3 Cuda Chaos in the Dominican Republic

Only Beaten by the Waves

After proposing in old stone Santa Domingo in a fortress mortared with animal blood (she said yes and loves the ring), then whale watching in Samaná, we shot off for the white-sand beaches of Bayahibe. Why? Because the next fish on my bucket list was the infamous barracuda, a tropical top predator renowned for attacking humans and devouring prey with torpedo-like velocity. I’d been jonesing to fish for this species for years, so now my mission was to investigate its legendary aggressiveness to see if its reputation had been rightly earned as a truly ferocious monster fish.

But if the barracuda has a worldwide range, why this island in the Caribbean with Haiti on the other side? Well, it was a place I knew nothing about, with a culture I knew nothing about, which attracted me. Plus, Lea had lived in the Dominican Republic back in graduate school, and she also knew Spanish and how to get around. More importantly, she was my favorite person on the planet, and I couldn’t get enough of her. And since she, like me, loved going out on the water, that’s what we decided to do.

We met our contact from the guide service at Bayahibe Fishing Centre at eight in the morning, and she took us down the beach where we boarded a twenty-foot fiberglass boat. It had a forty-horse Yamaha, a shade canopy, and a live well with holes drilled right through the hull that allowed for aeration.

Our guaranteed “English-speaking” guide didn’t speak any English at all, but Eduardo had a silent confidence that was reassuring and agreeable. He motored us out of the marina and into the amazingly greenish turquoise waters calicoed with a blacker blue and put the hammer down. The bow lifted, we began planing, and three seconds later the engine died.

Lea and I shared a wary stare as Eduardo opened the cowl and began banging on something with a rusty chunk of rebar. That’s when I noticed that the drain cork was wrapped in a plastic bag just like the lid of the gas tank to provide a tighter seal. As for the rinky-dink linkages inside the outboard, they were held together with snarls of wire as Eduardo rigged up a length of heavy-duty line, which he wound around the throttle handle. It was a jimmy-rigged solution which kept coming undone for the rest of the day, but hey, that’s the type of innovation found in developing countries that aspire to evolve into “middle-income” countries. The Dominican Republic, by the way, is supposedly the “world’s happiest country” behind Costa Rica.1

So off we went—past bright-white diving gulls, low-soaring pelicanos, and crucifix-looking frigate birds kiting in the sky—to a spot where Eduardo slowed down and broke out two six-foot fluorocarbon leaders with three rubber squid lures on each, which he attached to two huge fishing rigs. The six-foot trolling rods were stout and stiff and pretty much solid steel. They were equipped with jumbo baitcasting reels—one the size of a mayonnaise jar, the other the size of a coffee can. The line was at least one-hundred-pound test, and each rod and reel weighed about forty pounds. Eduardo positioned them in their holders on opposite sides of the boat and let out about fifty yards on both.

Within minutes, a rod tip started nodding. Eduardo motioned for me to reel in, so I locked the spool and began cranking. There was no resistance at all, and I could see a small silvery fish flopping on top of our wake. When we got it in the boat, it looked like a mini tuna. Eduardo unhooked it, said it was a cojinua, and threw it in the live well.

Not too long after that, trolling along the mangrovey roots of Isla Saona, Lea reeled in a stripy green-and-yellow fish with a flattened, toady head, its wide froggy mouth serrated with tiny fangs. It was about ten inches long, and Eduardo called it la rajula and threw it in the live well. It was a fish I later failed to identify, but with thousands of crazy-colored, bizarre-looking species down there, this was to be expected.

Since we now had enough bait, it was time to change locations. Eduardo shot out into the wind, and we began smack-smack-smacking on the chop. It was a rough ride, but hardly as rough as what was to come.

