7 Bananas for Tarpon

A Matter of Timing in the Gambia and Beyond

I had a score to settle with a monstrous, hard-hitting sport fish. Tarpon had beaten me twice, and this time it was serious. The first time was on the river border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, where trolling giant Rapalas, I hooked a six-foot-plus, 130-pound leviathan that leapt ten feet into the air. After a forty-five-minute back-breaking battle, I brought it up to the boat and my guide touched the leader right when the hook popped out of its mouth. According to IGFA rules I caught that fish, but since I didn’t even touch it, I can’t honestly count that as legitimate. And the second time was in Mexico, casting lures for juveniles. I had ten on in one day, but they were so scrappy that I couldn’t bring one in.

Heading to West Africa in October, I figured, would put me in a good position to end this maddening grudge match that had been going on for years, and African Angling looked like the solution. Their website states, “Tarpon are by far the most powerful game fish of The Gambia. These extraordinary fish can . . . be targeted using a variety of fishing methods. The weight of a tarpon in The Gambia can range from 15lb to 250lb, with numerous fish having been caught over 100lbs and our largest standing at 303lbs.”1 And since that three-hundred-pounder was the unofficial world record, and since British expat Mark Longster had been connecting folks with this legendary fighter for over twenty years, the Gambia was the place to go.

But I had an opportunity to double dip as well. Stingrays could also be caught, so why not go for this prehistoric, alien-looking bizarro fish? African Angling was experienced in bringing in supersized stingrays, so it was on!

After trusting a shifty stranger with our passports at the Banjul Airport, scoring thousands of Gambian dollars on the black market, going in and out of stark rooms with armed soldiers, and paying off guides in the middle of the night, we caught a ride in a limping, coughing, cracked-windshield taxi with no headlights and made our way through multiple machine-gun checkpoints. There were abandoned shells of buildings on both sides of the highway, lost souls pleading for rides, and eerie blacked-out skies that made me wonder what would happen if the tranny dropped out on the road. Our driver, however, ground through the gears, we inhaled enough carbon monoxide to knock out an elephant, and we finally made it to the Senegambia Beach Hotel.

This exotic, whacko tourist compound for Dutch families and dirty old men paying for companionship was basically a cross between a snake farm and a luxury golf course. Monkeys and monitor lizards ran wild; there were half-feral, cross-eyed cats chilling all over; vultures hunkered in the palms; and crazy-colored, long-tailed birds were pecking on the lawns. Because it was four in the morning, we didn’t see all this when we came in, but over the next few days we did—along with various models of sunburned vacationers lounging around the swimming pool, African dancers actually lighting their junk on fire, and the consistently exuberant English-speaking locals you couldn’t help meeting every three steps, then end up repeating obligatory information to because we were on “The Smiling Coast,” where, as the T-shirts say, “It’s Nice to Be Nice.”

After two days of exploring the beaches and trying out the local cuisine, “Bosslady” (as the locals referred to Lea) and “Bossman” (as they referred to me) were in a taxi heading to Denton Bridge. The sun was bright, the colors were brilliant, and the people swarming through the market shacks were hardly as intimidating as the night we arrived. In fact, we had fallen in love with the upbeat peacefulness of this war-free, storm-free country.

Our captain, Farmara, a silent yet jovial veteran of the Gambia River and the outlying coast, had been guiding for tarpon and stingray for twenty-two years. The first thing he showed us when we boarded the open-deck fiberglass boat was the cooler. He opened it, pulled out a bunch of bananas, and asked me if I wanted to leave them behind.

“Why?” I asked.

“Some fishermen don’t like banana,” he replied. “They say bad luck. One fisherman, he threw all banana overboard.”

Bosslady and I laughed at that.

“If we don’t catch any fish today,” I said, “maybe we’ll leave them on shore tomorrow.”

Out on the ocean, it was a hell-ride to the stingray spot, jumping waves on the incoming tide. Bosslady and I were seated on a cooler which kept slamming our asses every time the boat slapped down. But we made it there and anchored up. The waves were still pretty rough, rising and dropping six feet at a time and tossing the boat from side to side. Let’s just say that Bosslady wasn’t feeling 100 percent excellent.

