Sentence:  If a bream or a perch or a pilchard or a bass revealed its iridescent stomach on the decks of my clipper-ship, whilst crewmen <WSD>fustered</WSD> and flapped below the wheelhouse with their buckets and tridents to parse the bycatch from the clustering glut of prawns we heaped onto ice, I would elevate the piscine interloper to my eye and watch it strive to communicate through the burden of air and without a tongue to maipulate language in an endearing or persuasive way. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  To fumble; to work clumsily.