There are twenty-eight recognized species from the taxonomy Sphyraena (meaning “pike-like”), which goes back 50 million years. The smallest members are just a few inches long, and the largest members are reported to grow to nearly two meters. Seaworld claims barracuda can reach lengths of three meters, even though the official world record is just under seven feet.2 That 102.5-pound Guinean barracuda was caught in the Cuanza River in Angola. The largest great barracuda, on the other hand, is listed as weighing 103 pounds and measuring five and a half feet long.3

According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, barracuda can reach speeds of over thirty-six miles per hour. These opportunistic feeders are also served by “binocular vision,” meaning they see straight ahead and rely mainly on sight in the day for taking down prey. This function, coupled with a highly muscular aquadynamic body structure, allows them to strike like lightning. Hence, there are very few predators capable of doing a cuda in. Humans aside, killer whales, giant tunas, sharks, goliath groupers, dolphins, and cannibalistic barracuda are pretty much the only creatures with the huevos to even try.

Barracuda are also known for biting fish in half and taking down fish larger than themselves. For centuries, humans have reportedly been on their à la carte menu. Most incidents involve shiny objects which are mistaken for silvery fish. Other reports are connected with the flash of knives, or spearfishing, or provocation of some sort.

The Frost Museum of Science states, “The teeth of the great barracuda are sharp and can easily lacerate a human limb. Many attacks on humans . . . [end] in the loss of an arm or a leg.”4 This information, however, should be treated with a certain amount of skepticism. As the website MarineBio notes, “The great barracuda very rarely attacks humans.”5 And as the article “Debunking the Myths Behind Barracuda” asserts, “there have only been 25 documented and confirmed barracuda attacks in the last century, which is a negligible number when compared with other predators.”6 The Florida Museum of Natural History echoes this statement with the information that “such attacks are uncommon and more often than not easily preventable with a few simple precautions.”7

Barracuda are also famous for flamboyant acrobatics. There’s this video on YouTube titled “40 LB BARACUDA JUMPS INTO FISHING BOAT!!!” in which a guy is reeling one in and doesn’t notice it leap. It blasts fifteen feet through the air, seemingly driving itself harder and faster through the realm of oxygen by shuddering every molecule of its body. The guy sees this in the last split second and leans slightly to the left, the fish missile just missing his face. It lands in the boat and thrashes around like an exorcism demon child.8

This is where the idea of the barracuda tornado comes in. This species has a tendency to clump up in “wolf packs” that rotate dramatically, the smaller fish on the inside protected by the larger ones. I’ve seen quite a few photos and videos of this slowly revolving phenomenon, which sometimes includes hundreds of fish. It’s a bone-chilling sight, one that daring divers aspire to witness from the center of a whirling vortex that others fear could—like so many real tornadoes—suddenly start charting its own wild course.

Anyway, hold that thought, which we’ll return to in due time.

The ride to the reef was brutal on the butt, jumping waves and slamming down. With the bow up high and the drain plug out, the live well behind our seat was a foaming volcano that kept erupting on our backs.

Passing some egrets and tricolored herons, we finally made it to the place: a vast expanse of underwater rocks and plants, but mostly just sand about three feet beneath the surface. I’d never understood the concepts of “flats” in literature dealing with tarpon and bonefish, but now I understood it well.

The area was protected by a ridge of coral that had claimed two rusted fishing boats both now set at catawampus angles. An archipelago of some small palm-treed islands also kept the waves at bay. So with the water now calmer and the occasional manta ray ghosting by, Eduardo rigged us up with bait—most of which consisted of some sardine-looking ballyhoos with their unicorn horns removed. A foot-long steel rod was skewered through each eight-inch fish, and a J-hook the size of a candy cane was attached where the rod emerged from the anus. The other end of that rod was attached to a steel leader, which was attached to a two-foot fluoro-leader, which was attached to the extremely thick mono-test spooled in the reel. Eduardo then let out line, trailing the bait on the surface.

We cruised around for over an hour, the sun rising higher in the sky. Nothing bit. Nothing happened. Eventually, Eduardo said they weren’t biting.

