by Julie Angus
“Hey, that’s a dorado. I used to eat those all the time in the Pacific. They’re great eating,” Colin exclaimed.
I grabbed the fishing rod, which conveniently had a rubber squid attached to the hook. I was motivated by both a hunger for fresh meat and a desire to protect our piscine pets from this marauding predator. As soon as the green rubber squid hit the water, the dorado dashed towards the lure, and its yellow colouring changed slightly to a less noticeable blue/ grey. At the last second, it veered away.
The dorado had a bulbous head with a long, tapered body. As I moved the lure back and forth across the water by moving the tip of the rod in sweeping arcs, the sleek fish dashed after it. It moved with incredible speed, and I wasn’t surprised to later find out that dorado—also known as dolphin fish and mahi-mahi—are even faster than some sharks, reaching speeds of ninety kilometres per hour.
After about four or five strikes, the rod jerked and the tip bent towards the water. The line began screaming out as the fish tried to make an escape. Eventually, after much leaping, the fish began to tire, and I was able to reel it in slowly.
As the exhausted fish neared the boat, I noticed Ned and crew emerge from the depths, and they approached with curiosity. Colin used a gaff to haul the dorado on board.
“Well done,” I said, in awe.
But our dinner was not yet guaranteed. The fish had slipped off the hook and was now careening around the deck, propelling itself by frantically flopping. If it got lucky, it might find an escape route down one of the scuppers, but we weren’t about to let that happen. I ran after it, trying to end its misery with a hit from the blunt end of the gaff. But I seemed to hit the deck more often than the fish and, by the time it was over, our boat looked like a slaughterhouse.
The dorado is beautiful, even in death. In the water, it shimmers bright gold with blue and green hues. But its colours are always changing, dimming, and brightening to facilitate hunting and communication. In death it runs through a palette of hues—silver, blue, gold, green, and brown—before becoming a final muted yellow.
I felt a pang of remorse at ending its life. Although the fish we’d just caught was swimming alone, dorados mate for life. Most likely, I’d made a fish out there terribly lonely. But I consoled myself with the fact that the U.K.’s Marine Conservation Society considers dorado to be one of the more sustainable fish (when caught by hand lining methods in small fisheries) because of their rapid development and short lifespan. It takes the fish three to four years to grow from eggs drifting in sargassum—a type of seaweed that grows mid-ocean—into thirty-pound adults.
“Do we have any lemons left?” Colin asked eagerly. “We could pan-fry him in olive oil with a little lemon squeezed on top and then have rice and maybe some vegetables on the side.”
I had never cooked a whole fish before and wasn’t exactly sure where to begin. How did the seafood counter transform this huge chunk of skin, bones, and guts into tidy fillets?
“I’ll clean and fillet the fish,” Colin offered.
“I’ll cook it, then,” I said with relief.
Colin used the sharp blade from our Gerber multi-tool to make a long slit along the belly, from the base of the head to the tail. He deftly reached in with his hand, pulled out the innards, and showed them to me.
“You can see what he’s been eating,” Colin said as he pointed to a tiny fish. “It’s a flying fish. They glide through the air using their fins. I used to see them all the time on my sailboat when I was on the Pacific, but I wasn’t sure if we’d see them here.”
The flying fish had not yet been digested, so I could clearly make out its features. It was small and unremarkable, except for its fins, which were enormous for its tiny size and spread out like an unfurled paper fan. They looked like wings.
Colin continued filleting the dorado. He made a longitudinal cut along the backbone to remove the first fillet, then flipped the fish over, and with a single cut he removed the remainder of the fish from the skeleton. He proudly handed the two fillets to me.
“You’ve done that before, haven’t you?” I said, admiring his work.
Fortunately, Colin had learned to fillet fish when he worked on a salmon troller. He’d perfected his technique in the five years he had spent sailing.
We placed the fillets into our aluminum pot and hid the pot away in a cool, shady corner. We washed the deck with seawater and threw the remains to our pilot fish. They frantically darted back and forth, trying to claim their dinner before gravity did. It was a happy day for all the fish, except one.
With only one single-burner stove, cooking a two-pot meal is challenging. I prepared the rice, removed the pot from the burner when it was two-thirds cooked, and wrapped it in a blanket to hold in the heat. Then I dipped the fish fillets in flour spiced with garlic powder, pepper, and salt, and dropped them into the hot frying pan. A rich aroma of frying fish and garlic permeated the air. When both sides were crisp and brown, I lay the fish on a bed of fluffy rice with cold chopped tomatoes and black olives from a can on the side. Then I drizzled lemon juice over everything.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” I said.
Colin quickly stowed the oars and wriggled his feet out of the rowing shoes. Dinnertime was always highly anticipated—we stopped rowing and ate our meal together—but never as much as tonight.
Colin clambered from the rowing platform and made a cushioned seat by placing a life jacket against the safety line. I stayed in the cabin, leaning out the open hatch.
“This is amazing. It looks like something you could serve at Thanksgiving,” Colin said as I passed him his yellow plastic plate piled high with food.
“Do you know what ‘dorado’ means in Spanish?” I asked.
“What?”
“Gold.”
