by Robson Green
*
Eddie puts his finger to his mouth, signalling to be quiet. He sees something and points.
‘Cast,’ he says softly.
‘Cast at what?’ I whisper back.
‘Fish,’ he hisses.
‘I can’t see it.’
I pull the line out from the reel, ready to load the rod, but the whir of the reel spooks the fish. Eddie puts his hands on his head in despair.
‘It’s gone,’ he says.
‘I never saw it anyway,’ I say, grinning.
Using a mixture of English, Spanish and sign language he tells me, ‘Pull the line out beforehand. You need to be prepared.’
After the first unsuccessful attempt I suggest Eddie uses the clock system to tell me where to cast. He understands and we are set. Five minutes pass.
‘One o’clock,’ whispers Eddie.
I see a shadow. I do two false casts that don’t touch the water. Over, over, out, my first cast is on the money. He gives me the OK sign. A fish comes towards the lure. I have to keep a three-foot distance to replicate an insect moving jerkily along the water’s surface. I do this using a figure of eight retrieve, winding the line gently around my fingers. It’s a very effective method of pulling the line in. The fly I am using is like a bug-eyed nymph or caddisfly with large eyes, and it’s weighted. Bonefish also like small fish, but they are particularly partial to their insects.
A six-pound bonefish gobbles my fly and WHOOSH! It shoots off like an underwater bullet, creating a bow wave in its wake. Faster and faster it turbocharges off in a straight line, zipping off right, straight again, and back to the right. It’s taking the leader, fly line and backing line out to sea and I only have fifty metres of backing because I use this rod for trout and the odd salmon in Northumberland, and no fish has ever taken this much line this far out before! As it gets to the backing I start to panic. I am going to run out of line and – oh, holy mother of Jesus, son of God, no – I haven’t tied the backing onto the reel with a fucking arbor knot! The fish is going to fuck off to the Bahamas with my entire line. I grab the line with my hand and put the brakes on. The line snaps and the fish is away.
Eddie is agog. He cannot believe what I have done. I didn’t think I needed the extra backing or to tie it on with a knot. It’s one of the most stupid mistakes of my career. Eddie continues staring at me with absolute incredulity, but on the plus side I realise now that bone-fishing really is as incredible as everyone said it was! This is no consolation for Eddie and he is still poleaxed.
‘What an extraordinary fish! And the run – while it lasted – was out of this world. Unbelievable.’
I can’t meet Eddie’s eyes. He steps down from the umpire’s chair, shaking his head. He silently takes my rod and winds in the line, then passes me his own. It’s a 10-weight, built for the job with 150 metres of backing, fixed with an arbor knot . . .
I feel so ashamed of myself and wring my hands anxiously. Jamie, however, is all smiles. He fucking loves it. My catastrophes are his triumphs and I hate him like a Frenchman. Eddie punts over to a new spot but the water is so shallow that the draught of the boat is touching the bottom. We get off and wade in the turquoise water, like real hunter-gatherers in pursuit of our bony quarry. No one is about and the distressed trees of the salt flats look beautiful. Eddie is focused. He genuinely wants me to catch a phantom today. He also knows I hate myself enough for two people and gives me a kind look, willing me to succeed.
We gently wade out when I see a shadow. It’s a huge bonefish.
‘Eddie. Eddie!’ I stage-whisper, wading towards the fish and pulling out the line.
The fish fucks off.
Eddie says, ‘You have got to shush.’ I upbraid myself internally. Eddie is the spotter, yer numpty. You need to concentrate on being prepared for when he calls a fish. But after the adrenalin rush of the first run I am way too excited. Seconds later he says, ‘Two o’clock.’ My first cast is short; my second cast is in the window. The fish takes it and flies. It penetrates the water like a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. I don’t know what the equivalent of Mach 3 is in water but this baby’s packing some Gs. Whoosh, it continues to run and I have enough line and now the experience to know how to slow it down – it’s been a quick learning curve.