Farmara, meanwhile, baited up some heavy-duty Ugly Stiks with a fish called “bunga.” The poles were equipped with solid surf-fishing reels and “extra huge” baitcasters. Some had ultrathick line in the one-hundred-pound range, others had woven line that looked to be around fifty- or sixty-pound test. I tried to get some specific information, but as noted before, Farmara was pretty much a silent guy.

Anyway, we put those baits on the bottom for the “batoids,” an ichthyo-term that refers to skates, rays, stingrays, the whole weird-looking superorder of the family Batoidea. They’re infamous, of course, for killing Steve Irwin, “the Crocodile Hunter,” with their whiplike, spear-tipped tails. Some species even zap their prey with electrical currents. They’re found in both fresh and salt water, and new species are discovered every year.

We also had two lighter weight rods rigged with two hooks each. We baited these with shrimp and dropped them on the bottom. I immediately caught two angelfish, which look like larger versions of the tropical aquarium species. They had kissy faces and zebra stripes, and Farmara threw them into the hold.

Not too long after that, he hooked into a barracuda and handed his pole to me. It leapt once but came in easy, about twenty inches long and silvery with black racing stripes along the sides. I held it up for a photo, and to my surprise it didn’t act out. I caught a larger one later, and it also stayed relatively calm, which was a far cry from the frenetic cudas I’d experienced in the Dominican Republic.

As the day went on I caught a multitude of other fish. There was a small fish called “big eye,” which had a large comic eye and some electric saffron highlights to its fins (which we saved for bait), and a frequently recurring rock bass that Farmara called “wrass.” I also caught a “baby snapper” (a four-pound, big-lipped grouper), and I spotted an injured permit circling on the surface, which Farmara gaffed right through its humpback. But the most interesting fish was the one called “doctor.” It was a funny-looking dark brown fish with a neon tangerine oval near its tail where two backward-pointing spikes could pop out like switchblades on both sides, skewering anyone dumb enough to grab it there (which is how it got its name). All these fish went into the hold.

Gambian anglers, I was learning, don’t waste anything. Their fisheries are basically strong, healthy, and diverse, so it doesn’t make any economic sense to practice catch and release when they’ve got families to feed. Since it’s common for men to have multiple kids with multiple wives, there’s a lot of children that need to be fed.

Anyway, it was an incredibly hot day with the African sun brutally beating down. A torpid heaviness set in around one o’clock, and we began baking in the afternoon heat while Bosslady slept on the bow. With the boat still going up and down, it took more than just concentration to keep the line tight on the bottom as I rode the undulations, only nodding off a few times. Nevertheless, I held the pole tight just in case something hit. But nothing did. They just weren’t biting.

Eventually the sea calmed, and I saw an extraterrestrial squid swim by, plus a giant sea turtle rise and dive. But what I didn’t see were stingrays.

So at three o’clock we went looking for tarpon. Not fishing for tarpon—just looking for them because we didn’t have the right bait. We needed mullets, I was told, and we’d get them tomorrow.

To sum things up, we then drove around, didn’t spot any tarpon, and went back to the dock without any of my targeted fish. But I wasn’t disappointed because I’d gotten a better sense of the ecosystem I was working with, and I caught some cool fish in the process. Fish which we couldn’t do anything with since we were staying in a hotel, but others could. So we gave those fish away.

The afternoon before, we’d met these “bumsters” on the beach, which is a term for relatively harmless guys who hassle and hustle for whatever they can get. Junior was a thirty-year-old kid with a Rasta cap, and Fabu was equally as smiley and inviting, and they had a charming glaze-eyed quality about them that felt a bit Jamaican. But what really sold me on these guys was that they were fishermen and had shown me pictures to elicit business. I told them I was working with another outfit, but if they could catch a stingray, we’d stop by for lunch.

So now that Junior and Fabu had caught a few, we stopped by at the appointed time. They came rushing down the fine white sand and escorted us up to “the freedom tree,” which provided shade in front of their place. A table had been set up there, and they brought out some beers. After that, it didn’t take long for “the Marleys” to appear.

Needless to say, Bosslady and I had a fine time hanging out with these characters and exchanging stories. They showed us more pictures of fish, and I showed them some on my phone. We talked about mass shootings in the United States, and they told us about how the hotel we were staying in was owned by the Lebanese, as were a number of other businesses on “the Strip.”

“At the Lebanese Hotel,” Junior told us, “they try to keep the tourists inside. They give you a cock-and-bull story about how it’s not safe to go on the beach. Then the tourists, they give all their business to the Lebanese and don’t meet the real people.”

