “Yes” and because of this, my story is for her, a young woman now without her father.
Was my nightmare fictional or a spiritual message from the afterlife? Unlike the sea, I do care if anyone knows the answer. To me, only Sage matters, only her name really matters to me, to this lone Seawolf. Maybe that’s what the ghost-like figure in my nightmares was trying to say to me.
All I know is that I miss my friend.
I didn’t even have the chance to go to his tangi back in Ōpōtiki. I was out at sea being tormented on great waters, my Atua Tangaroa guiding me through those nightmare times.
When I got my answer from my old rugby friend in Whakatāne, chills were sent down my salted spine and the salt rubbed deep into my broken heart. For me, it was endless pain living in Ōpōtiki so now I live in Christchurch. It really isn’t any different here.