Man Trip

by Graham Salisbury

  “That’s exactly why I had this boat built like this. I can skipper down below in bad weather, or up here when it’s nice, which is most of the time. This is called a flying bridge.”

  “I like it.”

  “There are a few important things you need to know about a boat. The right side is called the starboard side, and the left side is called the port side.”

  I nodded. “Starboard, port.”

  “The front is the bow, and the back is the stern.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the upper edge of the side of a boat is the gunnel, and that bolted-down chair on the deck is the fighting chair.”

  Ho.

  “The captain of a boat is the law. Everyone follows what he says, even Ledward. That’s how it works.” Baja Bill tapped an instrument near the wheel. “And check out this gadget. See these jagged lines on the screen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the bottom underneath us. This is a depth finder. See how it falls off here? That shows where the shelf is, where the ocean floor drops quickly from shallow to deep. Of course, you know the islands are just the tops of undersea mountains, right? Volcanoes.”

  “Mr. Purdy showed us that in class.”

  “Fascinating, isn’t it? So look. If we troll along this shelf we’re in a good place to catch some fish. Most likely ono.”

  “What’s ono?”

  “A fish that looks kind of like a barracuda. Long, not fat like a tuna. Sharp teeth that look like a saw.”

  Baja Bill pushed a button on the instrument panel and said, “Be right back.”

  “But who’s going to steer?”

  “A compass. I just put it on autopilot. It will steer itself.”

  Wow. A boat that steers itself.

  I sat gazing out over the calm sea. It ran flat all the way out to a razor-sharp horizon. Looking south, I could see the long slope of another mountain in the hazy distance. The island was big, all right. No wonder they called Hawaii the Big Island.

  The engines hummed and water whooshed out from under the hull.

  Behind me on the deck below, Ledward and Baja Bill set up five fishing lines. “Five delicious meals to choose from,” Baja Bill said with a wink. The giant fishing rods had giant reels.

  Baja Bill studied the lures in the water behind the boat for a long time, pulling more line off one reel, taking line back on another, until he was satisfied.

  Ledward settled into the fighting chair. Baja Bill climbed back up the ladder to the flying bridge. “See anything while I was gone?”

  “Just lots of ocean.”

  Baja Bill flicked off the autopilot and took the wheel.

  “I wish my friends could see this,” I said. “And my teacher.”

  “Bring them over. I’ll take them out.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s my life, Calvin. I love fishing.”

  “The biggest fish I ever caught was like five inches.”

  “Well, if we catch something today, it will be bigger than that. Especially if we’re lucky enough to hook a marlin.”

  “What’s a marlin?”

  Baja Bill looked at me. “Boy, where you been? I can see we have some educating to do here.”

  Down behind us, Ledward swiveled around in the fighting chair and glanced up. He spread his arms wide. “This is the life!”

  Baja Bill gave him a thumbs-up and turned back to me. “So, a marlin is a billfish. Big fish. Sometimes ten, twelve feet long, or more. Maybe you’ve seen one in the newspaper. Sometimes they put fishing photos in the sports section.”

  “I think so.”

  Baja Bill glanced around, as if he were about to tell me a secret. “Listen up. This is serious. You have to be very careful with those guys. They can be extremely dangerous. They can even kill you, if you don’t watch out.”

  I looked at him. “A fish could kill you? I mean, if it’s not a shark?”

  “Marlin are the most violent creatures in the sea, worse than sharks. They eat and attack, eat and attack. That’s their life.”

  “Attack what?”

  “Whatever, wherever, however. Fish. Floating logs. Sometimes swimmers and even boats.”

  Boats!

  “I’ve seen one that weighed in at over sixteen hundred pounds. This was in 1984, a while back. The boat that brought it in was the Black Bart, skippered by a guy named Bart Miller. That fish was seventeen feet long! So big they had to drag it back to the harbor behind the boat. No way they could get it aboard.”