That’s when a rod jerked, but it was obvious that nothing was on. He reeled it in and the bottom half of the bait was gone, completely severed by razor-sharp teeth.

This was encouraging. I’d read that cudas frequently attack from behind, bite off the tail end, then come back to engulf the rest. In fact, the other rod then did the same, and when I reeled it in, we had another half-ballyhoo.

Eduardo put freshies on both rigs and let out line and circled back. It didn’t take long for a rod to arc and start whizzing. When Eduardo signaled me to reel in, I jumped to the task. Again, there was no resistance at all. Just a strange silver slash breaking from our wake and cartwheeling across the surface. I reeled and reeled, and then it was under water and feeling like a gar. That is, being spear-shaped, it cut through the water with little resistance. It was just no match for that super rig—until we got it next to the boat. That’s when I finally felt some tension. When its stripy back came into view, Eduardo grabbed the leader and yanked the fish into the air. It was about three feet long and seven pounds. Then suddenly it was in the boat and kicking up a fuss right between the three of us.

Lea actually screamed, which surprised me but surprised her even more. That’s just not the way she rolls. When it comes to barracuda, though, it doesn’t take much to imagine those choppers clamping onto an Achilles tendon, which is why she leapt away from its gnashing jaws. But to me, it seemed about as dangerous as any northern pike I’d ever landed, so I let it bang around and slap my shins.

Eduardo showed a bit more caution by conking it on the head. The concussion killed it, and he reversed the hook out of its bony upper palate.

Gripping the fish behind its head, I picked it up to examine it. It had two spiny dorsal fins and that prominent upturned lower jaw. The black blotches on its belly informed me that it was a great barracuda, and it had those trademark sharky fangs, some of them pointing backward to prevent prey from escaping. The teeth have inner sheaths, or interlocking holes in the opposing jaws, but gazing into that maw, all I could see was the stuff of vampire movies.

“Be careful,” Lea advised.

“No problem,” I replied, and that’s when it flexed and snapped. Sure, it was technically dead, but that didn’t stop it from springing from my grip and landing between us.

Lea screamed again, leapt away once again, and again I apologized for freaking her out. I thought I’d had it under control, but as I found out, this was the fiercest, strongest, most unpredictable fish I had ever handled.

I wanted to get the trophy shot, so I grabbed it again, and again I assured her that I had control. But again, the same damn thing happened. It broke away, she screamed and leapt, and this time she was pissed. And so was I. I mean, this dead fish was messing with my credibility, and it was making my bride-to-be distrusting of me.

Eduardo told me to grip it from underneath, so I clenched the inner gills in my fist and there was no way in hell it could break loose. It tried, and I almost lost it, but I held on and kept control.

Meanwhile, the fact that Eduardo had brained this barracuda as a precautionary measure spoke to the fact that this fish’s conservation status is highly stable, and it isn’t endangered or vulnerable. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the status of the great barracuda is that of “Least Concern.”9 Still, the specters of habitat loss, pollution, and sportfishing are something to consider. But this species’ overall stability isn’t just due to a dearth of its predators; another factor is that there’s virtually no commercial industry for barracuda because of the dreaded ciguatera toxin. Since barracuda eat smaller fish, and because many of those fish process algae which are poisonous to humans, barracuda are often avoided as a food source. Symptoms of ciguatera food poisoning include gastronomical distress, weakness of limbs, and problems differentiating hot from cold. Basically, the literature states that any barracuda over ten pounds can bioaccumulate enough to become a carrier, so there’s a wariness out there that acts as a defense mechanism and sustains populations.

I’d asked our contact at Bayahibe Fishing Centre if barracuda were safe to eat, and she had replied that she never takes that chance. This was the message I pretty much got from everyone and every source I consulted, so it bummed me out that Eduardo had iced this fish. I communicated to Lea that I’d like to release any more we caught, and she, in turn, translated that. Eduardo, however, responded that he would be glad to take it and any others we caught to feed to his family for Holy Week.

