The Next Valley Over
Page 9
When everyone knows his job and this teamwork is smooth, you are big-game fishing; otherwise you’re just ripping lips, and putting your health at risk while you’re at it. Carelessness and inexperience with either big-game tackle or fish can hand you your ass in an ugly variety of ways. One-hundred-thirty-pound-test line unspooling against forty-plus pounds of drag can lop off fingers, even hands. Gaff points and bills can skewer you. David Beaudet has been gored by a bill in the chest and had his left hand broken by a marlin. Less fortunate wiremen, becoming entangled in the wire or caught on the trailing hook of a lure, have been hauled off boats and drowned. Anglers, too, have been pulled overboard or gored, sometimes fatally. And for a final, vivid illustration of faulty teamwork in the pursuit of large fish, think of Ahab.
At eleven-thirty on our second morning out of Rangiroa, while trolling the corner of a huge school of yellowfin tuna, a big marlin bill sliced up behind the left outrigger lure. The fish swirled at the lure and missed it, then charged the lure on the left flat-line, swirled again, and disappeared.
“Try reeling in fast about twenty yards,” said David Beaudet. Leaving the rod in its holder on the arm of the fighting chair, I reeled in twenty yards of line, making the lure skip, then let it troll again, and the fish immediately ate it in a boil of water. I heaved the rod out of its holder, carried it into the chair, fixed the butt into the gimbal, clipped the kidney harness into the reel, and watched the line pour off the big, gold anodized-aluminum reel against forty pounds of resistance.
When the fish’s run was over, I leaned into the harness, pumping the rod in short strokes, dropping and reeling, and looking through muscle memory for the exact timing of exerted effort by legs, back, and arms that makes for the right combination of force and smoothness. The fish jumped twice, showing weight carried all the way back to its tail, then settled down and fought deep. We were only about five hundred yards off the reef of Rangiroa, and I could watch palm trees bouncing to the trade winds. Boobies dove into a bait school a hundred yards off the stern. Beaudet swung the chair for me, Jody handled the boat, and I gloried in the paced, sweaty, totally absorbing joy of balancing strength against strength. “I did not think. I only felt,” wrote Zane Grey about this joy, which is the red, beating heart of big-game fishing. “How blue the sky, wonderful the water, gorgeous the islands!”
Beaudet wired and released the fish inside of fifty minutes. It was not Big Mama, not even by half, but it was my quest fish and more—somewhere around seven hundred pounds. It was one of the first marlin, and certainly the largest, ever caught in the Tuamotus (Grey hooked but did not catch a marlin there), and along with the five other blue marlin we either caught or lost inside of twelve hours of serious trolling, it proved Captain Bright was on the right track.
Three days later that track finally led us out to his bank in the exact middle of nowhere—the single place in all the Pacific he considered Big Mama most likely to live, a place he had dreamed about fishing and kept to himself for seven years since digging it out of the long-liner reports.
Sailfish are the most elegant and feminine of big-game fish, and also the showiest on light tackle. They get up to a little over 200 pounds in the Pacific, a little less than 150 in the Atlantic, and should only be fished for with twenty-pound-test line and lighter, or with fly rods. On such tackle, nothing that swims outjumps a hot sailfish. I have seen them greyhound across the water like a skipped stone for over a hundred yards without wetting their backs. And they are wonderful on the bite—rising up out of nowhere like a memory, at first just a brown smudge behind a bait, then a rapier bill cleaving the water, the glorious dorsal fin luffing behind it, then a sudden acceleration, a boil of water . . . Often you will raise two or three, or even four or five, to the baits at the same time, and then to watch the speed (up to seventy miles per hour) and predatory grace of that pack within the pattern, darting between baits, one or two of them lit up and pulsing with blue light, can make you wish for nine eyes.
White marlin, an Atlantic fish, are around the same size as Pacific sails (the world-record white is 181 pounds) and are the most acrobatic and impulsive of the marlin. Like sails, they jump heedlessly on light tackle and they will also fight you deep, but without much conviction. They are jaunty, kickass little fish, and I have had more pure fun catching them than any other marlin.
