Imagine a serious, highly competitive, physically demanding outdoor sport that you can play while sitting in a chair drinking beer. Deep-sea fishing is as close as a middle-aged man gets to heaven—unless he’s not watching his cholesterol.
I was on the boat Lucky Too with Captain Jay Weed and mate Scott Genereux. We were sixteen or eighteen miles out of Key West, just past the big coral reef that runs from left to right below the Florida Keys like the line under an arithmetic problem. The seas were tall and disorderly. The water was such a deep Brooks Brothers suit color that it looked false—blue-tinted contact lenses on a brown-eyed woman. The wind was up and the sky was filled with tumbling dryer loads of clouds. The Lucky Too is a thirty-four-foot fiberglass cabin cruiser with a 212-horsepower diesel engine. It’s purpose-built for sport fishing. But even with this much size and power the boat was topping and bobbling and slobbering around.
Captain Jay was looking for fish. I have no idea how. Maybe he knows their ways from years on the open sea, or maybe they leave their phone numbers on channel buoys. Mate Scott was walking on the heaving deck as though it were so much Kansas sidewalk. He was baiting hooks and tending lines and generally exhibiting the kind of nautical competence that makes such landlubbing forty-four-year-olds as myself feel like shoes for an eel.
Everybody on the boat had a job. My job was to not throw up. This is the one, entire skill to being a deep-sea fisherman—not punting your bran muffins. Though you have to have a thick spot in your wallet, too. Deep-sea fishing isn’t cheap. A good boat charter costs between $400 and $550 a day plus six-packs and a lunch to blow and a minimum 15 percent tip to the mate if you expect to go out on that boat again and not wind up trolling schools of pizza anchovies. I must admit I was good at deep-sea fishing. What with a prescription anti-seasickness patch behind my ear and Men’s Journal footing the bill, I was, in fact, a regular damn athlete.
We were fishing with four rods, seven-foot-long fiberglass poles as thick as rake handles at the butt. Until something bites, these rods sit in holders built into the side rails of the boat. Captain Jay trolled at four or five knots (a knot being pretty much like a mile-per-hour, but more expensive). The lines from the rods are baited with fish bigger than what I used to catch and cook in my Midwestern boyhood. Two lines drag directly behind the boat, one on the surface and another weighted on a “deep troll” rig to fish sixty or eighty feet under water. The remaining two lines are held away from the boat by a pair of steel outriggers, which lean over the ocean like high-tension wire towers built by drunks.
The Lucky Too has, on its aft deck, a pair of fighting chairs—barber chairs without the barbers. At the front of a fighting chair’s seat cushion, in line with your crotch, is a socket to hold the base of the fishing rod. Now and then there’d be a sizzle, and line would start hurling off one of the reels. Scott would grab the rod, make sure it was a fish on the hook and not a lobster pot or an overboard beer cooler, then hand it to me. I’d fit the rod into the socket and get busy.
There’s a lot of excitement when a fish strikes, most of it for the fish, of course. Some game fish leap out of the water when hooked. Some even leap as high as fish do in the photographs on charter boat brochures. And a big fish will run the monofilament out like a teenage daughter on a Visa card credit line. You reel a few times first, to set the hook. After that you “work” the fish with a pumping motion—pulling back on the rod with all your weight then reeling like the world’s champion egg white stiffener as you bring the rod back down. It’s important not to give the fish any slack, though we’re talking strictly in physical terms. You can have any kind of emotional relationship you want with the fish.
As soon as you’ve reeled as much line as you can, the fish will run it out again and you’ll pull back on the rod and start over. You do that between a dozen and a hundred times while trying not to think to yourself, “If it weren’t such a big fish and I weren’t paying so much to catch it, this would be as much fun as pushing a stalled car to the nearest turnpike exit.”
We were fishing for sailfish, which, had we caught any, we would have thrown back. There aren’t enough sailfish anymore, and they are so prized as a catch that most sportsmen let them go. This probably sounds insane if you’re not a fisherman, but that’s the “catch and release” philosophy: don’t kill these animals, just annoy the hell out of them. We were also fishing for mackerel, especially the big king mackerel or kingfish. These would be sold cheap on the dock because mackerel are, frankly, very mackerel-flavored. Smaller fish such as cero mackerel, little sharks, et cetera, would also be thrown back. There is, all told, a certain futility to deep-sea fishing. But it’s a satisfying futility, like having sex with birth control.