Then pow! It was Barracuda city! They were biting like crazy, and that’s when all chaos broke loose. I hooked another three-footer, but this one was way huger. It leapt and ran and took out line, exploding my mistaken perception that cuda can’t fight. Then, when I finally got it in the boat, it went amok, somehow snapping Eduardo’s finger and leaving a gash that’s probably still in need of stitches. That fish weighed twenty pounds, and he dropped it in the live well.

Lea took the next one, but in handing her the rod I stepped on her foot, crushing her toes. Again she screamed but brought it in. It was the smallest of the bunch, only fifteen inches long, and Eduardo called it a blanco, meaning it was white. I couldn’t see any difference in it, except that it lacked the dark belly splotches the other two had.

Then I lucked into a monster cuda. I didn’t see it jump, but Eduardo got a gander at it and exclaimed that it was “Grande!” Figuring I’d set the hook, I hauled back hard on the rod and hit the canopy frame above, instantly snapping the line. Big mistake! I felt like a total dillrod after that and resolved not to set the hook again. If they were on, they were on, so no use taking any chances.

Eduardo was now trailing a handline to account for the pole I’d put out of commission. I hooked another fish, and in bringing it in I caught the handline, which ended up getting caught in the prop. Whatever the case, we landed that barracuda, another three-footer, this one nearly fifteen pounds, and eventually Eduardo untangled the mess.

“These fish are loco!” I cried, snagging a rock we thought was a fish. Eduardo directed me to reel in, so I locked the spool and the rod arced to the breaking point. We were in a jam, so I released the line and the bale spun at Mach speed. Another big mistake. The next thing we knew, we had a Medusa on our hands.

Eduardo began untangling that, the tiller swung freely on the transom, we drifted into some coral, and because he was uncoiling the bird’s nest, the propeller began cracking and crunching with a gut-wrenching sound. Somehow, though, he got us out of there, and together we freed the line.

Following that, I got a twelve-pounder, another seven-pounder, lost a couple more, and then we were ready for lunch and snorkeling. Lea and I swam around, saw some cartoony-looking fish, then headed back with half a dozen barracuda. The chaos was over.

Or so I thought.

The next day, we were heading into the wind, and the weather had radically changed. The waves were whitecapping at three to five feet, and the hull was slamming down every few minutes with a skull-rattling intensity. Not only that, there were swells coming in beneath those waves, lifting them another six feet. Sometimes we’d go up, then suddenly plummet eight to ten feet.

I’d just told Lea that my study had changed from investigating rumors of the barracuda’s violent nature to reflecting on the theme of chaos, which seemed to come stock with meeting these fish. I listed the litany of experiences we went through the day before as evidence of this, but now, as we were finding out, the chaos was much more than we’d bargained for. In fact, it was Chaos with a capital C.

Eduardo was standing in the stern expertly steering us up and down the crashing, smashing, cascading crests, and Lea and I were in the middle of the boat, our asses getting smacked by the bench seat every time the boat slammed down. It would’ve been nice to have had some life vests within reach (they were stowed in the bow), if not for the reassurance that if we flipped we might survive, then at least for the cushioning they could’ve provided our battered glutei maximi.

Then things got worse. The waves rose to seven feet, eight feet, and with all those swells, we were rising ten feet, twelve feet, thirteen feet, then bashing down with sledgehammer force. It even got to the point that I could feel my balls slapping the seat every time the keel smashed down. I sat on my baseball cap, and that lessened the thwack a degree or three.

Lea, in the meantime, was starting to get sick. She’d taken some seasickness pills earlier, but now her gut was surging like the pounding waves. She was clinging to the rail and looking pale.

We had an hour to go in an open boat on the open sea, and there was no protection from the wind in sight. In other words, we had to keep on pushing through the splashing, thrashing, kra-bashing fury of the relentless Caribbean because there wasn’t any other choice.