Striped marlin are a Pacific species, and most of the largest of them (up to nearly 500 pounds) are caught in the waters off the North Island of New Zealand. In 1984 I spent ten days fishing that water for stripies, a couple of those days on board the Avalon, the boat Zane Grey had built and fished from in 1926 when he pioneered the Bay of Islands and discovered the incredible striped-marlin fishery there. Though Grey was essentially a big-marlin fisherman, he loved the striped for its combination of heart (for its size, no marlin pulls longer) and show. I have caught little ones in Hawaii that would jump twenty or thirty times, and one in New Zealand of over 250 pounds that fought like a tuna, never showed himself, and came in dead.
Then there are the swordfish and bluefin tuna, each with a small but fervent coterie of devotees, some of whom will fish for nothing else. Bluefins are power lifters who can sprint—in the upper reaches of the weight they reach (the record is 1,496 pounds), they are almost unimaginably strong and fast. I have had one never slow up for eight hundred yards on 130-pound test with the drag cranked down, and finally freeze the reel, leaving everyone on the boat happy he was gone. Tuna do not jump, but bore against you endlessly and punish you like a bad toothache, often for hours. I have never caught a swordfish, but the big ones (world record 1,182 pounds) are said to combine the stamina and strength of tuna with the glitz of marlin, and many experienced anglers regard these mysterious, nocturnal, cold-current lovers as the greatest of all the big-game fish.
The other two contenders for that title are the black and the blue marlin. Blue marlin are found in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and are the species of choice for more anglers than any other big-game fish. Both blues and blacks (which are found only in the Pacific), can swim at speeds of up to forty-five miles per hour in bursts, and prime animals in the 400-to-600-pound range can maintain runs of over twenty miles per hour for fifteen or twenty minutes, often jumping as they run. Blacks, with their shorter, broader bills and usually greater girths up front for their lengths, are like pro football tackles and guards, while blues are defensive ends. Blacks tend to jump straighter up and down than the greyhounding blues, and to fight deeper. The males of both species rarely get over 300 pounds; the females . . . no one really knows. The largest legally live caught blue, an Atlantic, weighed 1,402 pounds; the largest black, 1,560 pounds, was caught in Peru by Alfred Glassell in 1953, which illustrates the indomintability of the giant females of that species.
Lots of reliable people swear they have seen or hooked and lost or had eaten by sharks, both blues and blacks of 1,600, 1,800, even 2,000 pounds. Mating for Captain Brian Reeves on the Great Barrier Reef a few years ago with angler Frank Sitterly in the chair, Jody Bright had on the wire nine times a black that he knows would have smashed Glassell’s record—a fish close to 2,000 pounds that came in straight up and down instead of suspended, so the entire crew couldn’t lift it and had to just stand there at the transom and watch a pack of sharks eat it—this marlin that everyone is fishing for—all the way up to the pectoral fins.
The biggest regulation tackle is rendered puny by such fish, and many of them simply cannot be caught on rod and reel except through sublime cooperative skill and freaky good luck. Which is exactly why trying to catch them—the Big Mama blue, the Big Mama black—has been and remains the ultimate quest, the Holy Grail, to many anglers.
Zane Grey caught his 1,040-pound Pacific blue marlin in 1930, kicking off the golden decade of big-game fishing. In the following year, Ernest Hemingway bought a house in Key West, and in 1932 he made his first visit to Cuba, there discovering marlin, about which he wrote brilliantly and thoroughly three years later in hi
s chapter called “Marlin Off Cuba” for the book American Big Game Fishing.
In 1935 Hemingway took his boat, the Pilar, over to the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, where Michael Lerner and others had begun trying to catch giant bluefin tuna, and became the first angler to put one of those sea-oxen into the boat whole, before the sharks got to it. Subsequently, Bimini became the center (along with wherever in the world Zane Grey was) for big-game fishing’s heyday. Sports such as Lerner, Tommy Shevlin, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Grinnell, Kip Farrington, and Philip Wylie (whose “Crunch and Des” books introduced many a young, would-be angler, including myself, to the dream world of big-game fishing), and great, innovating guides such as captains Bill Hatch, Johnny Cass, and the incomparable Tommy Gifford all fished out of Bimini in the thirties.
