there’s a lot of fish in the richmond river ….
… but it isn’t always peaceful.
< — This bloke is how it used to be: quiet, serene, a good spot, no neighbours, soft seat and a couple of favourite rods plus a bag of live bloodworms, then when he gets home he cooks dinner. Fishermen are like that and their wives admire them for it, the cooking that is because it’s a known fact that the bloke who catches the fish is the only one who knows how to clean and cook it properly.
She wishes he would do it every day if only to get him into the kitchen and her out of it.
There’s a boardwalk running along the river bank underneath the apartment block Mick lives in. He’s top floor. Two new tenants have just moved into one of the bottom floor units being Rod and Glenn but known to all as Rod and Gunn. They know all about fishing though I doubt neither of them has ever wet a line the reason being many of the youths of the town do, fish, and in the doing they like to park their bikes, girlfriends, beer esky and BOOM-BOX right underneath Rodd and Gunn’s balcony, a balcony that overlooks the river, one where R&G like to relax after dinner and watch the sun slowly sink behind the Alstonville ridgeline. Play a little Tchaikovsky, soft, perhaps share a chilled bottle of Chardonnay.
Now on a regular basis they get to listen to industrial semi-trash hypno-metal-doof along with the shouted conversations of half a dozen young blokes on the turps and the laughter of their girlfriends. Not to mention the uplifted smoke of holy herbs and demented caterwauling when one of them finds he has a choice 2kg silver bream on his line.
Mick remembered a late night not so long ago when a young bloke caught a juvenile bull shark down there. He and his mate got it up onto the deck before both of them attacked it with their knives then tossed it back in, dead. The multitude of arterial spurtings decorating the surrounds and large puddle of coagulated blood seen on the boardwalk the following morning has remained unexplained until this day.
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