Who, he explained, need our commerce more than the Lebanese. Which is something we’d heard from another bumster who’d helped me find a bank machine. Of course, we could see both sides of this double-edged sword. On one hand, the hotel took business away from the homegrown Gambians, but on the other, it provided steady employment for quite a few locals.

Whatever the case, Bosslady and I were getting out, and we were getting to know “the real people.” Especially Junior and Fabu, who, I began to realize, might be good backup in case Farmara couldn’t produce a stingray.

They also told us about a fishing tournament that happens every year. I’d read about this contest earlier and knew that there was a prize for the biggest fish, which was usually either a monster tarpon or a monster ray.

“Every year an Englishman wins,” Junior said. “He’s not even Gaaambian, maaan.”

“I know who you’re talking about,” I replied. “That’s whose outfit I’m fishing with.”

“He’s good,” Fabu nodded. “Yaaa, he’s good.”

Another thing we talked about was the incredibly welcoming attitude of the Gambians. To make a stereotype, they basically lack that desperate quality that translates to harassment in other underdeveloped countries when it’s obvious that you have resources they don’t. Hence, we returned to the concept of “nice.”

“Of course it’s nice to be nice,” I began rambling. “I mean, why would you want it any other way? Everyone knows it’s lame to be bad . . . to have to see yourself in the mirror when you know you’re treating others poorly. It’s a marketing tactic, nice to be nice. But here’s the T-shirt I envision: “It’s Better to Live a Good Life Than a Sucky One.”

It was a simple statement, and not really that genius, but at that moment, we were yukking up a storm and enjoying each other’s company. Junior may have used the term “brother from another mother” to try to connect with me down on the beach, and we were all aware of the social inequality we couldn’t directly address, but at that moment, that’s where we were: in the Gambia, feeling the love.

Then suddenly the stingrays arrived. Junior’s sister had cooked two of them over an open fire, and they were served upside down, looking like a bunch of meaty mushroom with striated gills. Those were the rays of the rays, the ribby bones of the big wings on both sides, which are actually pectoral fins that their whole bodies conform to. It was served on a giant platter: fish on one side, white rice on the other.

Junior and Fabu left us with our meal, and we picked at it for a minute. Then I flipped the whole mass over, revealing the heads. Their eyeballs were staring at us, and the small curvy rays along the edges were curling up and busting through the fresh-cooked flesh. They’d been prepared with their skin on, there were tubular bones all over the place, but there were also patches of pure white sweetness to dig into.

And when we did, both our eyes went wide, our eyebrows arching in disbelief. This fish we were eating, it was fantastic! Beyond anything we could’ve imagined! The flavor, the savor, the subtle sauce! The way the hot sauce brought the taste and texture together! The satisfying sizzle it left on your tongue! Holy cow! We had hit it! This was the instant! We were Here and it was Now!

But back to the stingray, which had some very chickeny qualities. First, it was finger-licking good. Second, its consistency was similar, and it had that buttery sort of fattiness. So me: I found myself slurping that meat right off the bone, enjoying the gristle and ritual of working for my calories, not to mention the contrasting layers of dark and light meat. Bosslady, however, wasn’t so into the gelatinous skin and cartilage. She went for the clean steaky hunks she flayed off the rays. And when we finished, we could feel a pleasing greasy radiation sweating through our pores, a sensation akin to that gluttonous afterglow which comes from gorging yourself on chicken wings—which is gross to some but glorious for the salivary carnivore.

In fact, I’ll repeat that word “gorge” again because that’s what I’d done. I binge-ate to the point of great, bloated ecstasy. So as we sat there on the beach, gorged immaculate in the shade of the freedom tree, some nearby drummers thumping rhythm into the air, I knew that our timing was on. It had been perfect. And as Junior put it, returning with another round of beers and drawing out the long, flat sound of his a’s: “Yaaa maaan . . . Gaaaambia.”

The second day out, Bosslady opting to visit the slave island of Kunta Kinteh, Farmara and I had live mullets, most of them between four and ten inches long. They were kept alive in a big blue tub, Farmara recycling a bucket of water every twenty minutes to keep up the oxygen.

We shot straight out to the stingray spot, the sea a bit calmer than the day before but pounding steadily away. The sun was also way more intense as we cast out our bait and got to work sensing the tension and keeping it constant, which I was getting pretty good at despite the swells lifting and dropping the boat.

