The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  All the kids in Porgy Bay urged us to register for the annual Native Fishing Tournament, the biggest event of the summer. Winners were the toast of Bimini. But frankly I had no interest in fishing tournaments and dreaded the appearance of hundreds of Florida boats on the island. Fishing as a competition seemed off the mark.

  I enjoyed our solitary fishing day, getting up late in the morning, rigging for the afternoon and leaving the dock around two. By four o’clock the local charter boats were headed back in and we were usually the only boat pulling baits off the north end of the island. Even in my twenties I didn’t mind lulls in the action, and fantasies were a big part of my fishing. As the summer wore on, the success of an individual day hardly registered as the weeks blended and New York malaise disappeared. But don’t get me wrong, we caught fish. One day Bonnie hooked ten marlin and brought five to the side of the boat. You couldn’t help catching fish off Bimini.

  By now we were feeding the Porgy Bay community with our kingfish, dolphin, grouper, tuna and cero mackerel. I was learning all the best drops around the island and the cays to the south. Even when we were trolling for marlin I came in on the edge for an hour in the afternoon to catch fish for the Porgy Bay kids to take home to their families.

  In the evening skinny Dick Davis climbed on board chortling while he took a look in our fish box. He was talking to himself that summer but would interrupt an argument or admonition to say something about our fishing—some little advice from another world. While I was washing down the boat Minnie would sit on the dock, her legs dangling toward the water, her skirt pulled up on her thighs. We all know what a Dick can do, she’d recall with a twinkle while her lost love sat at the end of the dock wearing ragged shorts, mumbling or laughing. Then she’d slowly nod at the inexorable passing of all things—her kids growing up and moving out; her poor walls and roof blowing down around their beds while Dick spent days on the porch poring through volumes of Melville and Shakespeare, sometimes crying.

  At dusk ten or twelve kids set off for home carrying fish in the air—the smaller ones dragging a dolphin or kingfish along the dirt road across the baseball field to their houses on the hill.

  Craig would occasionally come by the dock holding a beer but he was spending more and more time with Jeff and Wendy, who rented a little house fifty yards north of ours. Jeff was a terrific diver. Usually he worked the Turtle Rocks just south of Bimini, free diving for big groupers and snappers in seventy feet of water while she ran the boat in her ribbon bikini. They adored one another. A couple of times Jeff invited us over and barbecued a big snapper stuffed with crawfish. Someone mentioned that they were making their money racing marijuana across the Stream at night to a house in Fort Lauderdale. I was doing the best fishing of my life and didn’t pay much attention.

  Every year there were a half-dozen tournaments on the island offering trophies, substantial cash prizes, but most important, bragging rights: which was the top boat, the best captain, the most skillful angler. These events were cutthroat competitions featuring all the elite crews and million-dollar fish boats from up and down the East Coast. The biggest of all the events was the Bimini Native Fishing Tournament, which was held each August. As many as three hundred boats glutted the Bimini harbor for the tournament—you couldn’t find an empty slip or hotel room on the island. There was a bonefish class, a big boat division, and a division for boats under twenty-five feet. We were badgered into registering for the small boat division by the Porgy Bay kids, who boasted on Brown’s dock that we would win. It was embarrassing.

  Everyone on the island knew the favorites—the same boats took top places year after year. Some of the owners and captains bet big bucks against one another in side competitions called calcuttas. Among them were skippers I had known a decade earlier at the Montauk Yacht Club, where I had gained notoriety for sinking a borrowed skiff with my brother. Dad had revered these peripatetic skippers, almost like the surgeons at the Clinic, and was always trying to hire one cheap to guide his Ebb Tide to mako and marlin.

  In the bonefish division my old friend Ansil Saunders was the favored captain. Bonefish Cordell sought to wrest away the title, but year after year Ansil Saunders came away with the first-place trophy.

  At seven A.M. of the first day hundreds of boats of all sizes left the dock and jockeyed for position to go through the harbor mouth. I worried about getting trammeled by a fifty-footer before we even got into the open ocean. By eight o’clock this flotilla crowded the best water to the north of the island like Sheepshead Bay on a Saturday in summer. We knew that we had no chance competing against the top fish hawks from Florida. Bonnie and I trolled far to the north, trying to stay away from the fleet. It was our plan to fish short hours and enjoy the parties in the evening.

