Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  This circumstance applies, in some nth power, to the essay on angling. In fact (and this is a bee I trust the reader will get firmly in his fly-hat) I am continually “corrected” by people who have mistaken information; they plough into the millpond of my life to controvert some proper assertion. Be it noted here, then, that all such communications will be folded neatly and used (unanswered) to clean reels, prop up tables, and the like. Let me illustrate this monkeyshine:

  In a piece appearing here—about sharks—I point out that these beasts rarely attack human beings and may be driven off, frequently, by determined counterattack. Is that clear? Go back and study it. Very well.

  When that assertion was published in what is usually called “a national periodical” (and what we here shall call True magazine), a tragedy occurred off California. Two teenage boys, in swimming, were attacked by a shark. One was bitten so badly he bled to death. The other, trying to help his pal, slugged the shark with his fist and drove it away. Now, tens of millions of man-day swims occur annually off California and that instance of shark attack was the first recorded on the entire coast for more than eleven years.

  Clear enough, isn’t it? Observe from it that sharks rarely attack people off California and the only one that did so, in eleven years, was driven off by a sock with a bare fist. He was even driven off after he’d had one big bite of a person.

  There could hardly be a more convincing proof of my argument about the rarity of shark bite, the possibility of defense.

  But what happened?

  For days, for weeks, for months, my mail contained scurrilous letters from people who tore out my article and the tragic news clipping, pinned them together, and scribbled to me, “Guess this makes you feel like a horse’s neck!” (Note: Horse’s neck was about the mildest expression these oafs used!)

  I have turned this matter over to some of my friends who happen to be psychoanalysts. I have pointed out, in doing so, that my article also said (look for yourself) that once in a great while sharks do kill people and quite often the Australian sharks try it. The psychoanalysts are still pondering the problem of how it happens that people will mail you proof of something you wrote, in the imbecile belief that it proves the opposite!

  “People don’t think,” one learned man hazarded, “when confronted with anything that scares hell out of them. Look at McCarthyism,” this sage mused. “Separates the men from the boys, the sane from the hysterical.”

  Well, you look at McCarthyism.

  Take Portuguese men-of-war.

  These are the very handsome relatives of the jellyfish that float around with their opalescent-blue gasbags inflated and their long, barbed streamers hanging in the water. They are poisonous. Some people are more sensitive to the toxin on their trailing stinging-cells than others. But suppose you gather a group of innocent people and divide them in half. Tell one half that the Portuguese man-of-war causes a burning sensation that doesn’t seriously distress most persons and can be relieved by an alkaline application. Tell the other half that the same critter is capable of inflicting “agonizing” harm on people and some people have even been killed by the monster. (Both statements are true.)

  Now. Put these people in swimming along Miami Beach on a day when the men-of-war are around and the wind’s east. Let all these Joes and Jills get tangled with the sea varmints. You will find, I am sure, that the people who expected to be half-killed get in a prodigious uproar; those who merely expected the kind of burn you get from nettles will hold up dandy—probably go right on swimming, as myriads do. But I’ve seen people—preconditioned people—sent to the hospital for men-of-war “agony.”

  What, you may ask, has all this to do with McCarthy?

  What, I ask you in return, has he got to do with fishing?

  I have mentioned cost. A great many deep-sea anglers have said a great deal about cost. Said it with sorrow.

  In order to fish in the open ocean, one needs a substantial boat: the waves get big. One needs a motor: you can’t row fast enough to troll for sailfish. A motor alone needs a biggish boat—and somebody to run it. That means a boatman. If you aren’t very familiar with deep-sea fishing, you also need guidance. And, anyway, if you catch a really big fish, you’ll need help getting him aboard. It adds up—adds up, these days, to an average cost of sixty-five to a hundred dollars a day, for a charterboat.

  If you take three paying people along, that sum comes down to a manageable amount, for a day’s gamble. You spend more at a race track—and get even less. But suppose the people you take along are (a) your wife and (b) your parents-in-law. This means you pay the full freight. Sixty-five simoleons, at least. Can you afford it?