We caught a pompano and a croaking frogfish. Other than that, the bite just wasn’t on.

The afternoon came quickly, and soon we were roasting away. The wind died down, the sea leveled out, but the tide was too strong, and it was keeping our shrimp off the bottom.

Still, I didn’t complain or suggest we move. Farmara knew what he was doing, and if a stingray hit, it would be massive.

So as the dullness of the doldrums set in, the ultraviolet rays of our hydrogen star sucking moisture from our brains, I found myself reflecting on the Thomas McGuane book I’d been reading on the plane: The Longest Silence. I was really impressed by his gorgeous literary prose, and I’d given considerable thought to a moment of perplexing playfulness when he ended an essay with a character asking, “What do you know about that!” I mean, there wasn’t even a question mark. What a strange way to end an essay: by prompting readers to ask that question of themselves. Just posing any question at the end of any piece of writing makes readers go back and review what they’ve read—which, in turn, makes them active participants in what’s being discussed. That’s why I always tell my students to try to leave their readers with a question to consider—the trick being to put the question out there without a question mark.

That sort of stuff tends to confuse my students, but that’s okay. We should be confused because confusion spawns deep introspection, like the type I was doing now. McGuane had written some other things that were also sticking in my craw, and I was searching for resolution. For instance, there’s a lot I can agree with in the following passage, but there’s also a moralistic tangent I’m trying to unpack: “The fisherman now is one who defies society, who rips lips, who drains the pool, who takes no prisoners, who is not to be confused with the sissy with the creel and the bamboo rod. Granted, he releases that which he catches—”2

Whoa, stop right there! Okay, I see what he’s saying about being outside society and ripping lips, and I get the thing about draining the pool, but what does he mean by not taking prisoners? Fish prisoners? I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that if catch and release qualifies someone as a “fisherman,” then I have a problem with that. Because here in the Gambia, and in many other places in the world, some can’t afford to not eat what they catch. That’s why Farmara filled the hold the other day, and no eating-size fish went to waste. Not that I condone taking as much as you can get like I saw anglers doing in Nicaragua, but I’ve seen the poverty along the Gambian highways, and I’d been through villages where children sleep in open-air shacks with sewage in the streets. My point being: whether McGuane intended it or not, it seems judgmental to have food on the table and criticize those with less resources for eating what they catch.

Such reflections always bring me back to a pair of poems that have always held a lot of truck for me. The first one is “On the Coast Near Sausalito” by Robert Hass, in which he examines one of my favorite monster fish, “the cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish.” I’d caught such a sculpin in Puget Sound when I was six. Mine was mongo-headed and Gothic-finned, and I couldn’t help considering some of the same issues as Hass in sacrificing it for dinner. When my father lined his knife up with its brain, I thought the same thing Hass wrote: “But it’s strange to kill / for the sudden feel of life.” Then, after twenty years of seriously considering catch and release vs. killing and grilling, I came to understand his following lines: “The danger is / to moralize that strangeness.” Those lines articulate an issue meat eaters have been dealing with for millennia, which is why the stanza ultimately ends, “Creature and creatures, / we stared down centuries.”3

Galway Kinnell made a similar point in his poem “The Bear,” which I love to teach. Especially at the moment when the hunter, having wounded the bear and tracking it, comes upon a pile of its bloody scat. And what does he do? He thrusts it in his mouth and gnashes it down. “Gross!” I express to my students, playing the Devil’s advocate. “Why would he do that?” But they know, and they tell me. And their translation is essentially another version of the last four lines of that poem: “the rest of my days I spend / wandering: wondering / what, anyway, / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?”4

And now I’ll contradict myself by moralizing, which is a danger I feel confident addressing: “that rank flavor of blood,” that’s our gut questioning whether it’s right to digest what we’ve taken. But the way I see it, eating an animal is a way of knowing it better. To have it in us makes it part of us, so putting it in us, that’s about as sacred of an act as most of us can ever engage in. In a sense, that’s the poetry by which I live—along with millions of others. And if you think about it too much, it leaves a rank taste in your mouth.

But guess what? We can eat our fish and have them too if we return to another premise proposed by McGuane: “We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity’s demands upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a riverkeeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.”5

I therefore had a new question: what the hell can I put back?