Colin bit into one of the crispy chunks. It was cooked to perfection, and the flesh was tender yet firm.
“I see why,” Colin said, nodding his head slowly.
Their name seemed just as appropriate as that of the pilot fish who continued to swim with us. Though some know dorado as mahi-mahi, which means “strong strong” in Hawaiian, we always called them dorado.
With the occasional contented murmur, we finished the entire six-pound fish. In one meal, we had consumed more protein than we normally did in a week. Our overworked muscles would be grateful.
Although our regular meals were healthy and balanced, they were lower in protein than they should have been. This seemed to be reflected in the way our bodies responded to the strenuous exercise. I had thought that ten hours of rowing would add considerable muscle mass, but my muscles weren’t bulging and I still had enough fat to cushion me on the rowing seat. Perhaps our workout was akin to that of a long-distance runner. Few who win marathons resemble Schwarzenegger. Still, I hoped our added protein would help me gain some muscle.
THE FOLLOWING DAY we were treated to favourable twenty-kilometre-an-hour winds from the northeast. Our boat slipped through the water at 3.2 knots and Ned, Ted, Fred, and Oscar wriggled vigorously to keep up. As our boat’s speed increased, they began swimming farther out along the flanks of our vessel. Eventually they swam right in the region where the oars dipped into the water. More than once I felt a little thunk as a fish took a paddle to the face.
I pulled long, easy strokes on the oars, and a small trail of bubbles followed our boat. Ahead I could just make out the smudge of Tenerife, the best-known island in the Canaries. Colin poked his head through the roof hatch in the cabin and observed the sea.
“Do you see that?” Colin said, looking dead astern.
I couldn’t see anything. “What?”
“It’s either a big fish or a dolphin,” Colin said.
An abrupt splashing erupted around the boat, and six or seven dolphins appeared. It was hard to tell if they were just playing around or if they were hunting. The scent of fishy breath filled the air.
Suddenly I was gripped by dread.
“Where are our fish?” I cried.
“Ned . . . Ted?” I called hopefully.
The dolphins vanished as quickly as they came, and our pets were nowhere to be seen. I tossed a bit of dorado meat into the water, a treat I had been planning to feed our fish at lunch. I waited, expecting them to dash out of the shadows, to peck voraciously at the food. Usually Oscar would be out first, followed shortly after by the others.
Nothing.
I watched the white piece of meat slowly spin out of sight on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Ned, Ted, Fred, and Oscar were gone.
In terms of rowing, we were making good progress, but I was despondent and sulky. The loss of our friends made our solitude more pronounced. We had failed to protect them. Evolution had honed the instinct that mistakenly drew them to us in search of food and protection, but we had not provided the latter. I felt guilty that we had been unable to help our naive little fish.
All day I peered into the blue waters, hoping to catch a glimpse of the quartet. But I didn’t see a thing.
TENERIFE IS THE largest of the Canary Islands and we had spotted it from more than a hundred kilometres away, but it took us two more days to discern the features of the landscape. Like Kilimanjaro, Tenerife’s massive peak, Teide, is a freestanding mountain created from a volcanic eruption. It is the world’s third-largest volcano; the last eruption took place in 1909. The eastern side of the island had steep brown slopes and folded valleys. We saw no snow on top of the mountain, but it does receive occasional dustings. We knew that once we passed Tenerife, we wouldn’t see land again for several months on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Although we continued in almost perfect conditions, I didn’t feel entirely happy. The disappointment at not being rejoined by our finned friends lingered. I missed dangling my hands over the side and having them nibbling on my fingers. And these feelings of sadness fuelled a growing dissatisfaction with our monotonous world. I stopped admiring the colours that played on the ocean’s surface at sunrise and the beauty of shearwaters that soared effortlessly in the overhead breezes. I no longer relished the feeling of well-worked muscles at day’s end or the refreshing sensation of diving into warm ocean waters. I was in a downward spiral that dredged forth my doubts and insecurities.
What was I doing here? Had I given up a world I was comfortable in and a career that I had worked hard to achieve for a trivial pursuit? I had spent seven years completing my undergraduate and graduate studies and several more interning and working entry-level positions before finally establishing a solid career, only to discover it wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as I had imagined. I clearly remember the words of a long-term boyfriend as our relationship began to fade: “You’ll never be happy with what you have. You always want change.”
Maybe that was true. Moving has always been a part of my life. I’ve lived in numerous cities, never in one place for more than four years. Since my first job—a paper route at the age of twelve—I’ve had more than a dozen jobs and a career that’s gone from research and teaching to business development.
I wasn’t entirely sure if my rowing odyssey was a fork in the road, or just a break from the path I was already on. I felt uncomfortable with the notion of abandoning my years of education, so it was easier to think of this trip as a long pause in my career—a chance to embark on a different kind of challenge. Unlike many of my peers, I had never taken a year off to go backpacking in Europe or Australia. I had always stared ahead with tunnel vision as I moved towards my distant career. Perhaps a year on the road (and on the water) would be a healthy change.
I grew up with the ingrained notion that life is meant to be hard work, not a pursuit of pleasures. Both my parents are immigrants who came to Canada to provide a better life for their children, and I was their only child. It was my obligation to take advantage of this land of opportunity.
