For all of my childhood I lived at Onetangi Beach, on Waiheke Island, New Zealand.

When my brother was fourteen he went out with a local fisher for the day. My brother dived and caught four good sized crayfish. When he arrived back at the beach, the local man said to him, “See you later.”

“Wait, don’t I get my crayfish?” asked Neville.

“No, I am going to sell them.”

Neville went home and told Dad he had caught four crayfish.

“Where are they?” asked Dad.

“He wouldn’t let me keep them.”

Dad went straight away to see the local fisher and said to him, “You could have let the boy keep at least one of them, you mean b……”

The man said, “Take one now.”

“No, we will catch our own,” Dad retorted.

The next day Dad and Neville walked over the hills from Onetangi to Woodlands, which was a favourite fishing spot.

Neville was following Dad over the rocks to a flat rock where they fished, when he glanced down at the swirling water next to the rocks. He watched seaweed dancing in the water with each ebb and flow of the tide. Suddenly he saw two antennae poking out of the water and between the antennae a pair of short jointed feelers.

“Dad,” he yelled “Crayfish!”

They both jumped into the waist deep water and filled a corn sack  with fifteen crayfish.

Dad was leaning down, feeling under a rocky ledge and he said, “This crayfish must be a soft shell crayfish, it has a soft shell.”

Suddenly there was a mighty swirling in the water and a Moray Eel came flying out of the crevice where it was living. Dad and Neville jumped onto the rocks so fast, they could have qualified for the Olympics.

 They both knew the Moray could inflict dreadful wounds.

They had had a lucky escape.

Back on the shore, Dad looked for a long strong piece of wood to thread through the top of the sack and walking in single file, one holding each end, Dad and Neville, trudged back to Onetangi.

Arriving there, they walked down the zig zag track, leading from the top of the hill to the beach, and suddenly the local fisher came rushing over.

“What have you got there?” he asked.

“Our own crayfish,” Dad replied.

“Where did you get them?”

“Out there,” Dad said, pointing out to sea.

And he kept on walking.