  The first day the ocean was lumpy, weather was headed our way. We didn’t catch a thing until about two in the afternoon when I noticed some working birds. I trolled beneath them and Bonnie caught a few blackfin tuna. Usually after a couple of passes a school of tuna will go down and the birds will rise high in the air searching until the fish come up again or disappear for good. This school stayed right on top feeding on small bait. There were no other boats within a half-mile and we had them to ourselves. I trolled around and around the breaking tuna and Bonnie hooked them on feathers. After two hours, when it was time to pull in the lines, we had about twenty fish in the boat.

  All the boats weighed in their catch at Brown’s Marina. A big crowd of locals were waiting on the dock dancing to junkanoo music coming from the patio. It was exciting to see all the fish and to speculate who had the early lead and figured to win thousands in the Calcutta. The mates in the cockpits of the forty-footers stuck out their chests after tossing a nice sailfish or wahoo on the dock. Natives romanced their favorite captains for beers and fish to take home and put in their freezers. Fish were the harvest of the island and everyone went home happy. But first each fish was weighed and points were awarded depending on the species, with marlin, bonefish, tuna and wahoo getting premium points and barracuda and groupers getting smaller numbers of points per pound.

  At the end of the first day the top boat in the small boat division was the Ebb Tide. None of the Florida guys knew anything about this twenty-footer, a two-person operation with a small lady angler who doubled as mate. No woman had ever won the small boat division of the Native Fishing Tournament.

  I knew that our early lead was luck. I’d stumbled across a school of tuna that had committed suicide. But first place confers a responsibility. That night I couldn’t fall asleep trying to figure out how we could keep pace with the top boats.

  On the second day the wind was blowing twenty-five out of the southeast. It was rough, and most of the boats fished in front of the island, which offered a lee, or up to the north, which was best for marlin. I decided to run to Sandy Cay, twenty miles to the south. I knew that no other boats in our division would want to take a beating going so far. It took us more than two hours to get there pounding into six-foot head seas. It was a gamble. Running so far meant much less time for fishing.

  There were no other boats within sight and we put out our baits above ledges seventy feet down that looked like lush green hills in the clear water on calmer mornings. In those days fishermen rarely traveled to the reefs and atolls stringing to the south of Sandy Cay. The waters were alive with hungry fish unused to seeing rigged baits or lures. Almost immediately a big kingfish leaped high into the air and pounced on a ballyhoo. After a dogged fight Bonnie landed the forty-pounder.

  All morning the fishing was red-hot and Bonnie often had hookups on all three lines. Schools of mackerel and jacks flashed at the baits. Wahoo and kings were hitting before we could get ballyhoo twenty feet behind the boat and the surface feeding incited an army below. Sometimes she couldn’t get a big grouper into the boat before it was ripped off the hook by barracudas and sharks. Once she was pulling a mackerel over the side when a cuda leaped after it and landed in the cockpit. Then it jumped back into th
e water. My job was mainly to find the fish and pull them aboard with the gaff. Bonnie cranked the reels and took fish off the hook, rigged leaders, tried to keep slime off the deck so we wouldn’t go over the side. After a couple of hours we had no more bait, but it didn’t matter: cero mackerel and wahoo hit feathers and even bare hooks. We filled the box with mackerels, hefty groupers, barracuda, kings and wahoo. By the end of the second day we were exhausted and still held a lead over a hundred thirty boats.

  During the last two days of the tournament, competitors from Florida shadowed us to the southern cays. There were several boats fishing nearby and they followed us from one atoll or reef to the next. The boats were bigger, more commodious and far more efficient than we were. In each of them an angler sat all day in a canopied fighting chair cranking fish while the captain steered and a hired mate rigged baits and leaders, unhooked fish and carefully laid them in coolers, handed out sodas. We were helter-skelter and had fish flopping on the deck.

