Sea chase to catch toothfish trawler

The Patagonian toothfish, also called the Chilean sea bass, is a strange, deep-sea fish prized for its firm white flesh that is rapidly being fished toward extinction. As their numbers dwindle off the shores of South America, fishing boats have travelled further out into the waters of other countries to trawl for the “white gold”, selling their catches to the Japanese and American markets.

To protect the remaining stock in its Antarctic waters, Australia has pursued suspected toothfish trawlers, most notably in the 21-day chase by the patrol boat Southern Supporter tracking the Uruguayan-flagged Viarsa I across nearly 4000 nautical miles in 2003.

That dramatic sea chase, the longest in Australian maritime history, has already been the subject of a book – G. Bruce Knecht’s Hooked: Pirates, Poaching and the Perfect Fish.

Katherine Johnson (who doesn’t list Knecht’s book as a source) has used the chase as inspiration for her first novel, Pescador’s Wake, which won a HarperCollins Varuna Award for manuscript development in 2007.

The Pescador of her title is illegally fishing in the Southern Ocean when the Australis, chartered by Customs and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, catches sight of her.

Challenged and ordered to proceed to Fremantle, the master of the Pescador, Carlos Fernandez Rocha, decides to run. On board with him as first mate are his oldest friend, Eduardo Rodriguez Perez, and a crew that is predominantly Spanish and Peruvian. Rocha and Perez had hoped that the private sale of a small proportion of their catch would finance their own boat and cut them free of the life of illegal fishing for the shadowy owner of the Pescador. To this end, Perez has enlisted the sinister Russian Dmitri Ivanov who has contacts for the sale in Mauritius and organised his hiring as the ship’s engineer.

The Australis is manned with a knockabout crew, more used to checking boats for pollution in Australian waters or taking part in the occasional search and rescue. The skipper Dave Bates has promised his wife that the action on the voyage south would be just warning illegal fishers over the radio but the Fisheries Minister has decided to play hardball and orders the Australis to pursue the Pescador.

Johnson’s novel unfolds as chapters focused on the different characters – Rocha, Bates, Rocha’s wife Julia in Montevideo, Dave’s wife Margie in Hobart – interspersed with the journal-like confidences Perez writes in his log.

The drama of the chase is heightened by the back-stories – Margie’s thoughts and feelings as the second anniversary of her only son’s death approaches and Julia’s musing about her stolen time with Perez and the scare that ensues with the premature birth of her son.

Johnson stretches belief with the cooperation of her female characters and the dialogue could have done with a bit more work. There are moments, too, when this reader felt that Johnson (who has an honours degree in marine science to add to her BA Journalism) was shoving in marine-life facts with fish tails and feathers sticking out rather than having them neatly stowed in her story.

Between, however, there are passages of real tension and Johnson’s descriptions of the sea and the weather and the groaning boats shiver with authenticity. In the pitch of phrase and the surge of sentence there are moments of deep beauty.

This review first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald 31 January 2009. © Jennifer Moran 2009