Hooking a big barracuda was very satisfying indeed. Very futile, too. I mean, I wasn’t going to eat the thing. Barracuda taste like a cat-food salad, and they give you ciguatera, an awful disease. And I wasn’t going to get it mounted as a trophy. Why would I have something that’s as ugly as a divorce hanging on my wall? I just wanted to haul this scaly SOB up to the stern and give him a fish version of an IRS audit.
I’d been losing kingfish to barracuda all afternoon. A thirty-pound king mackerel would take the bait, jump in the air in a manner spectacular enough to be worth exaggerating later, and put up an admirable (if you admire fish) fight. Then I’d begin reeling it in and here’d come the barracuda. They’d snap and flash and trouble the water. By the time I got my mackerel into the boat, I’d have only half a fish and not the cheerful half either. If I got a barracuda itself on the line, its own brothers, its pals, its school-of-fish mates would do the same thing, gobbling cannibal chunks of flesh. Barracuda are the lawyers of the sea.
But the big barracuda I caught must have come off the William Kennedy Smith defense team. There wasn’t a bite mark on him. He was about three and a half feet long. And he weighed twenty-some pounds, most of which was jaw muscle and the rest of which was teeth. Of course we let him go. Anything as nasty as that must serve some purpose in maintaining the balance of the earth’s ecosystem. Probably it eats ecologists.
You see, deep-sea fishing has nothing to do with the enchantments of nature. Our friend and fellow intellectual the dolphin, for instance. With the help of various activist groups he has achieved everything except the vote and abortion rights. But out in blue water the dolphin is a fish thief and welfare cheat. A hooked game fish is an easy mugging, a finned food stamp to a dolphin. Barracuda take a percentage, vigorish. But a dolphin makes one swipe at a kingfish the size of a golf bag—a kingfish you’ve been fighting for half an hour—and leaves nothing but the head. Anybody who’s seen this will think again before getting into the Sea World swim tank with smiling, playful Flipper.
Nor does deep-sea fishing have anything to do with nature’s brilliant design. I watched for an hour while the same tern flew down and snatched our bait and then flew away until the monofilament line yanked the fish from its beak. Then the tern would come back and do it again. Like a modern American with a government benefit, the tern couldn’t figure out there was a string attached.
Deep-sea fishing is about nature that is mean and stupid. And let us not forget futile. I suppose this is what Hemingway was getting at in The Old Man and the Sea. (Though Ernie could have sent in a dolphin as soon as the codger hooked the marlin and saved us all some reading time in high school.)
Mean, stupid, futile—nature and middle-aged men have a lot in common. This is one clue to the pleasures of deep-sea fishing. And another clue is that, in order to deep-sea fish, you have to travel to someplace far away from wives, children, jobs, bills, and stationary exercise bicycles—Costa Rica, Cabo San Lucas, Bimini, Cozumel, or the like. I picked Key West because I’d had fun there in the 1970s. At least I think I did. It’s all blurry now. But I remember catching record-size hangovers in bars with three bathrooms: “Men,” “Women,” and “Drugs.” It was a dirty little island back then, populated with the flotsam of the seven seas and the jetsam of trailer parks uncounted.
But I hadn’t seen Key West in almost ten years. The place has changed. Time-share resorts have been built where historic liquor stores once stood. Tennis courts blot the swamps. And there’s a Santa Fe–style restaurant where a perfectly good parking lot used to be. Key West has become a “travel destination,” filled with—of all things—families. There are families everywhere, ambulating in sunburned clumps: fussing mom, bored kids, dad with his eyeball fused to the camcorder. And they’re wearing clothes in colors from the spectrum of visible light’s dreaded “vacation band.” These are resort clothes, clothes with too many zippers, too many drawstrings, too many pleats, buttons, pouches, snaps, pockets, buckles, straps, epaulets, and elasticized hems; clothes so divorced from normal sartorial function that the Bermuda shorts might as well have three leg holes. And every item of apparel is covered with designer logos like smallpox scars.