  Going into the last day we had fallen behind one of the Florida boats. Again, it was a rough sea and the fish were hitting. The lead boat appeared to be doing better than we were, but I couldn’t really be certain while trying to help Bonnie and then jumping back to the wheel to get turned around before we took a wave in the cockpit. I would never have guessed the way this tournament had possessed me. Bonnie and I fished without a break until the late afternoon, when our lines became tangled and we were completely out of rigs. I was furious at the men in the other boats who pulled their lines over my secret drops. We drifted around for three-quarters of an hour watching our competition boat fish while we tried to put things in order.

  Later that night at the awards ceremony Ansil Saunders took first place in the bonefish division. Each year Ansil won the tournament as though it were preordained and would always be this way. We were talking to Ansil when Bonnie was called to the podium.

  My young wife won best-angler prize ahead of all the men, just barely edging out the top-scoring Florida boat. Now and again I look at the color photograph taken that night of Bonnie holding her huge trophy and cup. I am standing beside her with a shit-eating smile clutching a much smaller trophy awarded to the top captain.

  Square Grouper

  IN NEW YORK, IN THE LATE SEVENTIES, I WAS MAKING A BELATED run at adulthood and career, but the ruins of our family were inescapable and even beguiling. My grandfather was spending dying afternoons with his venerable lawyers. The great factory was gone, turned into thick trusts and wills and massive legal bills. But the senior law partners called him I.R. with the old snap as if he might still mount the great Cadillac and put things in order.

  One afternoon when I visited my grandfather on 73rd Street, he was in a deep lethargy in front of the TV, a few white hairs blown by a breeze off the river. Suddenly he roused himself and remarked, “Mister, your father did terrible things. Terrible.” I pressed him to tell me. I was hungry for any scrap about my dad, but he shook his head. “He was your father. I don’t want to poison your mind against him.” This was not possible, but Grandpa wouldn’t say another word about Abe.

  My mother was sculpting her ancient texts from resin, her anger toward me hardening as Bill defiantly plunged into illness and drugged oblivion. She blamed me for Bill’s decline. I never understood this. She would say to me, “You’re smart, like Abe. You can figure out what to do.” But I didn’t have the answers.

  A couple of times a week I visited my brother, who was now living in a Manhattan apartment amid the broken furniture, old fish mounts and sundry objects of Great Neck years, when he had contemplated dinosaurs and ninety-foot sharks. Bill now walked with a list and spoke with slurred words. Each time I came to visit he asked me which button switched on his new VCR, he couldn’t keep it straight. I kept thinking that my brother could turn his life around; it was a simple question of will. I urged him to stop eating pills from the street and watching old Godzilla movies over and over, poring through photo albums of Liz Taylor and afternoon soap stars of the fifties. My brother’s rooms were suffocating with dust and recycled memories. I couldn’t wait to get out of his apartment. Through the thickness he smiled at me—there is nothing you can do about my choices, kid. The next day or three days later I’d get a phone call from the bank across from his building, my brother was on the floor mumbling to himself. I took him home from the bank, put him back on the black leather sofa from the Great Neck house. I was angry at him. Bill smiled at me sweetly, his slurred words, “The ship is sinking, kid. The bow is going under.”

  In the days following the Bimini Native Fishing Tournament we were the heroes of Porgy Bay. The kids held running races in our honor and talked incessantly about next year’s tournament, when we would surely win again and bring more glory to Porgy Bay. Every year we would be champions, they believed, like the great Ansil Saunders. And so it was a big surprise when we came back to the island the following July and discovered that the children of Porgy Bay had lost interest in our fishing exploits. Once again we rented Charlie Rolle’s little house and trolled long afternoons through the month of July. But only a few of the children stopped by in the evening to take fish home to their families. Since our last visit the culinary taste of Porgy Bay had undergone a change. Locals claimed to be bored with fish and were shopping at King Brown’s grocery store for chickens. Even Minnie Davis bought chicken from King Brown, who each week imported crates of frozen meat and poultry from Florida.

