Meet the voice at the end of the pier

Nia Vale

Orchid Shore looks small from the transmitter tower. From a boat at midnight, it feels like another planet. I began recording my fishing trips because I kept forgetting the best bits: the wrong turn, the broken torch, the enormous bass that appeared while I was trying to untangle a microphone cable. These are written dispatches from my imagined Big Bass Bonanza coastline. No broadcast schedule can tell the fish when to arrive.

I repaired my first radio with a paperclip and a great deal of optimism. Fishing followed much the same pattern. The workshop became a place to build odd lures; the shoreline became somewhere to discover why they did not work. I keep every miscalculation in the story. The point of a night journal is to let you hear the pause before something unexpected happens.