In a harbour city the people fish. It is a waiting game. David Loughrey went to the Steamer Basin to have a go and found an introspective pastime that allowed plenty of time for the mind to wander - too much time, perhaps.
At the wharf we sat, and we waited for fish.
The fish would not come.
The rod rose above the waves.
It rose over the lapping seas on a workday, it was tall and strong and made of carbon fibre or some-such.
It was tall and strong but its line of gut was loose and limp as it threaded through the guides and was seized by irritable winds that dragged it to the bright float uncomfortable on the swaying surface.
The float dangled above the harbour floor two vicious black hooks, both of which plunged cruel through the tiny rotting brain of a formerly frozen anchovy and emerged razor-sharp and blood stained through its anguished face.
What more appetising a morsel to attract a distracted salmon foolish enough to approach the shore of mankind's home?
The shore of mankind's home was warm but choppy this week, as yachts surged and pitched in their enclosure, their rigging slapping insistently on their aluminium masts.
The seagulls stood and cried and fed their young, then sat with heads into the wind and rested on the splintered wharf.
At the Steamer Basin a Stewart Island shag dived deep, and after an interminable wait surfaced sleek and watchful.
It was not the only hunter present.
A well-wrapped couple with fold-out chairs held on to one corner of the wharf, their lines moving with the swell.
A mother and her three girls wrapped in the safety of life jackets fished near their car; rods cast, they hauled a bucket on a string and spun and laughed on the wharf near a moored dredge and a locked wire gate with a shining silver padlock.
We all waited.
We waited for fish.
But the fish would not come to the Steamer Basin.
They would not respond to the silvered post-mortem swim of a rapidly disintegrating anchovy as it spun and flashed under the dark green waters of the Otago harbour.
They failed to surface, much less to jump o'er the surging waves that wetly slapped the concrete walls beneath the sturdy pier.
Where could they be, these scaled submariners with flicking tails and bursting bug eyes; sliding confidentially through the deep to some secret destination of barnacle and kelp?
Perhaps they were at a conference to discuss tidal flows, or an underwater community event open only to salmon and trevally, or a pan-species party where everyone was invited except sharks, which are deeply unpopular with all fish.
Probably dolphins weren't invited either, what with them being completely up themselves.
Who knew where the fish were?
The fish would not come.
The shag dived again, and the seagulls began to look agitated.
The fishers began to mumble, low voiced and troubled, of dredging that muddied the waters of their pastime; they counted the days - no - it was a week since the last salmon was spotted.
Their words were lost in the wind, and they began to sing sad songs of fishing boats long sunk and mariners dragged from their wives and children, lost in the scrambled seas.
They stood as gusts pulled at their huge waterproof coats, they linked arms and called their sailors back from Davy Jones' locker, but they would not come.
They sang hymns calling upon their God to guide the fish to their lonesome hooks, and chanted in a foreign language loathsome oaths, incantations they hoped would bring them luck.
They stood arm in arm and stared down the harbour, none willing to be the first to blink.
But the fish would not come.
On a floating dock that thumped irregularly on its concrete neighbour, a man thickly jacketed and woolly hatted on a hot day lay uncomfortable, propped up on his elbows under an uneasy ramp.
The smoke from his cigarette blew across the waves, past the public toilet, across the wasteland under the overbridge above the railway lines and drifted into the nostrils of the smart set in Vogel St.
His eyes closed, be began to drool gently on his collar: he dreamed.
He saw huge salmon eyes falling from above, they fell about him on the dock and bounced and bent his fishing rod, which was beginning to melt at the end and drip flaming plastic balls that fizzed into the harbour.
He saw salmon swim past the dredge, hundreds, thousands of them, blind and hungry, but his melted rod would not swing back to cast, and the hook caught in his ear, and he was in his pyjamas, ashamed and half naked on the wharf.
"You have to believe you will catch a fish before you can catch one,'' he shouted, as he woke and stumbled towards Fryatt St.
"You must stay positive.''
The rod lay on the dock, its gut still limp, the float bobbing purposeless in the water, the anchovy freed in death to sink finally to rest on the sand, and the fisher yearned for release from this listless occupation.
The wind blew him, too, back to the city of movement and activity and easy distraction, where he knew for sure - the fish would not come.
