There’s a pic thread and a visual art thread, so here’s a writing thread. I know @Zika and @MaverickMA are pretty prolific writers, and I got a kick out of the story @Redchaser posted over in the Street Cred thread.
My own post over on the Street Cred thread inspired me to dig up some of the old back-page essays I did for Salt Water Sportsman 20+ years ago. Most of them make me cringe a little now, but this one holds up okay as long as I keep in mind that I was in my late 20s when I wrote it.
The 295
It wasn’t until I eased the old Mako up onto plane and swung south out of the harbor into the deepening dark that we finally came face-to-face with the reality of what we were doing. John had been busting ass at school all day and I’d been so occupied with the preparations that I don’t think either of us had had time to really think objectively about the whole thing. I said, “You know, when you really think about this—”
“I know,” John said.
“There’s really no reason not to. I mean the boat’s in good shape and the weather’s perfect, it’s just that—”
“I know.”
“Are you sure—”
“We’ve got to at least try it. We can always turn around if it gets ugly.”
I looked at the “Dist. to Next” box on the GPS and said, “All right, one mile down, eighty-two to go.”
Although I’d been fishing out of San Diego for nearly a year, it was my first nighttime run. Most of my previous saltwater fishing had been on the Sea of Cortez, where a ten-mile run was typical, twenty-five miles was long, and a two-foot windchop qualified as “rough.” So I’d been taking “baby-steps” out of San Diego, fishing the bays and kelp beds first, then the Coronados Islands, coming gradually to terms with the fogs and the swell and the old Mako, which seemed so tiny and vulnerable on the open Pacific.
By mid-July, when we made that first overnight trip, I’d gotten pretty comfortable fishing the closer banks, and the strange litany of offshore highspots tossed back and forth by experienced locals had grown familiar as their names had blossomed one-by-one as waypoints on my GPS screen. The 302 Bank, twenty-seven miles out, appeared first, then the 425,the 230 and the 371 just over thirty miles out, then, one calm day, the 390 and the 421 about fifty miles out.
I often heard the names of the more distant spots on the radio as the big boats cruised back up the line, their skippers talking about easy albacore limits for five, wide-open paddies infested with twenty-five-pound yellowtail, big schools of breaking bluefin. I looked them up on the charts — the Butterfly, the Dumping Grounds, the Airplane, the 1010 Trench, the Double 220s — but I had never seriously considered trying to fish them.
Then, during the first week of July, the albacore bite on the “local” banks shut down almost overnight. I listened to the radio and watched the Internet reports trying to figure out where to go the next weekend, and within a couple of days one phrase distinguished itself from the speculation: “wide-open albacore at the 295.” I’d never even heard of it, but there it was on the chart — just over eighty miles south of San Diego, fifty miles west of Ensenada, and a long, long way from anywhere in a nineteen-foot skiff.
That Thursday night, John and I had gone out to a bar with some friends. One of them asked, “So when are you going fishing again?” It had been a good spring and summer, and our friends had gotten accustomed to potluck feasts every week or so, highlighted by pounds of fresh grilled albacore and yellowtail.
“Don’t know,” I said. “The fish moved back south again last week.”
“How far?” John asked.
“Maybe eighty miles. There’s a bank down there called the 295.”
“That’s too far?” someone else asked.
“It’s a long ways in a little boat. You’d have to have perfect weather, and it would still be a good four-hour run.”
“It’s been as flat as I’ve ever seen it for the last few days,” John said. He was a surfer and kept a close eye on the swell.
The conversation moved on after that, but the seed was planted, and I spent the next hour making calculations in my head. With the new four-stroke engine and big tank, fuel wouldn’t be an issue. The run wouldn’t take less than four hours, and it might take eight in the dark, so it would be smartest to leave at dusk. If we made a fast trip, we could get a few hours of sleep. If not, we’d still have time to catch a few fish and get home before dark the next night. The wind hadn’t blown at all recently, and the forecast said it wouldn’t over the weekend, either. Even if it did, it would just mean a slow, wet trip home. And with plenty of fuel, food and water, and warm clothes, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Around eleven, I said, “You know, I think we could do it, but we’d have to leave tomorrow night.”
“Do what?” John said.
“The 295.” By the time we left, we’d agreed that if the weather held we were going to try it, and we’d invited everyone over for a cook-out Saturday night.
I slipped out of work Friday and spent the day packing — thirty pounds of ice, bedrolls, water, beer, cinnamon rolls for breakfast and junk food for lunch — and working the boat over — changing fluids, checking connections, and making sure we had three of everything.
The direct course to the 295 ran right through the Coronados, and I was a little nervous about splitting them in the dark, but then, halfway there, a big moon rose above the low, thin overcast and lit everything with a diffuse, silver glow. As we cleared the islands, the long swells breaking against their western shores were so white they seemed to be lit from within, and the uncertainty we had felt began to give way to a kind of euphoria.