  Many people have answered that question in what seems to me the most uneconomic (not to say crazy) fashion imaginable. They have bought their own boats. Now, I will not argue with a person who “loves” boats and buys a boat because he loves boats, any more than I would argue with a man about the cost of a bracelet he gave to a girl, owing to his love of blondes. People are entitled to such whims. This is (or was) a free country. Every man is allowed to think as he pleases, excepting when a bully from Wisconsin disagrees. What I mean is, people are still allowed to love boats, as this Preface goes to press.

  But the men who buy boats because “they want to save money when fishing,” are marrying their blondes. If you have a boat, you have to buy a dock, or rent one. Then you have to hire a full-time man to run your yacht—unless you are willing to give up fishing and become a sea-chauffeur for your pals. You may also hire a mate to bait and to boat fish while your hired captain steers. Now you have a boat, a dock and two personnel on your payroll. You think that’s anything? You aren’t even in the water, yet!

  You have to get the damned thing to the sea and into it, probably paying for the use of ways, trucks, whatnot. And when it hits the water, you really begin to spend money.

  I have nothing against boat-makers, personally. I know some, clean-shaven Detroit millionaires, and no wonder. The only thing I demur at, in boat-makers as a class, is their illusion. They somehow imagine they have mastered the art of boat-making. Nothing could be farther from the fact.

  For there is no substance in or on or under or around a boat that they have learned to do a good job on yet—and they’ve been at it since Noah. For instance, every metal part on a boat “reacts” to sun, salt water and air. Here the phrase “reacts to” means “falls apart in.” Most metal, in fact, rusts, corrodes or oxidizes faster than the human hand can polish. Wood in sea water is just borer-bait and sea-garden soil. Zillions of plants and animals take up residence on and in your hull, and unless you are a marine biologist, this booteth you naught. When your boat gets much of this stuff in and on it, you have to haul it out of the water, scrape it and paint it. When the accumulation gets really sinister, you have to abandon ship because it isn’t “seaworthy” any longer.

  Furthermore, what happens to paint, varnish and plastics on boats, should give nightmares to the du Ponts. All in all, when you consider those costs, and then realize a fishing guide will take you out for maybe sixty-five a day, mate thrown in, you wonder what charterboatmen’s families eat. Put it this way:

  Years back, I used to fish on charterboats a hundred days per annum, approximately. And I figured even that cost represented a saving of 50 per cent on an owned boat. It also freed me to fish the whole time and it excused me from trying to explain why I couldn’t fix what had busted every time the Coast Guard towed us in.

  Here I shall give you a tip worth the price of this book a hundred times over:

  Charterboatmen, as a group, run constantly, and they understand boats; they always take you out and get you back safely. That has been my experience. But so-called “private” boats break down. They usually break down on the way out, about at the mid-point between home and the fishing grounds, over a mudbank where there’s a nasty ground swell and you can’t catch a flounder on a golden hook. This last is important because when private boats break down, you
usually have to spend a lot of hours just being there. So you fish—in the wrong spot. Some people have been obliged to spend years after being marooned by boat-fault. The Florida Keys are partly populated by the descendants of such shipwrecked persons; so are various islands in the Indian Ocean. By and large, then, stay off private boats if you expect to fish much.

  Of course, on charterboats the tackle is supplied.

  But for those who don’t charter a vessel to go after fish, tackle cost is important.

  The other day, I bought myself a complete new spinning rig. (The old reel was oxidized and the old rod was either rusted or eaten by locusts, I couldn’t determine which.) Well, this little outfit set me back exactly eighty dollars and eighty-six cents. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why.

  I could have gotten a decent rig for about half that: rod, reel, monofilament line, doodads for lures—and possibly a can of varnish, free. But the tackle manufacturers have gotten mighty fancy, lately, and I am supposed to be an “authority” on angling—owing, as you’ve seen, to the amount of writing I’ve done, not the amount of fish catching. As an authority, I have to appear with the latest stuff, the gadgets and gimmicks. For if I walked up to a snook-hole, or waded out on a bonefish bank, with even the 1950 tackle, I’d lose face. Prestige. People would think I hardly knew a mullet from a scupper.