I start pulling the fish back in but it changes direction and bolts towards me. I strip the line to keep it tight and he keeps on coming. I wonder if he’ll break my legs on impact. He darts away again taking out 150 metres of line at top speed. It’s incredible. But this fish is built for short bursts of speed and not endurance. He’s Usain Bolt, not Mo Farah, and his race is run. After a fifteen-minute battle I reel in the grey ghost. I look at him and can’t believe he’s not panting after that incredible run. What makes bonefish so spectacular is that they are so unassuming in appearance. His shallow slope at the head is more elliptical in design than other powerful fish and he has a proportionally larger forked tail to his body, which helps him move through the water, but he isn’t solid muscle like a barracuda or jack. His power comes from within, somehow. A bonefish is, I guess, a bit like Bradley Wiggins: not much to look at, being so lean and almost gangly, but the power within him to win a Tour de France and then Olympic gold makes him magnificent.
I raise my silver medal – he is only four pounds in weight, relatively tiny for the race he has run, and as I pop him back I imagine what it must be like to catch a bonefish three or four times his size.
Supper and Salsa
We head back with Eddie across the causeway to the hillside town of Trinidad. It’s a beautiful old place with cobbled streets, where old men and girls are dancing and laughing and there’s not a single tourist. A band is performing in the square: twelve guys playing double bass, trumpet, maracas and guitars. People have just come from work – they stop by to dance salsa and enjoy a drink. There is a raw beauty to the Cubans that does not require make-up or costumes.
A stunning woman dances with her friend, and when she sees us she asks me to dance. My father was a champion ballroom dancer so I must have his genes, I think. I pray. She grabs me and says, ‘Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis.’ She is doing salsa; I am doing Dad-dancing. Yet again I have brought shame on the family name. She counts again: ‘Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis.’ I am trying to keep up but it’s a terrible situation. I’m the guy who doesn’t know the dance, surrounded by people who do. I have an idea. I show her ‘the lawnmower’. I pull the cord three times left to right, then dance forward pushing the lawnmower. She kisses me on the cheek and goes to dance with another man. I am stranded. Jamie is pissing himself laughing and decides that we need to film a sequence where I am taught how to salsa properly. He says, ‘If you catch lots of fish tomorrow, I’ll hire a seriously hot instructor.’
Barracuda
I spring out of my bed extra early the next morning.
‘I need to catch me some fish,’ I say, stretching.
I do my morning exercises, limbering up in preparation for another evening of salsa. But first the fishing . . .
Guillermo Perez and Jorge are going to show me how plentiful the ocean is around here. They are government fishermen and have one of three boats in Trinidad Port, which are used as game-fishing charters for tourists. After shooting some meet-and-greet footage, we are marched off the boat by the police. They want to check our passports and documents, which we have to carry with us at all times. We are taken to an office nearby and after about an hour they are satisfied we aren’t CIA spies and we head out to sea.
‘Ha-ha! Fooled them again,’ I chuckle.
Apparently fishing trips, birdwatching and charity work are classic forms of deep cover.
Barely out of the harbour, we start to trawl our Rapala lures, which are shaped like small bait fish and mimic them in the water. I film a piece to camera saying, ‘Today we could catch grouper, jacks, barracuda . . .’ – but as I’m speaking both lines go off simultaneously. Moments later we have two barracuda around four and a half pounds ap
iece. I pick up one of the ambushed predators and put it in front of the camera. I open its mouth for a close-up.
‘It’s equipped to kill,’ I say. ‘Remember, this is the guy who killed Nemo’s mum.’
On board is a metal priest with a wooden handle. I haven’t used one like this before – they are usually all wood. I hold up the fish and go to strike it but it twitches and I miss and smash the glass of a little gate at the back of the boat. Jamie can’t breathe from laughing; tears are streaming down his face. Peter and Craig are bent double. Thankfully Guillermo and Jorge are up top and didn’t hear the crack. I panic, trying to hide the cracked glass with my body. Peter finds a towel and I casually drape it over. IWC never broadcast the footage, afraid the Cubans would kick up a fuss and bill us for thousands of pounds, and I just want to say here and now I am truly sorry.
I dispatch both barracudas and dinner is on me. I am going to cook them back in Trinidad.