My parents did not lead only through words; their lives exemplified hard work. My father had left Syria for Canada with only a pocketful of change. He worked nights as a waiter and days as a security guard, and somehow managed to get a university degree at the same time. He met my mother, a German immigrant, during his first year here. My mother’s life was also difficult. When she was seven months old, her mother died; she lost her father in the Soviet Union’s Gulag camps of World War II. Her family lived in East Prussia, but during World War II the country was ravaged and eventually divided between the Soviet Union and Poland. At the age of eleven, my mother, her aunt, and two cousins successfully escaped East Prussia on their third attempt; over five difficult months in the winter of 1946, they travelled illegally and without money by foot and train, living in refugee camps and carrying all their meagre belongings on their backs, eventually reaching West Germany. In her early thirties, my mother immigrated to North America with her cousin in search of a better life.
Since I was young, I have noticed differences in the philosophies between new immigrants such as my parents and multi-generation Canadians who have always lived in a society free of war and starvation. The struggles my parents faced left them with survivalist attitudes and an outlook that emphasizes financial well-being. They don’t let their emotions show or talk about their fears or weaknesses. I was brought up in two worlds: one where being open about one’s emotions was encouraged, and the other where this was regarded as a weakness.
Whether I would go to university was never questioned—this was the only route to financial prosperity. I had little money to put towards my education, but I drew on loans, grants, and scholarships to supplement earnings from summer jobs. Before the ink dried on my Master’s dissertation, I had several jobs to choose from. When I decided I wanted to use my biotechnology education to develop therapeutics through business instead of research, I found individuals who were more than willing to mentor me. These opportunities were not available to my parents—or, for that matter, to 80 per cent of the world’s population living in less prosperous countries—and having them profoundly altered my view of life. Although a career was no less important to me than it was to my parents, a job that offered opportunities to learn and be challenged began to take priority over one with financial stability.
But now, as we bobbed on the open ocean, still seven thousand kilometres from our destination, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d made the right choice. We would arrive home more than fifty thousand dollars in debt. I would have no job, and would face the struggle of getting back into the work force. The way things looked, we might both be facing personal bankruptcy. These financial troubles gnawed at me while I laboured at the oars. The world of banks and credit cards and creditors seemed another planet away, but we couldn’t forget about them.
Colin listened as I aired my worries and, as usual, helped to put things in perspective.
“You’ll never starve in Canada, and you’ll always have a roof over your head, which is much more than what many people in the world have,” he said. “It’s too easy to allow external pressures to dictate what we strive for, and not what really makes us happy. This row across the Atlantic Ocean will create memories that you will take to your grave. The dolphins, the sharks, the storms, the struggles—it’s all priceless. Your years of work will all blur into one another. But this year won’t. Believe me, forty years down the road, you’re not going to kick yourself for having rowed across an ocean.”
I nodded in full agreement. I knew all that, but somehow I couldn’t shift thirty years of conditioning so easily.
“No matter what happens, we’ll have each other,” Colin added.
It was sweet and corny and true all at the same time. It reminded me of the Tom Waits song “House Where Nobody Lives.” The lyrics “If there’s love in the house . . . ” went through my head, and I couldn’t help but smile. At least we had a seven-metre palace.
TWO DAYS LATER we found ourselves in
the middle of the 120 -kilometre passage between Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura. A microclimate in the region, created by the uneven heating of the land and ocean, affected both the weather and wind direction. The winds shifted early in the day, and we now had headwinds from the south, decreasing our progress to that of a slow walk. The wildlife continued to entertain; we saw a small pod of dolphins and a mid-sized shark in addition to the dorado, tuna, petrels, and shearwaters that we now saw on a daily basis. But the wildlife was not the only thing that multiplied; we also saw numerous boats, both local fishing trawlers and freighters, transporting goods to the islands. The memory of our near collision with the tanker was all too vivid, and I felt apprehensive as the waters became increasingly congested.
Before heading off to bed, I noticed that a thick cloud cover obscured the stars, but that numerous lights shone from non-celestial sources. Off in the distance, the city lights of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria emitted more illumination than a full moon. Several other towns and villages on the islands gave off muted yellowish glows that reflected on the clouds above. And at any given time, we could see between five and ten green or red lights, the running lights of nearby boats.
By law, powered boats on the water must display running lights at night, which announce both their presence and direction of heading. A green light shines from the starboard side, red off the port, and white off the stern. Knowing this, boats can determine one another’s orientations and approximate heading. For example, if we saw a green light, we knew that we were seeing the right side of a ship and that its direction of movement would be rightward. If we saw both red and green lights together, we knew that the ship was coming directly towards us. Upon departing Lisbon, we had had this unsettling experience a few times, but invariably the vessel would change course when it saw our own navigation light. Colin had cynically dubbed this disturbing display of green and red lights “a Christmas treat.”
Because of our boat’s slow speed and its erratic movement in big waves, we displayed a bright flashing strobe light instead of the typical red, green, and white display. So far this had been very effective in alerting nearby boats of our presence at night.