Some of those anglers were also beginning by then to venture farther abroad, as Grey had been doing for years—to Cape Breton, Central America, Bali, Ecuador, Chile, Peru. A few of them (Lerner and Hemingway, for example) were fine amateur naturalists, and more was learned about big, oceangoing fish and how best to fish for them in a shorter period of time during the thirties than ever before or since. In 1939 Lerner and others formed the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), given over to record keeping, scientific curiosity about gamefish, and the purveying of a “universal code of sporting ethics to guide ocean anglers in their pursuits.”
But, as with other golden eras, decay was not far behind the height of bloom. Throughout the thirties, tackle was getting bigger and more brutally efficient. As a result, larger fish were being caught, killed (virtually all of them), and compared competitively. Reputations and careers, along with some fair-sized egos, came to depend on the weight of fish hung up on a dock. By 1940 big-game fishing was already infected with too much testosterone and becoming something other than what it had been. For a sort of stop-action photo of that metamorphosis, we have Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s description of Hemingway near the end of the decade, roaring drunk and alone late one night on the dock at Bimini, using the hanging carcass of a 514-pound bluefin he had caught that day for a punching bag.
It is more or less a straight line from that Bimini dock to the Petaj, anchored along the Great Barrier Reef in the early eighties—where thousand-pound female marlin were hung up on gin poles to be photographed, and then were thrown to the sharks, and any fish under five hundred pounds was referred to as a “rat”; where the price tag for a week’s fishing could run as much as $50,000, a case of herpes, and a two-month hangover. For a while, there and in other parts of the world, big-game fishing fully became the Animal House of the blood sports.
But things are different now, even on the Great Barrier Reef. Three or four years ago, when I was back there staying at the splendid Lizard Island Resort, I spent a pleasant afternoon aboard one of Australia’s newest luxury motherships, whose crew were proud veterans of many and various immoderations during the Good Old Days. One of the hostesses on board served our group chablis and cheese until she realized that we too had been to the barbecue in the seventies and eighties—then she broke out the tequila and slammer glasses. In between demonstrating her version of the Layback-Slammer—wherein she sat on a stool with her back to the bar, her head and neck extended onto it, while the mothership’s chef poured tequila and lime juice into her mouth from separate bottles—and other personal favorites, this hostess commented that her slamming had gone a bit rusty from lack of practice. The new clients were different, she said, momentarily wistful: no drugs, don’t drink anything but wine, in touch with their offices every day, never kill a fish. “Some of them even bring their bleeding wives,” she sighed.
It is a good thing the new clientele is not inclined to kill fish. Like so much else in the natural world that is unspeakably and irreplaceably valuable, big-game fish stocks have been put gravely at risk in the last few decades of this closing century. A 1996 report from an international group of government officials and biologists suggests that the Atlantic blue marlin population, for example, is just 25 percent of what is necessary to keep pace with increasing fishing pressure. Bluefin tuna have been in serious trouble for years. So have swordfish. Because of commercial overharvesting, even sailfish are endangered in some places, including Costa Rica, which was until just a few years ago arguably the top sportfishing destination in the world for Pacific sails. Planetwide demand for food fish, including all of the big-game species, keeps increasing with exploding populations. In response, government-subsidized fleets have expanded rapidly, and corporate or “factory-style” fishing—abetted by tremendous recent improvements in marine and satellite technology—has created a growing and by now close to uncontrollable drain on the world’s big-game fishery resources. Dead-serious and effective organizations such as the Billfish Foundation, IGFA, the National Coalition for Marine Conservation, the Hawaii Conservation Association, and the Coastal Conservation Association are laboring hard to plug that drain, but they need coordinated worldwide cooperation to really make a difference, and that cooperation is hard to come by. Without it, since big-game fish are pelagic and migratory, a blue marlin caught, tagged, and released by some enlightened sport in South Carolina is likely to end up as flash-frozen steaks on a factory boat off Senegal only a few months later.