The fishing that day didn’t end well. After stewing in the sun all afternoon and not catching anything, we went inland on the Gambia River to the mouth of another river, where we anchored in the roiling, churning confluence. There were some shipyards nearby with guys repairing boats, and there were scattered wrecks here and there. On the flats in front of the oystered mangroves, there were ibises and storky birds high-stepping through the muck.

Farmara had heard that tarpon had been in this area the day before, so we were trying to time it right. We hung our mullets six feet beneath the floats, then again got to work just sitting there, watching the turbulent eddies swirling behind the outboard motor.

It didn’t take long. A sudden tarpon rose next to us, and I saw its whole body flex. It was more than four feet long and at least fifty pounds. Then we saw two more rising side by side. They were smaller, but they were there. They just weren’t interested.

I wasn’t superstitious, but I couldn’t help considering the bananas in the cooler. They hadn’t contributed one dang bit to getting me a tarpon. And since we weren’t even eating them, it didn’t make much sense to be driving them around.

But rather than chucking them into the river, I decided to take another approach. After two full days of no tarpon and no stingray, I wrote an email to the real Bossman. I told Mark Longster that I only had one day left and asked him if he could think of anything that would up my odds of getting a tarpon. I even stooped so low as to note that if he could hook me up, I could guarantee publicity.

Mark, in return, had written this back: “I have organized a new tactic for tomorrow . . . . Tarpon are around and can switch on any time . . . . . . . sometimes it’s down to a bit of timing.”6

So on the third day, Bosslady opting to stay ashore, I took a taxi to Denton Bridge. I had no idea what the new tactic was, but when I stepped out of the cab I was told that “the boy” would be coming with us. Allegedly, the boy had caught four tarpon the other day and knew where they were.

Then I met the boy, who looked older than both Farmara and me put together. He had an ancient craggy face with barely three teeth in his mouth, but his shirtless torso was as lean as a teenager’s. He introduced himself as “Ninja,” and we boarded the boat, bananas and all.

“Now you have two captains,” Ninja told me, but as he took the wheel and throttled out to the mouth of the river, it was clear who was piloting the craft. And when we got to the spot, right beneath an eroded terra-cotta cliff where the waves were breaking on the rocks and two different colored bottoms could be seen—one brown, the other dark blue—it was clear who was giving the orders on where to anchor. Ninja placed us right where the waves began to break, which lent to dramatic surges lifting us, followed by plunging drops felt in the gut.

The sea was definitely rough in that spot, but it was way less windy than the day before. A steel-gray mistiness permeated everything, and we put three lines in the water. The mullets started swimming out to sea, all following the same course, slowly towing their floats behind. When one got too far, we’d bring it in and cast it in on the shallower side.

We saw a few tarpon breaking the surface, and then one hit. Instinctively, I set the hook. The result was predictable.

“You got to let them take,” Ninja said. “Just wait for screeeeee, then strike.”

Given that, I decided to train myself to not set the hook. If the line screams, I kept telling myself, don’t do jack. If the line screams, don’t do jack. If the line screams . . .

Repeating this mantra in my head, I conditioned myself, I readied myself, I steeled myself for the hit. And when it came, I let that tarpon take out line.

“Should I hit it?” I asked.

“Yes! Yes!” both Farmara and Ninja shouted.

I hauled back, felt a nanosecond of resistance, and then absolutely nothing during the longest second of bafflement in my fishing existence. In the first half-second, the tarpon leapt: a beautiful, chromy, four-foot fish bending and twisting in the air. It shot five feet into the sky and looked right at us with its mouth agape. And as that happened, the reel spun free. Something was wrong. Like it wasn’t locked, or the gears were slipping. But in the next half-second, as the fish slapped back, I cocked the reel, got it locked, and hauled back again.

Sometimes it’s down to a bit of timing. Sometimes timing doesn’t work. In this case, the rod arced. The fish was heading out to sea.

Ninja and Farmara scrambled. They got the anchor up and the engine going. And as the tarpon shot away from us, Ninja coached me, telling me to take it easy—which I was. He was telling me to reel in while lowering the rod—which, having been in this situation before, I was. And that tarpon, it was hooked good! It was hooked so damn good that I knew it couldn’t get off.