  Bimini had entered a building boom, with scores of cinder-block houses and several hotels in various states of construction. One man was putting up a three-story mansion on the bay and was dredging a small harbor for his new fleet of boats. In the bay there were a dozen new and costly twin-screw ocean speedboats moored or tied up at small docks. In the evening the young men of the island roared their new boats up and down the inside channel, disturbing old-timers handlining for snappers in skiffs and throwing big wakes up on conch piles and sandy backyards. There were a half-dozen shiny new cars on the island, big four-door sedans suitable for a limo service in Manhattan. Fishermen cruised the cars up and down the three-mile stretch of road with windows closed, air conditioners whirring and stereos pumping out Barry White or Marvin Gaye. There was a wild-ness in the air, new chances, Bimini men strutting and making deals at the edge of the bay.

  When I trolled offshore with Bonnie I occasionally turned on the radio to hear what the other captains were catching. There was the normal palaver about the water looking dead or some boat breaking off a nice marlin but also Bimini skippers would ask one another if they had seen any “square grouper.” On the bay in the evening conch and lobster fishermen reported snaring square grouper on the banks to the east of the island; and the young men who owned the sleek new speedboats were hunting exclusively for this new breed off the southern cays where Bonnie and I had prospered the previous summer winning the Native Tournament. “Square grouper” was the name locals used for sixty-pound bales of marijuana. Square grouper had become the fish of choice on this small Bahamian island.

  Almost everyone on Bimini was making money off the refuse of a new delivery route used by the Colombian drug trade. Many nights planes from Central America and the southern Bahamas flew close to Bimini and dumped bales of marijuana into the ocean. Standing by below were fast, expensive speedboats with Colombians brandishing automatic weapons on the lookout for DEA helicopters and U.S. Coast Guard cutters. When the plastic-covered bundles dropped from the sky, the men quickly loaded them on the boats and raced across the Gulf Stream headed for safe houses in southeast Florida. Invariably during these nervous night transfers, bales of marijuana were lost and floated north toward Great Isaac lighthouse or east onto the Bahamas bank, depending on the wind and tide. There were nights when Colombian planes running low on fuel weren’t able to locate the waiting boats and jettisoned their entire cargo into Bimini waters, hundreds of bales.

  Every morning the Bimini fleet of small boats that had formerly supplied local restaurants with conch, lobst
er and grouper now hunted exclusively for floating bales of marijuana. There was such an abundance that you didn’t even need a boat. Like the giant bluefin tuna during Abe’s years, there were days when scores of bales came right into the Bimini harbor with the tide; the wealth of Solomon bobbed in front of the Big Game Club, the Blue Water Marina or the power company; sometimes bales became tangled in the mangroves or they tumbled up onto the beach in the surf. It was common to see men, women, children, dockhands, pastors, laundry ladies wading into the lagoon pulling out waterlogged bales.

  During the first year or two of the drug prosperity, everything was out in the open. Men who owned trucks rented them for top prices to lucky fishermen who came to the town dock with a big catch, and I once saw three or four of the Porgy Bay kids struggling to push a heavy bale across the baseball field to their shack on the hill. Bimini ladies dried soggy grass on their back porches or on the sun-bleached roofs of their little homes and sold it to a few hippie smugglers in Porgy Bay or to my friend Craig. The ladies felt graced by marijuana. At last they could buy all of the dreamy appliances of modern life. One summer Sunday services came to an abrupt halt at churches on the hill when parishioners noticed thousands of pounds of marijuana floating in the beautiful light blue water twenty yards off the beach. Everyone raced out of the pews to collect bales and one seventy-year-old lady called after her grandchildren to bring her home a share. “If God made it, it must be good,” she reflected. Indeed, ministers on Bimini had stashes of marijuana. The new churches were the sturdiest structures on the island and during hurricane season their basements were rented out as safe houses for grass.

  “Smuggling is ninety percent boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror,” said Craig, quoting Henri de Monfreid. Craig had set up his ragged operation at the old Bimini Hotel on the southern end of the island, where my brother and his German shepherd had once lived on the top floor writing his romantic thriller, Rogue Shark. But the rooms in the hotel were no longer suitable for guests and the breezy top floors with a wonderful view of the changing sea were now open to the weather.