  So I have to use this fancy gear. My present rod is made out of mica or maybe glass or possibly beryllium. My line is Dacron, Orion, or maybe it’s still nylon. I lose track. And the reel I bought is made, I believe, of an alloy that was released only last month by the Government as it had all been going, up to that time, into radar sets in the war heads of guided missiles. This kind of thing costs money and looks good. But not one damned fish has heard about any of it, so it doesn’t matter to them. What I’m trying to say here is that, in my opinion, simple, straightforward tackle does the trick.

  You look at a sports-goods catalogue. You will begin to feel that you are a piscatorial moron. Here you intended to go out with nothing more than two or three rods, some line, hooks and a bit of bait. Now you see you need shock-absorbers in your waders. Prevents stone bruises. You need a Geiger counter—might locate uranium on the trip. Your reels should be fashioned of Prysmex. Lightning resistant. You need balanced tackle, a matched set of rods, twelve in all, like golf clubs. I knew a man once, a multimillionaire in Palm Beach, who had sixteen graduated and balanced rods with his name and address shellacked on each one. “How,” I asked him, “do you ever manage to get the right-sized fish to hit the suitable rod?”

  This man soon gave up fishing.

  I myself like to hang a fish on moderately light tackle for its size. Nevertheless, when I go trolling in the sea, I take along only two outfits. I take a heavy rod for big ones and a light rod with thirty-pound test line for everything else. In nearer shore, on the flats, I’m apt to take just my casting rod—the kind you use for bass—or even a trout rod. Some guides and many anglers maintain that thirty-pound test line is too small for sailfish, but I’ve never broken it even when taking big white marlin, and men have caught blue marlin of upward of three hundred pounds on such tackle.

  When a salt-water game fisherman talks about tackle, though, he’s talking in a different world from the fresh-water angler. You will get some idea of what I mean by that, in the pages ahead. It was revealed to me only slowly, over many years, and while other sportsmen were learning the same thing. Time was, when a really doughty man might cast salmon flies at baby tarpon. Nowadays, ocean anglers go after baby tarpon with trout rods and big tarpon with plug-casting outfits. The record is well over a hundred pounds in the latter sport.

  My early days of sea fishing followed many years of trout, bass, pickerel, pike and muskie fishing. Naturally, when I saw myself taking fish routinely that weighed from twenty to eighty pounds, I thought the heavy gear then in use was essential. But I’ve since caught all of the same species on very light tackle and many of them on my old fresh-water rigs.

  This brings me to another “confession.”

  It is obviously a lot of fun to roar out on the Atlantic, Pacific or Caribbean in a big motorboat, with a view to catching a fish of five hundred pounds or more. But it is expensive. And it is a lot of work! Your seafaring angler will enthrall a group of porch loafers with an account of the hours he battled a monster. I, too, many times, have battled for hours with monsters—losing most of them in the end, as admitted. But a day comes when many anglers of that type get old enough—or even wise enough—to desist.

  For no matter how magnificent the thrill, no matter how Homeric the struggle, there is always a point in taking a very large fish when the angler realizes—realizes acutely—that he has set himself to do, for fun, something not unlike unloading a coal barge, alone, with a big shovel, fast—and no time off even for wiping sweat.

  This awareness, which comes to all men, does not even correspond precisely to the basic concept implied by the word “fishing.”

  Some men, facing that somber truth, quit. Some others are told by their doctors that they must quit. Some, like me, don’t exactly stop; but we cease to spend so much effort in the pursuit. Last time I went out when the tuna were running, for instance, I hung a whopper and after much toil fought him to the boat. He escaped when the mate reached for the leader. The next day, while Mrs. Wylie massaged liniment into my shoulders, I kept asking myself what in hell I had thought I was doing. If I’d never fought even one tuna, it might have been different. But there I’d been, pushing fifty, unloading that coal barge for the umpteenth time!