It was a textbook battle. I kept horsing it in and wearing it out. For ten minutes straight, I fought that fish. Then it changed course and shot toward us, so I had to speed it up. It all came naturally, from fighting fish for forty-five years. Farmara got the net, and then Ninja groaned. The line was wrapped around a rock.

Farmara swore, which I’d never seen him do before, but I could feel the tarpon on my line. We circled the rock, hoping to unwind the fish. Under the water, I could sense oysters clicking and ticking against the line, which kept coming loose, mussel by mussel, limpid by limpid, barnacle by barnacle. Until finally . . . I reeled in a severed line.

My captains were definitely pissed off. They were kicking themselves and slapping their heads. But me, I was buzzing and ready for more.

Making our way back to the spot, we anchored up and cast out again. Our floats formed a bobbing triangulation, and at one point a sixty-pounder rose right in the middle of it. A half hour after that, I saw one leap near one of our floats, then reverse itself in flight. It was flying backward, seemingly flipping us off. Ninja told us that he’d felt it nip his bait, so it must’ve gotten a taste of metal, which is why it leapt so spastically.

Then Farmara hooked one, and it got off. He swore again. The pressure was on.

An hour later, Ninja was about to bring in a float to change the bait when suddenly he saw it vanish. He took a chance and hit it before the line even squealed, and instantly that fish was on. It leapt, and we saw it clearly in the air. It was the exact same size as the one that got away, so now it was time for me to pick up where I left off.

Ninja handed me the rod and Farmara sprang for the anchor rope. We were after it, and this time we weren’t going to let it get near the rocks.

I fought that baby for fifteen minutes. It kept taking out line, and I kept bringing it back.

“If it goes to the rocks,” Ninja advised, “you need to make it want to go the other way.”

Again, I knew this and was doing my best to steer it away. Then, when we got it up to the boat, it dove right beneath us, so I had to keep it away from the prop. At that point, I had some pretty convincing persuading to do.

It was a truly epic fight, but in the end, it flattened out on its side, and I brought it up alongside. Farmara slipped the net under it and hauled it in, and “the silver king” was finally mine! Yeee-hawww! Clasping hands in the air! High fives! Total Fish Victory!

It was four feet long and forty pounds, a stunning slab of muscled fish. Its megascales sported a mica-like abalone sheen glimmering turquoise along the spine and sparkling with hints of pink. It was staring up with one huge eye, which is why its Latin name Megalops atlanticus translates to “Atlantic big eye.” Being predators who hunt by sight, that’s what those orbs are for.

It surprised me then when my captains didn’t throw it back. Tarpon are Redlisted as “Vulnerable,” and the World Conservation Union estimates a 30 percent drop in global abundance.7 This decline is due to overfishing, the altering of river systems, pesticides, pollution, habitat loss, and harvesting of juveniles that haven’t reached spawning size. Also, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History, “Tarpon are slow-growing fish and do not obtain sexual maturity until reaching an age of 6–7 years and a length of about 4 feet.”8 That’s how long this fish was.

At the time, I didn’t know it was a borderline juvenile, but if I did, I don’t think I could’ve condoned the feast they were saving it for. As I keep repeating in books like this, eliminating immature fish from the genepool is the opposite of sustainable.

Nonetheless, I was damn thrilled to have caught it.

Since the stingray hadn’t worked out, I hired Junior and Fabu to take me out the next morning, and at nine I showed up on the beach.

It was a big communal production launching that patched-up motorboat. About ten Gambian boys wheeled it down on its trailer and dropped it into the surf. I got in, followed by Junior, and then Fabu and a guy named Daniel boarded. Fabu was in the stern, readying the forty-horse Yamaha, and Daniel was operating the wheel. We were waiting for a window in the waves, which were breaking at about five feet.

After a couple false starts, everyone started yelling. They were pushing us out, trying to beat a gnarly roller, and something was going wrong with a linkage in the engine. Someone was pounding on something with a rock and Fabu was instructing him. They finally got it at the last second, Fabu pulled the cord, the motor shot to life and gripped the ocean, and we shot forward right as the wave broke on the bow, our timing down to the split second.

Out by the reef, we anchored up, and the smoke started going around. They set me up with a well-worn rod double-hooked with shrimp. I got to work tight-lining, and the others threw out some handlines weighted with sparkplugs, plus a heavy-duty rod baited with bunga.

