Life on the water, by the water, in the water.

Fishermen in Jaffa are watching their natural habitat, the dilapidated warehouses and concrete docks turning into one more fashion spot for the late night crowd, which from its seats at the fish restaurants on the pier looks down on the piles of nets and crates of empty beer bottles on the decks of the blue, yellow, green, orange, red and black peeling paint boats that go out at night and come back in the morning.

It's a lonely ride, and most of it is spent lolling on the deck on a hot night, because even out there, where the neon skyline of the city becomes a blur of vague light, in mid-August there is no relief from heat. The fishermen drink their beer and don't talk much, for fishermen don't talk much wherever they work or sport, and there's not much sporting fish in this part of the Mediterranean.

Mid-week in the marina there are sailors scrubbing their decks, sanding the wood and painting, over and over again, with the lacquer that goes on so thick that when the sun and wind and salty water has finally peeled a piece away, it's not a slice of paint, it's a piece of cloudy glass.

And there are the rich ones, the ones with crews, who do the scrubbing for them. The rich ones use their yachts for something other than to test the strength of the mind's control over sail and rudder and keel against the strength of the sea. There are yachts of wealth and yachts of love, yachts for living and yachts for status, yachts for the sake of the sea and yachts for the sake of being seen on board. Once upon a time, a yachta, as it's called, was anything that floated and wasn't used to fish or patrol the coastline. Now there are yachts too small to make a big impression on the Riviera, but like brand-new BMWs and Mercedes sports cars patrolling Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda and Kikar Hamedina on a Friday afternoon, a sign of the acquisition of wealth through the sweat of nerves, not labour.

Few of these vessels have Hebrew names or their names written in Hebrew, and that's probably part of the mystique of owning something floating in the Tel Aviv marina in 1986. Almost all the fishermen's boats in Jaffa, rising and falling at anchor or tied up to the docks, have Hebrew names.

Above the marina is the only public swimming pool between Jaffa and the Yarkon River, the beach and the Ayalon Highway. It's the pool at the end of Gordon Street, where from six in the morning, the aging fitness nuts, and the bathing beauties old and young who want to avoid the cruising beach barracuda and the kiddies with mothers wanting a lifeguard who pays attention and not a lifeguard who's paid attention from teenage girls, all swim in chilled sea water cleansed of the seaweed, tar, plastic bags, empty plastic coca cola bottles.

On the beach are the boats, dinghies, four metre sail-and-jib day sailers, sailfish and sunfish, which are the origins of the windsurfer, little boats all, owned by men or women whose spouses would never let them sell the three room flat in Holon and use the money to buy a yacht, and really sail, over the horizon to the place where when you're runing before the wind there is no sound except for the slap slap of the water against the hull.

There's a hand-made red and orange catamaran, built by three buddies who use it every weekend, and only for their love of it, their belief in their baby, for it's as ugly as a baby whose mother believes to be the most beautiful in the world, does the marina management not ask them to at least cover it, lest its sheer ugliness offend the monied owners of more graceful but probably not as loved sea machines.

At the marina there are only a dozen families living in the pedantic crowdedness of being on board a boat big enough to contain its own shower, big enough to take from Tel Aviv to Miami. Hundreds of other boats and yachts, the difference a matter of metrage, according to the Transportion Ministry, boats being up to six metres, yachts being up to 24 metres and anything over that is a ship.

On the beach north of the marina, where there's no breakwater and no lifeguard but lots of surfers standing around in clusters of twos and threes, on the boardwalk and hot sand beneath the sandstone cliff overlooking the beach, only the masts, like a maze of downtown tv antennas, are visible.

All summer the surfers had planned -- to the extent that surfers ever plan anything -- for this day. The national championships. On the second day of the championship, there were lots of colour pictures in the afternoon press, showing pretty girls watching their boyfriends, pretty boys watching their mentors.

But since that first day there have been no waves, no curling rolling slipping tossing highways of the moment when the graceful curve of the board becomes the elegance of feet firmly planted and arms outstretched in a ballet pose of balance.

The water is as glassy as a sea can be, and the surfers listen to each other's stories about days when there were waves, using a language as esoteric in Hebrew as it is in English, a jargon of ways to describe waves and boards and ways the two are coordinated by the bravery of the surfer.

Only Danny Sanderson, knew how to write a surfer's song for Israel, and even his song had a bit too much of the Beach Boys.

Only Mashina, which they say now is breaking up, could have written a great surfing song for Tel Aviv, but young songwriter Yuval, who like all Banai's has the wide jaw, dark eyes and silk black hair of a Jerusalem grandmother three generations ago, is from Jerusalem where the nearest sea is dead and salty and actually a lake, not a sea at all.

Back to the top