Scattered among the families are double-scrubbed, peach-faced college students, fun-having as hard as they can, getting mirth-filled and perky on three light beers. It’s amazing how decent, middle-class Americans, enjoying themselves in a harmless way, create a more repulsive atmosphere than dope smugglers, drunks, sex deviants, and cokeheads ever did. Key West’s main street, Duval, used to have five or six terrible bars, two flophouses, and a Cuban lunch counter. It is now flanked with unbroken lines of souvenir T-shirt stores. Sample slogan: “My Buns Got Toasted in Key West.”
In the midst of these emporiums is local sing-along king Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville,™ a sanitary and wholesome nightspot with menu items named after Jimmy’s songs. It is so different from the places in Key West where Buffett actually used to drink that the device of simile is strained. Suppose the present-day Elizabeth Taylor were given her original part in a remake of National Velvet. It is that different.
Margaritaville™ has a souvenir T-shirt store of its own, naturally, where all manner of Buffett memorabilia may be purchased. What a shame this never occurred to the great musicians of the past. Think what Wagner could have done with a Götterdämmerung Outlet—adjustable Valkyrie hats with foam rubber horns, life-size inflatable Rhine Maidens, and personalized, gold-plated Nibelungen rings.
Better to be out with nature however mean and stupid. And she was particularly so the next day, with a sky like the bottom of an old frying pan and waves as big as hospital bills. The first thing we caught, though it was large and full of fight, wasn’t even a fish. A poor pelican snatched our bait and had to be pulled to the boat and unhooked. It was a wet and difficult business for Scott to get ahold of so much angry bird without bird or Scott being too badly hurt. When the pelican was freed it turned as perverse as a human and hung around the Lucky Too, looking expectant.
We caught nothing else that morning except a couple small yellowtail snappers, which displayed the same color combinations as Key West tourists. The boat was being shaken like a bad dog. And the real excitement was trying to take a leak in the Lucky Too’s tiny head. I attempted to wedge myself into position, pushing a hand against the ceiling and a foot against the deck, another foot against one bulkhead, and the other hand against the wall behind me, but this left no appendage free to undo my zipper. The only comfortable way to piss would have been to sit down on the toilet and have the head filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts to hold me in place.
I tried to eat lunch but the cooler was chucking ice cubes into my lap, my sandwich got blown out of my hand, and my beer leapt out of its gimbal holder and spilled into my Top Siders. I didn’t have a chance to vomit; my food was doing it for me.
There are times, deep-sea fishing, when even the meanest and stupidest middle-aged man wonders if he wouldn’t be happier back at the office losing a fortune in leveraged buyouts. Then we got into the blackfin tuna. We found them just on the edge of the reef, where the ocean turns from abysmal blue to a perfect grass green as though you’d been watering the lawn and just couldn’t stop and now the front yard is thirty feet deep. Blackfins aren’t very big fish, never more than forty pounds. They weigh less than the paperwork from a real estate deal, but they’ve got as much fight in them as any condo salesman. Blackfins don’t do any graceful leaps or acrobatics, either. No one ever made a 1950s table lamp with a ceramic base in the shape of a battling tuna. They strike in a quiet, solid way as though you’d hooked the dock. And working the fish, pulling it back to the boat, is a matter of enough sit-ups to make Jane Fonda ditch the exercise business and marry a rich guy. Tuna are deadweight when you’re reeling them and torpedoes when you aren’t. One moment of inattention and your line is headed for Cuba. And, when you finally do get the tuna to where it can be gaffed, it shakes its head back and forth like a girl meeting William Kennedy Smith in a bar and dives, going for the bottom faster than T-bill yields.
We caught a bunch of them—beautiful fat parabolas of fish, dark-spined with brass highlights along the flanks. The sun came out and the wind went down a little. Flying fish sped down the valleys between the waves. A loggerhead turtle swam by, brown as a Havana cigar and big as a breakfast nook. The boat quit rocking so badly or I quit minding so much. I had another two or three beers. Scott took a fillet knife, grabbed one tuna by the tail, and cut out long, thin, garnet-colored strips of meat—the freshest sushi in the world. Captain Jay turned the Lucky Too toward Key West, and I settled into a haze of exhausted and slightly alcoholic bliss. One of the quiet joys of middle age is knowing exactly where you are in the food chain—above tuna, below souvenir T-shirt stores.