“Hey,” Ledward said, waking me an hour later. “You enjoying yourself out here on the ocean?”

I’d just scarfed lunch down like a starving dog, then dozed in the chair. “Yeah, I love it. In fact, I’ve got an idea. How about we stay here a week?”

“I wish … but we have that six o’clock flight.”

I looked out over the sea. “I could do this all day and all night, and then do it again the next day, and the next one after that.”

Baja Bill called down from the bridge. “Any time you want, you just give me a call. All I need is a day to prepare.”

“We’ll do this again,” Ledward said. “But your mama needs to get used to having you gone first. I bet she hasn’t stopped worrying since we left.”

“Why?”

“How moms are.”

It seemed like we’d left home days ago.

Baja Bill put the boat on autopilot and climbed down. He dug bottles of water out of the cooler and handed them around. “This was not what I’d call a normal day out fishing, Calvin. Usually it’s a long quiet boat ride. But today, you brought us luck.”

“And,” Ledward added, tapping my chest with a finger, “you caught our dinner.”

I’d almost forgotten about the ono.

Baja Bill took out his watch, glanced at it, and put it back on. “Better head back. You got a plane to catch.”

We reeled in all the lures and coiled them up with their leaders. When we were finished, Ledward leaned back on a seat and closed his eyes. “Wake me if I fall asleep.”

“What you mean, if?” Baja Bill said.

Ledward grunted.

Baja Bill nudged me. “Come sit with me.”

I followed him up the ladder.

He kicked the boat off autopilot and brought the engines up. We swung around and sped toward the harbor. It felt great to go fast after a day of slow trolling.

“You did a fine job, Calvin. You can be my deckhand anytime.”

“Really?”

“You bet.”

We rode in silence a few minutes before he spoke again.

“Once I was out with a guy from Montana. Nice guy. We were about a quarter mile south of here and a lot farther out, and we hooked an ahi, and not a small one, either.”

“That’s a tuna, right?”

“Right, but not just any tuna. This one was a big tuna. It was late in the day. We were headed back to the harbor, like now, and boom! That fish hit like a hammer. But we didn’t see it like we saw the marlin today. No, this one sounded, went straight down. My angler grabbed the reel and tried his best to stop it from going deeper, but that fish just kept on going, because it took a small lure on a light line.”

“Wow.”

Baja Bill waved at another boat that was also heading toward the harbor. The skipper waved back.

“How deep did it go?”

“Deep. When it finally stopped going down, the pressure on the line alone made it feel like we’d hooked a garbage truck. That light line was as tight as steel. I told the guy, forget it, you’ll never get that fish back up. Cut the line and let’s go home. But the guy said he didn’t come here to hook a fish and then cut the line.”

Baja Bill chuckled.

“Well, if you didn’t see the fish, how’d you know it was a tuna?”

“Just a guess … until we saw it.”

“He got it back up?”

Baja Bill nodded. “Sure did. And you know what came up with it? Sharks. White-tips, scariest creatures in the ocean. We figured that tuna died from the pressure of going so deep, and as my angler worked it back up, those sharks discovered an easy dinner. All we pulled aboard was the head.”

Ho! What a story!

“It took the guy a couple-three hours to get that fish head up to the boat. We pulled into the harbor after dark. Believe it or not, my angler took that ahi’s head home and had it mounted!”

Baja Bill humphed, as if that were the craziest thing ever.

“Today it sits over his fireplace somewhere in Montana. He sent me a picture of it, and on the back he wrote: Next time we’re going to catch the rest of this fish!”

I laughed.

Baja Bill reached over and messed up my hair with his hand. “Find your dream and live it, Calvin. What’s your life worth if you don’t do that?”

Deep-sea fishing might be my dream, I thought.

“I have a question,” I said. “Why did we let that marlin go?”

“I was wondering when you’d get around to that. You see, most anglers who come to fish off the Kona coast would want to keep a big fish like that, if only to get their picture taken standing next to it. But to me, that’s not a good enough reason to kill a big fish. They’re beautiful creatures. To fight it and win? That’s enough. Unless you fish as a business and sell it for food, there’s no need to kill something with so much life in it. Agree?”

I thought for a moment. “Yeah. It was too big, anyway.”

“Ha!”

“Okay, but why did we stick a tag on it?”

“Research. Each tag is bar-coded. When we get back to the harbor, I’ll fill out a form with the same code. I’ll record the date, the location, and the size of the fish and send it in. When someone catches a fish with a tag he reports it, then you get the information on the tag and you know how much it’s grown and where it’s gone.”

Research? Mr. Purdy would be interested in that.

“A while back, a guy here hooked a small marlin and tagged it. He guessed it was about a hundred pounds. He turned it loose, and a year later someone caught that same fish way down in the South China Sea. It weighed around two hundred fifty pounds. So people who study fish got some good information.”

“Wow.”

“All life is amazing, Calvin.”

I nodded. I’d never thought about that before.

“You ready to go home and face that bufo problem Ledward said you had? Mow that lawn?”

“He told you about that?”

“Some girl problem, too?”

“What?”

“Don’t worry. Your secrets are safe with me.”