Having spent the last three days doing this exact type of fishing, I was totally prepared and ready to fish. In fact, I caught four fish right off the bat, before anyone else caught anything. Two were angelfish, and two were butterfish, which are these slimy, blubbery, purple polka-dotted grotesques with buck teeth that used to be despised by tourists who now can’t get enough. They’re easy to fillet, and they’ve got a good clean meat that the restaurants buy up like crazy. The locals call them “chicken of the sea,” and there’s definitely something hen-like about them flocking around on the bottom.

Then I caught a barracuda, which my guides were surprised to see. Usually they don’t hit off shrimp on the bottom, but this one did. I also got what Farmara had called a “wrass,” but these guys said was a black grouper.

So we fished and fished, but mostly, Daniel and I fished. Because Junior, he worked his way to the bow, then passed out in the sun. It had been a late night for him. And Fabu, he wasn’t feeling very well. Something about a headache and too much JulBrew beer.

Anyway, I kept bringing in the butterfish, and we kept tossing my catches into the bow. I was impressing myself by impressing them, but soon my catches started decreasing and Daniel’s started catching up. Not that it was a contest, but an hour later, the waves lifting us and dropping us, he left me in the dust.

This got me thinking about what makes a good angler. In the McGuane book I’d been reading it struck me as curious that he kept qualifying anglers as “good” and “bad.” There was some commentary on what makes an angler fall into these categories, and I found myself wondering what drives anglers like McGuane to judge other anglers according to these simple extremes. For fishermen like Junior and Fabu, a good angler is probably one who brings back enough fish to feed the community, no matter how they’re caught. For McGuane, I suspect that a good angler is someone who’s technically adept enough to catch a fish by thinking like a fish, but then that fish must be released. Where these views converge, I think, is in McGuane’s assessment that “Good anglers should lead useful lives, and useful lives are marked by struggle, and difficulty, and even pain.”9 Therefore, I extrapolated, it’s a matter of utility, and a respect for that utility, that defines anglers as good or not.

Whatever the case, the boat kept rising and dropping, and the butterfish kept coming in, but no stingrays like Junior and Fabu had promised. Until suddenly the fish just stopped, which didn’t stop Daniel and me from trying.

A comfortable silence had also set in. We were each in our own world, hunkered in our own spots, either asleep or nodding off. Junior was definitely out, and Fabu had wrapped himself in his own arms. He was shuddering like a junkie, trying to hold his sickness in. Neither of them were even trying to fish.

In my case, I had entered a strange limbo where I was leaning forward, keeping my line tight, elbows propped on my knees. It was easy to fall asleep and wake up and keep enough tension on the line. If the line twitched under my thumb, I would react. And Daniel, in the stern, was doing the same thing.

Basically, we were all a bunch of lumps—but it was nice. Nice to be out in the sun. Nice to be together not saying anything. Just fishermen fishing, despite our obvious dispositions and the fact that again my time was running out.

I was wondering if we should move to another spot, even though I knew that if I raised that question (and I did) they’d say we should stay where we were. Because moving to another spot, that’s not always advantageous when you’re trying to conserve gasoline. Also, taking your bait out of the water, then taking time to motor somewhere and re-anchor, can often translate into less fish. So I understood why we were there.

The truth, I finally had to admit, was that we were out there to catch food, and they were using me to add to their supply. To them, it didn’t really matter if I wanted stingray. One might come along, and that would be fun, but in the meantime, we were going to catch as much as we could and not waste time bucking the odds.

But this didn’t bother me because suddenly I was stung by the satori that I can’t be disappointed if I don’t get a stingray because this is what it’s all about. It’s about being on the water. It’s about what happens along the way. It’s about being excited about your goal, even when you can’t stay awake. And it’s also about being by yourself when you’re with others. And when that’s the case, it’s sometimes about the cliché of being brothers bound by a passion, even when everyone’s aware of the underlying business transaction.

I also knew that I didn’t need a stingray because I’d already got the tarpon I’d come for. Sure, a stingray would’ve been a bonus. But more than that, it’s a bonus to have an excuse to do what you love in order to have moments like this. And really, I want more moments like this—in which I realize that I’ve had my stingray all along.

Then, right at that moment, Fabu jerked, bolted straight up, and leaned over the rail. And timing it perfectly, he puked into the sea.

