Books

The irony was that while my body was protesting about the physical demands of fishing, my waistline was probably expanding. Heaven help the scales when I eventually got home, although that was one competition I was quite prepared to lose. For now, the only numbers requiring my serious attention were the ones attached to the leaderboard.

In both cases, failure quickly became public property. Lose a fish to a shark and three other fishermen could immediately explain your mistake; lose a hand of cards and everybody around the table suddenly knew which card you should have kept. The only defence was to win often enough to earn the right to provide the same assistance to somebody else.

It also showed how quickly the little society aboard Big Cat Reality was forming. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been a bloke standing beside somebody else’s card game; now I knew who was noisy, who was quiet, who understood the game and who was capable of punishing an error before you had finished regretting it. The same thing was happening everywhere aboard the boat, with fishing, meals, cabins and evening card games gradually turning a collection of passengers into people with histories, reputations and increasingly usable material against one another.

It may even have been the best result of the day, although I am reluctant to overstate that point while leading Trophy One by a considerable margin. There are priorities in life, after all, and on the eve of the final fishing day mine had become increasingly clear.

For nearly a week our world has been reduced to weather, reefs, meals, dories, knots, rods, fish and the ongoing responsibility of ensuring that no mate becomes too pleased with himself. Tomorrow the phones will work properly, roads will replace water and all the ordinary things we temporarily left behind will begin reclaiming their positions. Tonight, however, there are trophies to settle, evidence to review and one last opportunity for the defeated parties to establish that the result would have been entirely different if only several fish that escaped had displayed a little more respect for the rules.

My body is less enthusiastic about the achievement. A week of being bounced by swell, bracing against boats, hauling fish, twisting, reaching and climbing in and out of bunks has been followed by eleven hours sitting almost motionless behind a steering wheel, and everything now seems to hurt in a different way. The recliner therefore becomes less a piece of furniture than the final destination of the expedition.

Perhaps that is also why trips such as this become increasingly important. As we get older, there are more reasons not to do things, more comforts available at home and considerably more information being supplied by various parts of the body about activities they no longer consider appropriate. The answer cannot always be to listen to them, because eventually the safest possible life would involve remaining in a comfortable chair and looking at photographs of things we once did. I am not ready for that yet, particularly when there are still fish at Swains Reef apparently unaware that I have plans for them.