“Isn’t this dangerous?” Lea asked in Spanish, but Eduardo just shrugged. From the way he swayed and kept his footing, it was obvious that he was used to such conditions. But for us, we were entitled Americanos, so I felt indignant about having to pay for such discomfort. But more than that, it vexed me that my obsession had placed the love of my life in peril.

And for what? So I could write a monster-fish book? So I could continue to not catch what was still eluding me? I sure as hell wasn’t getting any closer to anything—except death!

Then things got even worse. As we chugged to the top of a twenty-foot wave, I heard Lea gasp. It was looking like the little engine that could might not. The apex of the wave was curling above us and was about to come barreling down, but we made it by the hair of our chinny chin chins, the patched-up motor droning whenever it could find purchase, revving up and winding down according Eduardo’s grip on this merciless sea that had already claimed countless lives.

And on it went, excruciating minute after excruciating minute, going more up and down than forward. And as it went on, surfing through gullies, gliding through gaps, more and more water slapped us in the face. Gallon after gallon, bucket after bucket, drenching us, in our eyes, stinging us! We were already totally soaked except for one cargo pocket of my shorts, the only dry spot on both our bodies. It was holding my notebook, which was filled with pages of water-soluble fishing notes I’d spent two days compiling. All it would take was one good hit and all the details I’d been collecting would be completely wiped out. Why this didn’t happen I have no clue, because we were definitely being abused.

By the smash of the ocean! The bash of the sea! By the rising, the diving, the hell-pounding of the seat! Gastric acids bubbling! I couldn’t take any more, had to stand up, get off my ass! So I lurched to my feet and grabbed the canopy, locked my legs, and turned my pocket away from the spray. And that did it. It was easy enough to just cling for dear life, white-knuckling the steely frame.

On and on we raged through the chaos. The chaos of cudas, the chaos of slaves! Torture, hurricanes, military might! Crashing and smashing over thousands of leagues of gone treasures, corroded cannons, the casualties of empires, pirates, prisoners, refugees! Lost histories riddled with rape, malaria, massacres, mass suicide—the whole horror of this gorgeous, genocidal, sun-blazoned place! Which, now, is also an all-exclusive destination for frequent flyers seeking golf-course-spa massages. But where are the Arawaks now? A quarter million wiped out in just two years! Thanks a lot, Christopher Columbus!

And there she was: my pretty, ailing fiancée—who I’d hauled off on a madman’s quest—fighting the shock of her own intestines, sheets of spray smacking her face, being beaten like a dog. Still, as we both confirmed later on, we were consoled by the fact that at least we would die together.

But then, of course, we made it to the jetty. And as soon as we rounded it, we were out of the wind and coming in.

On the plane ride over, I’d been reading Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, a novel based on the Trujillo dictatorship that took its toll on millions of Dominicans. That book was filled with all sorts of murders and assassinations that had affected the political evolution of the DR in the twentieth century. One passage, though, that stuck out to me was from the protagonist’s point of view in Santo Domingo: “She is at the corner of Independencia and Máximo Gómez in a crowd of men and women waiting to cross. Her nose registers a range of odors as great as the endless variety of noises hammering at her ears.”10 Noises that the author described in vivid detail. Noises like we’d heard the night before, trying to sleep at the Hotel Villa Iguana: roosters crowing constantly, political loudspeakers blasting the night, but mostly, the music. The insufferably loud, booming, quaking, woofering music pumped into the atmosphere like mushroom clouds of methyl-ethyl-diesel exhaust: an in-your-face, conga-techno-rap explosion born from the hyper desire to make use of an earsplitting technology just because it’s possible. Some may call it celebration, others may call it noise pollution, but it was definitely five hundred thousand watts of WHOMPF-WHOMPF-WHOMPFing island pop that some can tolerate better than others.