  Baja Bill winked. “No one got hurt bringing that one in, but more than a few boats around here have scars where marlin have rammed their bills into them.”

  Whoa! Then I grinned. “You’re just making this up, right?”

  “No, no! I’ve heard of marlin charging up and leaping right into the boat!”

  “Uh …”

  I looked toward the island. It was a long swim back.

  Baja Bill leaned close. “One time when I was ’bout your age, I went fishing with my dad. It was right after a hurricane blew through the islands, and there was a lot of debris in the water. The ocean was still choppy. We were way outside the harbor, way out, when we saw something coming toward us in the rolling swells.”

  “Another boat?”

  “Couldn’t tell what it was, just this huge thing barreling toward us. It made white water as it moved, so we knew it wasn’t just something floating, like a log. It was alive.”

  “Ho,” I whispered.

  “We had to get out of the way, because it was going to ram us. So my dad gunned the engines. Soon we could see what it was—a giant, angry sperm whale, heading like a submarine to who knows where. But here’s the thing: that’s when I learned how dangerous a marlin can be.”

  “But it was a whale.”

  Baja Bill nodded. “Sure was, and when it passed us we discovered why it was so angry.” Baja Bill sat back and looked at me. His eyes widened. “Stuck in its side were not one but two marlins. Rammed their bills right into that whale and couldn’t get out. They were dead, and that sperm whale was raging mad.”

  I gaped at him.

  “My guess is they went nuts and attacked the whale for being in their territory.”

  Baja Bill looked gravely out over the ocean. “So you see, Calvin, you can never let your guard down when you’re dealing with a marlin.”

  “If you do, you could die,” I said.

  “If you do, you could die.”

  We headed north along the coast, trolling five lines behind the boat. By then it was around ten o’clock. The sun was clear up over the mountains, and it turned the ocean sparkling blue.

  Baja Bill had his back to the wheel and was studying the wake behind the boat. Whatever was out there, I sure couldn’t see it.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked.

  “Just watching the action of my lures. See the ones way back there, how they jump in and out of the water?”

  I squinted. “Not really.”

  “Keep watching. You’ll see them.”

  Ledward poked his head up to the flying bridge. “Is Bill filling your head with tall tales?”

  “You should hear this one about a whale that—”

  Ledward put up his hands and laughed. “No, no, not that old one he made up about the sperm whale with the marlins stuck in it?”

  I looked at Baja Bill. “It’s not true?”

  “Of course it’s true,” Baja Bill said. “Don’t listen to him. What does he know? He’s a farmer, not a fisherman.”

  Ledward nodded. “True.”

  “On the sea, things can happen that you don’t expect,” Baja Bill went on. “Every day you can get something wild and crazy, or you can just get a long lazy boat ride. You never can tell. That’s the thrill of it.”

  He looked up and eased the boat in closer to shore. “Let’s take a serious pass along that undersea shelf I was showing you,” he said, tapping the depth finder. “Maybe we can snag an ono.”

  “Do t
hey attack boats, too?”

  “Nah. They’re small, not like marlins.”

  I watched the wake, looking for the lures. All I saw was a bunch of bubbles and white water. After a while I went down on deck and sat in the fighting chair.

  The sun was warm, the engines hummed, and the ocean was as smooth as glass. I sure wished my friends could have been there. It kind of surprised me that I hadn’t really thought much about them. All I’d been thinking about was what was happening that minute. I was—

  Zzzzzzzzzz! Zzzzzzzzzz!

  One of the fishing rods bowed out over the water. Something had hit a lure. The reel screamed.

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

  Baja Bill brought the engines to an idle and scrambled down from the flying bridge, Ledward right behind him. The boat rocked in its own wake, exhaust gurgling out the pipes.

  Baja Bill grabbed the screaming rod and yanked it out of its chrome holder. “Calvin! Get ready! This one is yours!”

  I fell into the fighting chair.