Maybe there will be billfish and tuna to fish for and be amazed by well into the next century, and maybe not. But in the meantime, there are more lines in the water than ever, and wetting those lines nowadays is a diverse lot of anglers. Most of them are day fishermen, who shell out an average of $650 to $1,000 plus tips and lunch in Cape Hatteras and Cape May, Destin, Nantucket, Port O’Connor, Cabo, and Cozumel to drag baits for eight hours and go home sunburned with or without a fish story. Then there are the tournament anglers. Big-game fishing tournaments have recently become a big industry in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean, with pots between $500,000 and $1 million not uncommon, and they have bred a particular kind of fisherman. He owns a Hatteras as big as your front yard, and flies in top captains and wiremen from as far away as Australia to crew the tournaments he goes to in Cozumel in May, North Carolina or Florida or Abaco in July, St. Thomas in August, and Venezuela in October.
Similar to this tournament angler, but also very different, is the world-traveling record stalker. A few of the latter, such as Houstonian Jerry Dunaway, chicken king Don Tyson, and Frenchman Jean-Paul Richard, have (or had, in the case of Dunaway) mothership/gameboat combinations that allow them to follow fish and seasons without the constrictions of land-based accommodations. Dunaway and his wife, Deborah, have between them an astounding fourteen light-tackle billfish world records—including a 102-pound Pacific sailfish on two-pound-test line for Mrs. Dunaway—caught from Costa Rica to Dakar. Also from Houston—without a mothership, but with a great gameboat and crew and with three line-class world records on Atlantic blues from the Ivory Coast and Portugal—is Stewart Campbell. Fishing with Peter Wright, Campbell once caught sixty-four bluefin tuna between 300 and 600 pounds in one day, his sixty-fourth birthday—speaking eloquently to the seriousness of intent, as well as to the durability, of anglers of this ilk.
And finally, there are still a few big-game fishermen around who fish primarily and simply to see new water and to find out what’s in it: the heirs to Zane Grey.
I had the privilege of fishing with three of these recently, the same Tim Choate, Ronny Hamlin, and Jody Bright whom I first met on the Great Barrier Reef in 1981. These warhorses of the Good Old Days and I were in Iztapa, on the southwest coast of Guatemala, where Choate owns Fins & Feathers Inn, one of the best saltwater fishing lodges anywhere, on the premier water in the world right now for Pacific sailfish. It is water Choate pioneered, after commercial harvesting began to ruin the sailfishing in Costa Rica, where he had a fleet of boats. Now he is in the forefront of Pacific big-gamefish conservation, working on it with the governments of both Costa Rica and Guatemala. Jody Bright is in that forefront, too. He is founder and president of the Hawaii Conservation Associa
tion, and is one of the world’s foremost experts on analyzing and patterning the migratory movements of marlin throughout the Pacific, movements that can be used to formulate “best use” recommendations to all the countries sharing the resource.
As for Ronny Hamlin—who was in Iztapa captaining a boat for Choate—he cleaned up well, too. Captain Hook was then fifty-three and reformed from various things, but still inimitably blithe, with inimitable brio. He began fishing professionally when he was sixteen, and since then has lived and fished with all four feet in St. Thomas, Cuba, Venezuela, Australia, and other places, writing and publishing along the way a big-game fishing novel called Tournament. He is a big-marlin specialist, and has probably seen as many of those formidable creatures as any man alive. Not far behind him would be Choate and Bright, and watching the three of them fish for sailfish, Hamlin driving the boat, while I amused myself ineffectually with a fly rod, was a little like watching someone shoot squirrels with a .30/30.
We drank a lot of Gallo, the excellent Guatemalan beer, and ate sandwiches of dorado and onions fried together by Hamlin’s two well-trained deckies, Haron and José. We told stories and lies, and laughed more than anything else. There was only a little rum on board, no white powder in the galley, and the only sandwich-makers were Haron and José, but the music and the laughs and the people were pretty much the same as sixteen years ago. We fooled around with more than thirty sailfish that came up to bite, taking turns at them. At one point I asked Captain Hook what he made of all this, having seen more of everything in the Big Game than almost anyone since 1960. We were sitting on the flying bridge, and below us on the deck my wife, Patricia, was catching a sailfish in the fighting chair. Jody was standing at the transom, dropping back to another sail and laughing at something Choate was saying, the speed of the line going off the reel and its angle of entry into the water telling him things he didn’t have to listen to anymore, things it takes fifteen or twenty years to know that well.