  Before me, at the moment, is a letter which just arrived from one of the world’s top anglers, Jack Mahony, of Miami. Jack has been president of the Rod and Reel Club of Miami Beach and a referee in the Cat Cay Tuna Tournaments. He wrote to discuss the matter of the seaways of tuna; but he mentioned in passing that he, too, was shunning the heavy fishes. Not because they’d worn him down but because he had always enjoyed a different kind of sea fishing even more. Me, too!

  A man can fish in the sea almost exactly as he fishes in fresh water. The trout angler knows the intimate pleasure of wading streams and casting into pools. The bass fisherman drifts his happy days away, still-fishing; or perhaps he sends a singing plug under that old stump, into that little cove, alongside yonder rock. The plug caster has all the same fun as the golfer, and catches fish in the bargain. He fishes from a bank, a bridge, a skiff. But that kind of fun has not much attracted marine anglers, till lately.

  When they looked at the sea, ocean anglers usually thought in terms of deep, far-out water. To be sure, a few of them, for years aplenty, have fished from beaches. California, the Carolinas, Montauk, are peopled every year with surf casters. But even they had special gear—gear contrived to make incredible casts out over the breakers, gear requiring a special skill of its own.

  Hardly anybody stopped to think that wherever the sea and the shore come together there are billions of coves, of landlocked ponds, of salt-water “creeks” and “rivers,” fallen logs, rocks, weed patches and the like. Fewer still bothered to note that in many areas, such as around the Keys and the Bahamas, there are immense stretches of “flats,” where a man in boots could wade as appropriately as in any trout stream. Indeed, during my first dozen or so Florida years, I never saw anyone but a surf caster or two in waders. Yet in these land-close, fishy-looking spots, fish live. Not pike, of course—but barracuda, which are like muskies; and not trout—but the snappers, which hit like bullets, and chiros, which are exactly like trout, except that they are bigger than most trout and they jump more, and more fantastically. These are samples. There are many other very spectacular game fishes besides. Look:

  Barracuda, snapper (many kinds), chiro (as noted)

  Pompano (delicious)

  Sea trout (familiar)

  Redfish (or channel bass, or drum)

  Crevallé jacks (let black-bass fishermen try these!)

  Horse-eye jacks (powerhouses)

  Tarpon, tarpon and t
arpon (!!!)

  Blue runners (casuals)

  Groupers (several sorts)

  Bonefish (some say, the greatest of them all)

  Permit (what old bonefishermen graduate to)

  Jewfish (any size)

  Ocean talley (rugged)

  Queen triggers (ditto—and beautiful, too)

  Margate (lunch)

  Porkfish, angelfish, butterfly fish, rock beauties (all bottom-feeders, all to be caught still-fishing, all beautiful beyond dreaming)

  Mackerel (you know)

  Snook (a pikelike fighter)

  Nearly all these fish hit top-water baits, or flies. I have taken nearly all, many times, from small boats, skiffs, rubber boats and from the bank; many by wading. They run from a pound or two up. And “up” means up! Several of these breeds (of which you may never even have heard) run from ten to thirty pounds and some, like tarpon, reach two hundred, while the jewfishes get to a half ton. Of course, we’re talking about shallow water, where only “small” jewfish, for instance, might be found. “Small” still could mean fifty pounds.

  Now, to an angler accustomed, when fishing, to catching a bass or two or perhaps a couple of pickerel, this lavish variety will come as the eighth wonder of the world. But my list is still only a tiny sample. There are, around the Keys, for instance, literally hundreds of species of fish, of which scores upon scores might rise to a fly cast into a quiet cove, to a plug dropped above a blue pothole. This I hold to be the most sensational sort of fishing.

  It brings you scenery and scenic variety instead of the hot, steel-blue monotony of the open sea. It brings you every sort of challenge as to terrain, as to weed, log, coral, whatnot. And it brings you a shot at a near-infinite variety of fish of great weight and sportiness. From such fishing you seldom come home skunked. There’s almost always something biting. And you frequently come in loaded down.

  Furthermore, you can get a sample of it with a two-bit rod, a dollar reel and a ten-cent line!