  Baja Bill worked the wailing rod over to me and stood it in the rod holder between my legs on the chair. “Hold it here, and here,” he said, and showed me how to pull and reel in the line.

  I gripped the rod with my left hand and grabbed the reel handle with my right. I tried to pull the rod back. Whoa! Whatever fish we’d hooked was as strong as a goat!

  I pulled back and reeled line in when I bent forward.

  Back and forth, inch by inch, bend and reel.

  I gritted my teeth and puffed out my cheeks.

  Ledward put his hand on my shoulder. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  It took ten minutes to get the fish up to the boat. I could see it flashing silver and blue under the surface. It was long, the biggest fish I’d ever seen!

  When the leader rose up out of the water, Baja Bill grabbed it with a gloved hand. The leader was made of wire and was attached to the lure. “This leader is wire because fish have sharp teeth!” he said.

  Ledward slapped me on the back. “You just caught yourself an ono, Calvin.”

  I stayed in the chair, stretching to see what the fish looked like.

  Baja Bill peered over the gunnel holding the gaff, a huge steel hook on a pole. He reached over the side and hooked the splashing fish. It thumped the side of the boat. Baja Bill knocked it out with a wooden mallet, then dragged it aboard.

  It was wet and shiny and long and silvery with blue stripes. It had about a hundred small, sharp-looking teeth. Good thing the leader was wire.

  Baja Bill stuck his hand in its gills and held it up. It was almost as tall as me! “This,” he said, “is a nice catch. My guess is it’s around forty pounds, and for an ono, that’s a big fish.”

  Ledward opened the fish box built into the deck, and Baja Bill lowered the ono into it. Ledward tore open a bag of ice and spread the ice over the fish.

  I couldn’t believe I’d just caught it. “He was strong,” I said, holding the rod with trembling hands.

  Baja Bill grinned. “But you were stronger.”

  Baja Bill fired up and headed the Kakalina out to deeper sea.

  The engines hummed endlessly. It took ten minutes for my hands to stop shaking.

  Sometime around noon, I was lounging in the fighting chair watching two dark seabirds skimming the water, looking for food. They flew so smooth and perfect they almost put me to sleep.

  Baja Bill got on his radio and called the skipper of another boat. I could hear him talking about where the fish action was that day.

  Ledward came up to stand beside me. “Can you believe how close those birds can get to the water?”

  “I wish I could fly like that. What are they called?”

  “Wedge-tailed shearwater. ’U’au kani is the Hawaiian name.”

  “Hey,” Baja Bill called from the flying bridge. He pointed. “Look.”

  About a half mile away, a swirling mass of birds circled the sea. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  Ledward gave Baja Bill a thumbs-up and hung on to the fighting chair as Bill swung the boat around to head toward the swirling black specks. “Birds like that mean fish.”

  Within minutes, we were cruising through them. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Birds everywhere, like a cloud of them. And we were right in the middle of it.

  “Talk about a feeding frenzy,” Ledward said. “These birds are called noio. They don’t skim like your shearwater. These ones dive-bomb.”

  Boy, did they. From high above, they plunged down into the sea, snatching small fish out of the ocean.

  A fish the size of a pocketknife landed on the deck. Then another, and another. “Flying fish,” Ledward said, tossing them back into the water. “They’re being scared up by bigger fish down below.”

  We trolled back and forth through the birds, the lures jumping and plunging behind the boat.

  Birds swirled around the wake, and—

  Bang!

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

  A reel screamed! The rod bent forward, way more than when the ono had hit. It was an outside rod, starboard side, and it looked like it was about to snap in half.

  I jumped out of the fighting chair and scrambled into the cabin to get out of the way.

  Baja Bill brought the engines down and Ledward leaped for the jumping rod. Behind the boat, a monster fish burst out of the water, twisting and shaking and turning the water white. It was loosely hooked at the jaw. The lure flopped against its head.

  The long bill told me it was a marlin.

  “Yai!” I yelped.