The night was gorgeous — a low, easy ground swell out of the west, not a hint of wind, phosphorescence in the wake, surprised schools of bait flushing out from under the bow like molten silver, and that weird light that seemed to come not from any one source but rather from the whole sky at once. We didn’t talk much the rest of the way; it was impossible to think about anything but the magic of moving fast on the open ocean at night in a little boat, of feeling somehow safe and easy alone in the palm of something so vast and powerful. And there wasn’t really anything to be said about that.
When we hit the waypoint just after midnight, it felt like we hadn’t been on the water an hour. We threw out the sea anchor, turned on the anchor light, and sat for a while drinking beer and just listening to the ocean before spreading our bedrolls out on the casting deck.
Just before gray light, the distant sound of a diesel snapped me out of my half-sleep in the helm chair. Twenty minutes later, as the eastern horizon was lightening, I caught a hint of motion out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned, there were albacore breaking just off the starboard beam.
Still bleary-eyed and barely awake, I grabbed the only rod that was rigged and ready — a fifteen-pound, level-wind bass outfit with a four-inch, dart-style metal jig — and gave it a toss. The second the jig hit the water, line was singing off the little baitcaster.
The fish led me up into the bow, where I stumbled over John in my deck boots. He stuck his head of his bag and said, “Dude, what are you … are you hooked up … what time is it?”
“Time to get the gaff,” I said.
He raised himself up an elbow and looked around — bleary-eyed, his hair on end, red marks all over his face from the PFD jacket he’d used for a pillow. “No way,” he said, but he got up in his long johns, pulled his boots on, and lurched toward the stern for the gaff.
As I brought the fish boatside, John steadied himself against the gunnel and swung. It was a solid shot, right behind the head, but as the point sank home, the fish decided, understandably, that it had one good run left and sounded, taking the gaff along with it. It was hard to blame John, of course; gaffing, after all, is one of those things best done after a cup of coffee or, at the very least, with your pants on.
I got the fish turned again thirty feet down, and as I pumped it back to the surface we were amazed to see the metallic glint of the gaff trailing behind it each time it circled out from under the boat. A minute later, John reached down, grabbed the gaff and jerked the fish out of the water as neatly as if it had been born with a built-in handle. It seemed at the time like a sort of benediction from the ocean, a sign that we had made the right decision.
The good weather held throughout the morning, and we went about our business, zig-zagging among a few big sportfishers working the area. The bait pump had died during the night, but it didn’t really matter in the end, because the 295 was, indeed, wide open. We never went more than fifteen mintes without a jig strike, and by eight o’clock we’d filled out our Mexican limits of five albacore apiece.
At one point, we heard someone on the radio say, “Did you just see that little skiff?” and someone else reply, “You couldn’t pay me enough to come down here in that thing.” We knew they were talking about us because there wasn’t another boat in the area under twenty-eight feet, and it was hard not to feel a twinge of pride.
In these days of air-conditioned, wet bar-equipped sportfishers and super-sophisticated electronics and satellite SST images and EPIRBS and commercial tow-boats, it’s easy to forget the old romance and bravado of going to sea. There’s so much fishing to be done now without ever venturing out from under our vast American umbrella of safety and comfort that it can seem stupid to willingly take risks in boats on the ocean, however small and calculated.
But for me the romance and the risk are as much a part of offshore fishing as the fishing itself. If I could catch tuna two miles from shore, I wouldn’t be half as enchanted by them, and that long, nighttime run south wouldn’t have been half as beautiful or memorable if it hadn’t been seasoned with a little fear of the unknown. After all, it’s the danger and mystery of the sea more than anything else that separates what we do from standing by a pond catching panfish.
The run home with a light northwest chop on top of the swell was slower than the run down, but we were still back at the dock by one. Rocking and rolling from seventeen hours at sea and exhausted from lack of sleep and three or four beers apiece during the trip, we butchered the fish in the backyard and crashed for two-hour naps before our friends showed up.
At some point that night, as we told the story of the trip in bits and pieces around the little fire-ring in the backyard, one of our non-fishing friends said, “So it took you four hours to get down there and five hours to get back, and you didn’t even fish for two hours?”
John and I glanced at each other across the fire, each wondering, I think, whether the other had the energy to try to explain it — to somehow convey the ancient, perfect satisfaction of venturing out alone into the world’s last great wilderness, leaving behind temporarily the civilized world and all its certainty and predictablity, finding exactly what you went there for, and coming back alive and whole solely by your own wits and experience and nerve. And then John said, “That’s one way to look at it,” and changed the subject.
.