‘How good-looking is this dance instructor going to be, Jamie?’
‘If you catch some more fish, Eva Longoria level.’
This time I want to see if we can catch another type of fish for our supper. I set the lines again. Wham! Wham! It’s barracuda again and they are everywhere. I pull them in.
In order to get another species, we anchor the boat and go in pursuit of bottom feeders. I am after grouper, with some squid on the hook, and before long I catch a beauty. The trick is to pull the bait in such a way that you do it very slowly. But when there is a take you need to yank up the line very fast. I’m not as quick off the mark as I should be and the grouper takes the bait back to its cave. Internally I start to panic, thinking the line will snap, but Jorge tells me to let it go slack and wait for the grouper to come out of his cave. I take the tension off the line and wait. The grouper swims out of his lair, the line goes tight and I pull him up. He’s a brown-spotted grouper, covered in red and tan speckles. His dorsal and tailfins are jet-black with white edges and the first seven spines are iced with tartrazine, warning of their toxic nature.
I take the smorgasbord of barracuda and grouper to a restaurant in Trinidad and, in my best sign language, say we would like them cooked with chips. The chef tells me in Spanish how he will prepare them. I nod, not understanding a word. We sit out on the cobbled street, enjoying the warm evening. It’s mojitos all round again. I’ve certainly got a taste for them and am beginning to get a little mojito belly.
Half an hour later the waiter returns with fried, poached and grilled grouper and barracuda, accompanied by a mountain of patatas fritas. I try the grouper first.
‘It’s sensational – a salsa on the senses,’ I declare.
The crew groans. Surprisingly the barracuda is just as good. The poached fish is more succulent but I am a fan of all of it. A Cuban band starts playing and everyone gets up to dance. Jamie has set the whole thing up and – surprise, surprise – no one wants to dance with me. Cue ravishing salsa instructor (Jamie’s done well) who takes me by the hand and encourages me to go with her, and I really want to on so many levels. It’s an intoxicating mixture – mojitos, salsa and Latin women. We glide to the music. Midway I say, ‘Do you know the lawnmower?’ I do the dance and she loves it. We do the lawnmower together.
‘You are so funny,’ she says. I completely charm her. She looks over my shoulder at Jamie as if to say, ‘When am I getting paid?’
I drink another six mojitos and we dance the night away. This truly is the Land of the Lotus Eaters and I don’t want to leave, ever.
Giant Tarpon
One man who came to Cuba fifteen years ago and never left is Fabrizio Barbassa. The charismatic Italian married a seriously red-hot smoking Cuban lady and is living the dream, taking tourists tarpon fishing in Cayo Las Brujas. Fabrizio wasn’t always a fisherman; he used to be a Formula 1 driver until he suffered a terrible collision in 1995 in which he broke his legs and an arm and sustained severe chest and head injuries. After that he decided to get out of the fast lane for good, and I don’t blame him.
Today we are in pursuit of giant grown-up tarpon, which can grow up to eight feet and leap their own height. That’s like Lawrence Dallaglio doing the high jump. We are on a similar platform to the bonefish boat except this one has an F1 400 b.h.p. engine. We motor across the iron-flat ocean. Samuel Yeras Pompa, Fabrizio’s assistant, tells me what I can expect from today’s trip.
‘There are thousands of tarpon here. You will catch many,’ he says.
I take it with a pinch of salt. I’m just happy to see what happens. However, after the bone-fishing and my earlier tarpon experience with Lazuro and Philippe, I am beginning to realise the Cubans don’t bullshit.
We arrive at the spot where Fabrizio thinks the tarpon are. He cuts the engine. As we wait I wonder whether he can smell fish, like Steve Hall in the Azores.
‘The fish will come to us,’ he says presciently. ‘There are giant shoals in the area that move around. They will come.’
If they are nearby and something spooks them they will leap out of the water. They also show themselves by rolling to the surface in order to breathe. This is when they are most vulnerable to predators and piscivorous fishermen.
We wait two hours for them to show.
‘Any size will do, Samuel,’ I say.