And once again, there it was, blasting the atmosphere. The beach was filled with hundreds of spring-break Westerners in Bermuda shorts and thong bikinis drinking Presidente Beer as they oohed in awe at the fish coming in. There’d been a week-long fishing tournament, and the local vendors were out in force, selling trinkets, hawking amber, mongering Hawaiian shirts made in Mexico. And contributing to all this confusion THUMP-THUMP-THUMPing in the afternoon heat, was a deafening HUMPA-HUMPA-HUMPA wall of sound shaking like a gazillion maracas from two pairs of ten-foot speakers strapped to a tractor trailer, all of them aimed directly at us.

The chaos again. It was in the air, it was full of bass, and there was nothing we could do but pull up on the sand, get out, and wade straight into it.

We made our way to the weighing station where technicolored mahi-mahi and gothically spiked wahoo were dangling like sides of beef. There was even a behemoth barracuda about five feet long and fifty pounds, which is about as big as they get this side of the Florida Keys.

And in this chaos, a cleaning frenzy was going on. Fishermen were chopping fish, filleting fish, and saving the roe as a sloppy slew of innards washed its way across the beach.

That’s when I noticed that the locals weren’t holding back on the barracuda. They were gutting them and slicing them and taking them home, even those over ten pounds—ciguatera be damned!

So I went back to our boat, picked out a seven-pounder, and Eduardo offered to clean it for me. “Sí,” I said, and he broke out a knife, chopped it into an accordioned chain of steaks, then sent us on our way.

We took it straight to Mama Rosa, a jolly chef who ran a chicken shack across from our hotel. We’d eaten there the night before, and she told us she would cook any fish we caught. But now that I was standing there with a questionable fish in my grip, she was shaking her head with a tight-lipped frown. Lea, however, told her that it was small enough to not be infected, and she finally gave in.

“Frita o criolla?” was the question, so we went with the latter. And an hour later, now drinking cold beers, Mama Rosa brought it out on a platter. The head was flayed right down the middle in all its eyeball-glaring glory, and even the cheek meat was exposed as if to say, “Hey, dig on in!” Not only that, but there were baseball-sized hunks of sweet, white cuda meat swimming in a mild brown sauce. And on the side: yellow rice with pigeon peas, sweet plantains, salad, beans.

It was a culinary masterpiece! A work of cooking art! A true performance poetry piece leading to the next obvious phase of this investigation: I put a forkful in my mouth.

Hmmm. Not bad. The texture was flaky and firm, but something wasn’t gelling. Something wasn’t great. The sauce was fine, but nothing special. Whereas the meat was inviting, the payoff seemed anticlimactic. We couldn’t figure it out.

I reckoned this was a fish that depended on its sauce. If the sauce was transcendental, then that could elevate the taste—but it just wasn’t there. I mean, it was a good clean-tasting fish, and it wasn’t fishy-tasting at all, so it should taste excellent.

Lea agreed. She said it was okay, but that’s all it was. Just okay.

Thus my conclusion, which is pretty much what most sources say: it’s edible, but nothing to write home about.

Nevertheless, I write this. About a fish. About a culture. About two people who go to the Caribbean, get engaged, and envision a twister. One that arises from the threat of chaos, but never quite strikes. And then, just as instantly as tornados are prone to form and drop from the sky, they can just fade away. As chaos often does—with an eerie silence following the breaking waves. The one saving grace of all this being: we didn’t get poisoned or washed out to sea.

Chaos. It’s part of this island’s identity. It’s a force that destroys but also creates. That’s what I was working with. That’s what I was reflecting on: the fact that all that destructive power can sometimes serve to connect exceptions to the rule—if you’re lucky, that is.

And I am. And I know it. Because if it wasn’t for the violence of mass migrations clashing and smashing and scattering humans all over place, I never would’ve met this person, who I’m more than fortunate to have in my life. And here I am, and there she is, both of us beaten by the waves but together in the darkening dusk, surrounded by barracuda; rotating cyclically, psychically, cyclonically. As the roosters crow. As the music thumps. As the tide crushes on—all through the Dominican night.