I could write about the pufferfish, which Daniel caught, and how he explained that when this fish comes around all the other fish run away. Or I could write about how we caught two more butterfish right after he told me this. Or I could write about how Daniel plopped that pufferfish onto the seat in front of me, where I watched it spit out water and gradually deflate, and how I couldn’t take looking at its bulging, begging eyes, so I placed a leaf over its face.

Nope, what I’m going to write about is suddenly discovering what I’d been looking for. Because there it was in my face: the missing link! The direction I’d been seeking! My hook in search of monster fish that was going to make everything fall into place!

But first we had to shoot in on the incoming tide, load the trailer, and haul it up the beach. Then it was trophy-shot time.

The fish we caught were laid on a plank. I knelt down in front of them, Junior joined me on my left, and Fabu slid in on my right. Someone handed me the barracuda, Junior exposed some beaveresque butterfish teeth, and Fabu showed off an angelfish. The whole community gathered around, the great-white-hunter pictures were taken, and as I stood up, calamity broke out.

Kids and mothers were scrambling for fish. Some shoulders came in and body-checked people aside. And for the first time in the Gambia, I heard dissent. Squabbling. Shaming. Even some smack talk.

“Why you get all the good fish!?” I heard someone ask, only to look over and see Junior and Fabu walking away with the barracuda and the three fattest butterfish.

People were definitely annoyed at them, but Junior and Fabu, they didn’t give a damn. They just motioned for me to follow them. And as I paid them their seventy bucks, I could literally feel something akin to a hissing behind us.

But what really matters is the epiphany McGuane had led me to: it was the question of putting back more than we take out. Because here we are, and our ecosystems are going down, and as McGuane pointed out, we’re beyond needing to put back—a fact documented by thousands of scientists who’ve reached consensus on global warming. Because technically, it is too late. Our ship is sinking. Meaning patchwork is our only hope.

That’s the conundrum of timing. It takes a lot of foresight to get things right, and it takes a lot of convincing to make both fish and people change directions. In essence, we are a species that looks out for ourselves first, and if tarpon have to pay the price for the sins of the industrialized world and hunger in developing countries, so be it. That’s our attitude, and that’s the creed by which we live.

But on the flip side, it’s not like we’re guaranteed more than a century on this planet anyway. As I’ve been pointing out, at the rate we’re going, we won’t have any ice caps left in a century. Add to that the reality that we are past the tipping point of a pH level of 7.8, plus the fact that all that melting ice contains carbon that can evaporate as methane, which is almost thirty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide in veiling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, and we get David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic warning from New York Magazine: “we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.”10 Wallace-Wells expects such heat to come stock with severe drought, phenomenal floods, dire diseases, imminent crashes in world crops and the human immune system, terrifying plagues of insects, debilitating ozone smog, and mass die-offs of marine life from ocean acidification. And as the journal Geophysical Research Letters points out, there are also 32 million gallons of mercury, which is “a potent neurotoxin and serious threat to human health,” thawing out in the Arctic right now.11

Still, it doesn’t have to be that way because we can try to slow our slide. How? By actually envisioning the monstrous results we can’t bear to imagine. That is, we need to face the damage we’re doing with the intensity of those cigarette packages that show graphic images of blackened lesions and infected gums. Because looking away from what we’re doing, refusing to register the consequences of our actions, that’s just suicide.

But back to what I’d been searching for, which in effect had just found me: the slap-in-the-face realization that since it’s physically and economically impossible to put back more than we take out, we can only give back in other ways.

But here’s the trouble: it takes activity. As in action. As in “activism,” which is admittedly a scary word; but a word that doesn’t have to be scary if you find what drives you and apply it. Like those, right now, studying biology, ecology, and more eco-friendly management practices. Like those who are running for office in order to make policy changes from the inside. Like those who are marching in the streets or knocking on doors or making phone calls. Like those who are spreading the word through music, poetry, video—whatever means possible. And like those who don’t know what to do, so they’re trying to learn, or they’re just walking around wondering what the hell to connect with—which is an active form of being lost, and the world needs more of that. Because most of us, we feel too powerless to try to do anything—which is what makes us believe we can’t.

So that’s where I was, stymied on the Gambian sand, gulls squawking in the sky. They were asking me why I shouldn’t continue to fish and preach and catch and release and eat some fish on this planet, where a bit of timing can make all the difference in getting a tarpon or delaying the unthinkable.

And I, now armed with what I needed, was ready to get down to business.