I could see the shark fins. The sharks were swimming in a circle around our small dinghy.

“Stop snivelling,” said my twelve year old brother, Neville.

“Stop now, or I will throw you overboard.”

“I want to go home,” I cried.

It was the first Monday of our summer school holiday and our mother was busy doing the washing. We did not have electricity and so there was no washing machine. Instead Mum used a copper, which was in our backyard, to boil up the clothes. My brother had cut up wood, the right size, for the firebox under the copper and he had filled the copper with water from the tank. Mum would let the clothes boil in the hot water for a while and then fish them out with a wooden pole. They would then be rinsed in a tub of cold water and Mum would ring each item out by hand and then hang the clothes on the clothesline.

Neville said that Mum would be too busy to have time to be sitting down looking out of windows, so we were going on an adventure.

A few locals would leave their boats, and the oars, up above the high tide line on Onetangi Beach.

We ‘took’ one of the dinghies and launched it in the shallows. Neville’s friend David stood behind the dinghy and held it steady, while Neville, another boy and myself climbed on board. Neville sat in the middle seat, oars at the ready. We watched and counted the waves, we knew that after the seventh wave, there was always a lull and so when that happened, David pushed us out, then hopped in the stern and Neville rowed like mad to get us quickly out past the breaker line.

I had been enjoying the adventure until I saw the shark fins.

My brother said they were Grey Nurse sharks. He told me that for every fin I counted there would be three more sharks under the surface. I did not know if it was true, or if he was just trying to scare me.

“Look at the size of the fin and you can tell the size of the shark. It is an inch of dorsal fin for every foot of shark,” he told us.

Finally he decided to row to shore. As we pulled safely into the beach, I jumped from the dinghy but my knees felt all rubbery and I fell into the water. Faster than lightning I picked myself up and sprinted up the beach to the safety of the sand dunes.

“Don’t tell Mum and Dad we went out in the boat, or I will take you back out there and throw you overboard,”  my brother said in a menacing tone.

It was surprising that my nightmares only lasted a week.