beach.
“Two hours” I called after them. “If you’re longer than that you can sleep ashore. I’m not coming in to pick you up on the ebb.”
Jimmy waved and grinned. I put Dancer into reverse and backed off cautiously, while the two of them reached the beach and hopped around awkwardly as they donned their trousers and shoes and then set off into the palm groves and disappeared from view.
After circling for ten minutes and peering down through the water that was clear as a trout stream, I picked up the dark shadow across the bottom that I was seeking and dropped a light head anchor.
While Guthrie watched with interest I put on a faceplate and gloves and went over the side with a small oyster net and a heavy tyre lever. There was forty feet of water under us, and I was pleased to find my wind was still sufficient to allow me to go down and prise loose a netful of the big double-shelled sun clams in one dive. I shucked them on the foredeck, and then, mindful of Chubby’s admonitions, I threw the empty shells overboard and swabbed the deck carefully before taking a pailful of the sweet flesh down to the galley. They went into a casserole pot with wine and garlic, salt and ground pepper and just a bite of chilli. I set the gas-plate to simmer and put the lid on the pot.
When I went back on deck, Guthrie was still in the fighting chair.
“What’s wrong, big shot, are you bored?” I asked solicitously.
“No little girls to kick around?” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. I could see him checking out my source of information.
“You’ve got a big mouth, Bruce. Somebody is going to close it for you one day.” We exchanged a few more pleasantries, none of them much above this level, but it served to pass the time until the two distant figures appeared on the beach and waved and halloed. I pulled up the hook, and went in to pick them up.
Immediately they were aboard, they called Guthrie to them and assembled on the foredeck for one of their group sessions. They were all excited, Jimmy the most so, and he gesticulated and pointed out into the channel, talking quietly but vehemently. For once they seemed all to be in agreement, but by the time they had finished talking there was an hour of sunlight left and I refused to agree to Materson’s demands that I should continue our explorations that evening. I had no wish to creep around in the darkness on an ebb tide.
Firmly I took Dancer across to the safe anchorage in the lagoon across the channel, and by the time the sun went down below a blazing horizon I had Dancer riding peacefully on two heavy anchors, and I was sitting up on the bridge enjoying the last of the day and the first Scotch of the evening. In the saloon below me there was the interminable murmur of discussion and speculation. I ignored it, not even bothering to use the ventilator, until the first mosquitoes found their way across the lagoon and began whining around my ears. I went below and the conversation dried up at my entry.
I thickened the juice and served my clam casserole with baked yams and pineapple salad and they ate in dedicated silence.
“My God, that is even better than my sister’s cooking,” Jimmy gasped finally. I grinned at him. I am rather vain about my culinary skills and young James was clearly a gourmet.
I woke after midnight and went up on deck to check Dancer’s moorings. She was all secure and I paused to enjoy the moonlight.
A great stillness lay upon the night, disturbed only by the soft chuckle of the tide against Dancer’s side - and far off the boom of the surf on the outer reef. It was coming in big and tall from the open ocean, and breaking in thunder and white upon the coral of Gunfire Reef The name was well chosen, and the deep belly-shaking thump of it sounded exactly like the regular salute of a minute gun.
The moonlight washed the channel with shimmering silver and highlighted the bald domes of the peaks of the Old Men so they shone like ivory. Below them the night mists rising from the lagoon writhed and twisted like tormented souls.
Suddenly I caught the whisper of movement behind me and I whirled to face it. Guthrie had followed me as silently as a hunting leopard. He wore only a pair of jockey shorts and his body was white and muscled and lean in the moonlight. He carried the big black .45, dangling at arm’s length by his right thigh. We stared at each other for a moment before I relaxed.
“You know, luv, you’ve just got to give up now. You really aren’t my type at all,” I told him, but there was adrenalin in my blood and my voice rasped.
“When the time comes to rim you, Fletcher, I’ll be using this,“he said, and lifted the automatic, “all the way up, boy,” and he grinned.
We ate breakfast before sun-up and I took my mug of coffee to the bridge to drink as we ran up the channel towards the open sea. Materson was below, and Guthrie lolled in the fighting chair. Jimmy stood beside me and explained his requirements for this day.
He was tense with excitement, seeming to quiver with it like a young gundog with the first scent of the bird in his nostrils.
“I want to get some shots off the peaks of the Old Men,” he explained. “I want to use your hand-bearing compass, and I’ll call you in.”
“Give me your bearings, Jim, and I’ll plot it and put you on the spot,” I suggested.
“Let’s do it my way, skipper,” he replied awkwardly, and I could not prevent a flare of irritation in my reply.
“All right, then, eagle scout.” He flushed and went to the port rail to sight the peaks through the lens of the compass. It was ten minutes or so before he spoke again.
“Can we turn about two points to port now, skipper?”
“Sure we can,” I grinned at him, “but, of course, that would pile us on to the end of Gunfire Reef - and we’d tear her belly out.”
it took another two hours of groping about through the maze of reefs before I had worked Dancer out through the channel into the open sea and circled back to approach Gunfire Reef from the east.
it was like the child’s game of hunt the thimble; Jimmy called “hotter” and “colder” without supplying me with the two references that would enable me to place Dancer on the precise spot he was seeking.
Out here the swells marched in majestic procession towards the land, growing taller and more powerful as they felt the shelving bottom. Dancer rolled and swung to them as we edged in towards the outer reef.
Where the swells met the barrier of coral their dignity turned to sudden fury, and they boiled up and burst in leviathan spouts of spray, pouring wildly over the coral with the explosive shock of impact. “Then they sucked back, exposing the evil black fangs, white water cascading and creaming from the barrier, while the next swell moved UP, humping its great slick back for the next assault.
Jimmy was directing me steadily southwards in a gradual converging course with the reef, and I could tell we were very close to his marks. Through the compass he squinted eagerly, first at one and then the other peak of the Old Men.
“Steady as you go, skipper,” he called. “Just ease her down on that heading.”
I looked ahead, tearing my eyes away from the menacing coral for a few seconds, and I watched the next swell charge in and break - except at a narrow point five hundred yards ahead. Here the swell kept its shape and ran on uninterrupted towards the land. On each side, the swell broke on coral, but just at that one point it was open.
Suddenly I remembered Chubby’s boast.
“I was just nineteen when I pulled my first jewfish out of the hole at Gunfire Break. Weren’t no other would fish with me - don’t say as I blame them. Wouldn’t go into the Break again - got a little more brains now.”
Gunfire Break, suddenly I knew that was where we were heading. I tried to remember exactly what Chubby had told me about it.
“If you come in from the sea about two hours before high water, steer for the oentre of the gap until you come up level with a big old head of brain coral on your starboard side, you’ll know it when you see it, pass it close as you can and then come round hard to starboard and you’ll be sitting in a big hole tucked in neatly behind the main reef. Closer you are on the back of the reef the better, man-” I remembered it clearly then, Chubby in his talkative phase in the public bar of the Lord Nelson, boastful as one of the very few men who had been through the Gunfire Break. No anchor going to hold you there, you got to lean on the oars to hold station in the gap - the hole at Gunfire Break is deep, man, deep, but the jewfish in there are big, man, big. One day I took four fish, and the
