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I felt like I was going to go arse over.
    â€˜Yeah. Careful, mate,’ Dad said through a mouthful. ‘Haven’t finished bolting that together yet.’
    â€˜One day,’ Pat moaned.
    Dad nodded and I could see his knee jiggling under the table.
    They left the dishes in the sink and lashed some rods onto the roof of Pat’s white Crown sedan. Looked like the racks had been fitted especially for that purpose. Dad stuffed five life jackets in the boot and we were away. I was sitting with Ernie and Carolyn in the back of the car and she was chowing down on her thumbnail. My leg was jiggling. I’d been hanging out to go fishing with Dad since forever and I couldn’t get excited. There was too much stuff going off in my head.
    We arrived at Clarkson’s boat hire at 1.23 pm. Ernie looked like a premiership dork with the life jacket on. Carolyn laughed so hard I thought she was going to pop a foofer valve. By 1.39 pm we were in a boat with all our gearand motoring out to an amazing hole that Dad had been raving about the whole way down. The wind blew in and chopped the water so it felt like the little tinny would be shaken apart. Boats are supposed to glide through the waves, aren’t they? This one bounced on them so it was like riding in a bongo drum with an outboard. Dad wasn’t wasting any time. Ernie was standing at the front of the boat between Carolyn and me. At one stage he got a heap of salt water in his face and shook so hard that he lost balance. Nearly tipped us all out. No shit. That little shift of weight made us lurch into a turn that would have flipped us if Dad hadn’t backed off the revs. Nearly heaved up my breakfast. Lunch. Whatever.
    Carolyn scraped the anchor noisily across the front of the boat and sort of dropped it over the side. It was obviously heavy for her and Dad had made a big fuss about exactly when to throw it. He was lining us up between two huge red buoys that were probably a kilometre apart. Looking left and right, getting her ready. Now. I think she busted a nail, or if it wasn’t busted it was bruised.
    Dad baited my hook for me. We were using little lobster dudes called ‘one-arm bandits’ that were all pinkish with one white claw. Dad paid ten bucks for a tiny little bucket of them at Clarkson’s. They were still alive as he was skewering them onto the hooks. He did mine and I wriggled to the edge of the boat, took the bail off and flicked the line overboard. He baited Pat’s hook too. And Carolyn’s. By the time Carolyn’s bait hit the water, I’d hooked the first fish. I had the rod sitting in a piece of pipe that had been welded to the side of the boat—I think for that purpose—and it bucked and bent until I thought it was going to get pulled overboard. I tried to steady it with my stump whileI cranked the reel frantically with my hand. I felt bloody awkward. Carolyn leant forward to help then thought better of it. Frantic flashes of silver in the water. I grabbed the rod out of its holder and hoisted the fish into the boat. Ernie went apeshit and almost bailed out. Dad put his foot on the fish and took the hook out—that would have been awkward with only one paw—and held it up, flipping.
    â€˜Garfish. Nice one. Well done, Wayne,’ he said and put the fish in the cool box.
    What a buzz. It looked like a fat archer’s arrow with a point at one end and a fine tail at the other. Talk about built for speed. Dad baited me up and I flicked my line overboard. Bang! Hadn’t even hit the bottom and there was another fish hooked. It managed to run out fifty metres or so of line before I got the bail over and started reeling it in. Felt like I’d reeled for ten minutes with the line zipping across the water under the boat and back out. The tip of the rod was bending almost to touch the waves. What a battle. Pat got the net under this one while it was still in the water. Big pink fish that she