  The marlin fell back into the ocean with a whoomp of exploding water and vanished. Ledward struggled to pull the rod out of its holder. The engines grumbled as the boat rocked.

  Baja Bill slid down the ladder from the flying bridge.

  Ledward flipped off the clicker on the screaming reel. The reel went silent as line spun out into the water. It was so exciting it was spooky.

  The marlin leaped again!

  It twisted and shook its head, trying to shake the hook loose. It fell back into the ocean, turned, and rushed toward the boat, thrashing through the water, half in, half out.

  “He’s coming at us!” Ledward shouted.

  Ledward started reeling in the slack line as fast as he could as the marlin charged.

  Baja Bill flew up the ladder to the flying bridge and lunged toward the controls.

  I froze. Stopped breathing.

  The marlin went under, then leaped again, completely out of the water and so close I could look it in the eye.

  The engines roared to life. The boat jumped ahead as the bow rose up out of the water.

  The marlin charged under the boat, taking the line with it.

  Ledward hung on to the reel with one hand and the fighting chair with the other.

  The boat swerved as Bill tried to get out in front of the fish again.

  Just then Ledward fell back.

  The line went limp.

  “Dang!” Baja Bill yelled from the bridge. “Dang, dang, dang!”

  That big fish was gone.

  “What happened?” I asked, gulping air.

  Ledward wiped sweat from his neck. “Prop cut the line.”

  Baja Bill brought the boat down to a crawl.

  No one spoke.

  I gaped at the ocean where the giant fish had been, the surface now a small smooth whirlpool. Looking over the gunnel into the depths, I saw spears of sunlight shooting down toward the bottom of the deep, deep sea. The color was a blue I’d never seen before.

  It scared me.

  The boat rocked, idling.

  The swirling mass of birds moved on, now a quarter mile away.

  “Too bad,” Ledward said. “He was a nice one. What you think he weighed, Bill?”

  “Two-fifty. About.”

  Ledward nodded and looked at me. “How you doing?”

  “Uh … okay … I think.”

  Baja Bill grunted. “Hang
on to your hat, kid, because I’m not done here. No, sir, I am surely not done with this.”

  Baja Bill went to work.

  He was so excited that now even his hands were shaking. He squatted down and dug through a box in the hold. He found what he was looking for and sat back on his heels.

  He held it up. “This will get her.”

  It was another lure. This one was black as night. Points of light, like stars, sparkled in its huge head. It had rubber hanging on it like a hula skirt, with a giant steel hook poking through.

  I stepped closer, gaping at the monster lure. It was creepy.

  “Secret weapon,” he said. “My trusty old Black Mariah.”

  Baja Bill grinned. “Here, see this? Only one hook. If you use two, they could pin its jaws shut. If the fish gets off the line, you don’t want to take the chance of killing it.”

  The steel hook looked strong enough to pull Ledward’s jeep.

  Ledward put his hand on my shoulder. “This is where Baja Bill turns into Captain Ahab.”

  “Who’s Captain Ahab?”

  “Guy on a mission. He’s from a great book called Moby-Dick.”

  “Cool.” For sure I was going to read it. Maybe Mr. Tanaka had it in the school library.

  Baja Bill tied a new double line to a new swivel and secured it to the big black lure. “The swivel keeps the line from getting all wound up,” he said. “That old fish can jump and turn all he wants, no problem.”

  This time the leader wasn’t wire but extra-thick fishing line.

  “Kick her into gear, would ya, Led?”

  Ledward went up to the bridge and moved the throttle forward.

  As the boat came up to speed, Baja Bill dropped the Mariah overboard and released the drag on the reel. When the lure was far behind the boat, he stopped the running line and tugged a few inches more off the reel until the lure was exactly where he wanted it.

  “The way that fish was jumping around, my guess is he was showing off for some female, and with marlin, it’s the female that gets big, not the male. We’re going after his girlfriend, boy.”

  “That one wasn’t big?”

  “There’s bigger ones.”