Jamie is starting to get irritable, but Fabrizio is super-cool with not a care in the world. All of a sudden the vast shoal of tarpon show themselves to us. They are running by the side of the boat, like the superpod of dolphins in Costa Rica. We start casting out fly lines forty yards from the boat. I use a 12-weight rod – not like a Spey rod; much shorter. I get a take. I set the rod parallel to my hip bone, keep it down and set the line as if pulling back a bow. I reel as quickly as I can. It leaps. Wow! It comes off. Bugger. What did I do wrong? I realise that I forgot to bow to the king when it leapt, that’s what. I raised my rod up like a revolutionary and put two fingers up to the king. I’m a big fan of royalty – well, Elvis, Freddie Mercury’s Queen and now the Silver King – and next time he leaps I’m going to kowtow, nay grovel like Uriah Heep at his feet.
Fabrizio senses my inner turmoil.
‘Don’t worry, it happens, Robson. In the moment you forget what to do,’ he says generously. ‘They’re here. They’re here. We will catch.’
I cast again, a tarpon takes the lure, the king leaps, I bow my rod and for the next hour Fabrizio and I take it in turns to bring this giant fish to the boat. The fish is running, leaping, and diving down to the bottom, which causes real stress on the body but my back is fine because I’m using a fly-line and not a harness. I slow down the barrel of the reel with the palm of my hand. Only a wuss would ask for a glove – real men do it with skin. I now have real calluses to prove my machismo. I used to be a hand model before this show.
I love fly-fishing and somehow this method seems a fairer fight than all the heavy-duty tackle used for game fishing. I feel closer to Santiago – after all he caught a marlin on a hand line in Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, which the author wrote and set here in Cuba. With the help of Samuel, we get the fish on board. It’s breathtaking. Its silver scales are like elaborate chain mail. This is Megalops atlanticus, which loosely mean ‘big eyes of the Atlantic’.
Nothing can top this extreme fish. Nothing can top Cuba. I found love here, not in a person, but in a culture and a place that I haven’t experienced before, other than with Newcastle. Fabrizio fell in love, too, and he is now at peace with himself, he is serene. I look at him and think it must be a great feeling to be at peace with yourself. In the material world we have such high expectations of our lives and ourselves and sometimes our goals are impossible. Dissatisfaction and depression creep into the void between our expectations of how things should pan out and how they actually are. If we don’t expect too much and we remember to get pleasure from the natural world and simple pleasures, we too can feel at peace. Especially in Cuba!
None of the team wants to leave the next morning; we all want to stay here f
orever. Maybe we could miss the plane and go another day? Where are we going next, anyway? I don’t really care. In the distant recesses of my mind, Taylor and Vanya call to me. I snap out of my reverie; the spell is broken. I have to manhandle Jamie, Craig and Peter into the cab to the airport. Peter is worst of all.
‘Go on without me. I’ll only slow you down. There are others who have the gift of sound.’
‘Well, none like you, Prada. You are a fucking one-off, my friend,’ I say, booting him into the passenger seat.
Had I not had a beautiful wife and child to return to I would still be there to this day. Cuba is one of the most enchanting places I have visited on this fishing odyssey.
Chapter Eleven
PATAGONIA
Hostage of Fortune
January 2011, At the Ends of the Earth, Series 4
After what was a bit of a bumpy start, Extreme Fishing is becoming a veritable ‘beast’, a term we use in telly to denote a successful show. It’s a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, though, as there’s little time for anything else work-wise and I can forget about a social life.
But everyone is talking about Extreme Fishing, and now in the street I am harangued thirty or forty times with, ‘Caught any fish yet?’ or: ‘Off fishing?’ I was even on the loo minding my own business when some guy popped his head over the stall wall and asked, ‘Caught any extreme fish lately?’ I bombarded him with toilet rolls until he left me alone. When I was Jimmy Porter in Casualty, I used to get ‘Oi, Robson, I hurt my finger.’ When I was Tucker – ‘Where’s Paddy?’ And when I was the surgeon in Reckless I would have grannies winking at me, asking if I could do reconstructive bowel surgery. I definitely prefer the fishing questions.