Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  Such are a few of the means of fishing in Florida which—while not always conventional—are highly rewarding. And the moment you begin to fish from small boats—or along the beach—or on banks—you will spot others like yourself who will be ready, if asked, to lead you to novel methods and to new quarry. As an angler who has written a good deal about “big time” or deep-sea fishing, I was once advised by a reader to “get off my charterboat and go fishing on a bridge.” Some dispute between that gentleman and myself arose—but I was able to squelch him finally by advising him to get off his bridge and fish under it. He hadn’t tried that one yet.

  No telling where or how you might get a fish. One pal of mine—a gent with salt water of an icy degree in his veins—not only goes goggle-fishing (diving, with goggles to make his vision clear under water, and a hand spear) but when he has speared a fish he rides up to it hand-over-hand on the spear line and wrestles it to the surface. He has done this with fifty-pound amberjacks—turning their heads up by sheer muscle and thus forcing the frantic fish to carry itself and the man on its back to the top. And he has done it out on the big reefs, amidst the twenty-foot sharks and the barracudas. If you are confident in yourself, strong, and don’t give a damn what happens—there’s one you might try.

  Fishing in a chartered boat with expert guides is fun. A blue marlin of several hundred pounds on a rod and reel provides a degree of exhilaration difficult to understand. But, as I have said, the billfish—even the sails—don’t bite every minute. It took me six years of trying to get one blue marlin and I lost eight in that period before we had my first baby in the boat. Still—if the sailfish aren’t running—king mackerel and bonita will give you plenty of excitement.

  One last tip—about that casting rod. Take it along on the charterboat if you go to the Gulf Stream. Maybe you’ll feel sillier than a man carrying a small fire extinguisher to Hell—but take it. If you happen to run into a school of little dolphin—or a school of baby bonitas—you can settle for yourself the age-old argument: Which is stronger, pound for pound—a sea fish or a fresh-water fish. Cast a feather into the school—and then make up your own mind.

  Me, I won’t tell you. There are some places where even a bold man doesn’t care to stick out his neck. I just say—take that casting rod along. After all, I know one guy—just one, though—who caught a sailfish on a salmon rod. But I know three or four who have caught sailfish on surf-casting tackle from piers. When you go to Florida—fish in the charterboat, Chamber of Commerce, newsreel style, if you like. But if you can’t for one reason or another, don’t be discouraged. Just remember that a string tied to your big toe, while you nap on a bank, can get you supper—or even take your toe off.

  Nomads of the sea

  It takes a lot of fisherman to catch a mako shark. It takes a couple of extra men, as a rule, to boat a mako, after an angler has brought it alongside. The tearing teeth and snatching jaws of the fabled Jabberwock had nothing on the mako: it moves like a beam of light and its mouth is loaded with ivory railroad spikes. A baby mako will cruise up to a hooked tuna and take out a hunk as big as a horse’s head. And a live mako in a boat is something like a live crocodile—but possibly crocs are safer. So it takes a good deal more than “a lot of fisherman” to hook, fight and boat a mako shark out in the Gulf Stream—alone!

  It is among the accomplishments of Captain Crawford Edmund Wall—better known as “Eddie” Wall—skipper of the yacht Playmate and one of the celebrated sea rovers who make up that group of guides which, off and on and more or less, is based in Miami and Miami Beach, Florida.

  He tells the story modestly enough; I’ve heard men make more to-do over a three-pound brook trout. In those days, Eddie was in the automobile business and he fished entirely for fun. He had his own boat and he frequently ran out alone, setting a rod in a socket, steering, and keeping one eye on the course, the other on the flickering bait.

  “I saw it was a mako before it hit,” he said, “and I knew I was in for a battle. I killed the motor and ran back and grabbed the rod. A mouthful of teeth consumed my bait—and I sat down in the wicker chair I had for fighting. During the next hour or so that mako and I used up a lot of the ocean—he jumped plenty of times—but eventually I began to get him up to the boat. That was the part that worried me. I had only a little gaff—and I didn’t want my arm to go where my bait already was. When I thought he was really worn down—I got up, grabbed my leader, set my rod back in the socket, and began the boating operation.”

  His eyes, at this point, are likely to glimmer. “Took me longer to get a tail rope around him and heave him aboard than the fight on the rod and reel. He was everywhere. Forward, after, under the boat, in the air—and I was everywhere with him, except overboard. Finally, though, I did get a line on him—and finally I managed to heave him in. Then I took my billy and sort of stalked him until I could knock him out.”

  How big was that mako? Eddie doesn’t remember! Somewhere between two and three hundred pounds.

  He doesn’t remember, perhaps, because that was his fish and because it was just for his own fun—not business. Or, perhaps, because he has boated so many bigger ones in the intervening years—as a professional fishing guide. But it could be that he doesn’t remember on purpose: Eddie Wall is an exceedingly modest guy. There are some blowhards among the world-famed charterboatmen—some who, in recounting their adventures in far places, could out-spout whales. But the majority of them are quiet men—modest men—men with a lot of character in their faces. It takes character to be a deep-sea fisherman. It takes skill and infinite patience. The biggest ones really do get away—invariably—and that makes for a kind of humility. It also takes a rugged man—physically; and there are times in the trade when it takes a large amount of internal ruggedness, too.

  At night off Chile—when the sea is running big, the dark is like a closet, only the water shines—with phosphorescence—and when your customer is taking giant squid aboard, for sport. Squid with tremendous tentacles and tearing beaks. Or during some gray dawn, in unfished waters, when an unknown hulk heaves clear near by—but I am getting ahead of myself.

  Most people think of a deep-sea-fishing guide as a man who, however glamorous his occupation, is pretty much attached to one dock and the cruising radius of his boat. A Jersey fisherman is a Jersey fisherman in the common view—and a Florida guide patrols his own offshore section of that state. But there is a great and a growing brotherhood of fishing guides who have dragged baits farther than the distance covered by Magellan’s famed expedition—and in the same, exotic seas. Even the ordinary boatman, moreover, is likely to be no one-port sailor. The winter may find him at his home berth in Miami. But summer may see him tied up in Jersey or Maine. He may be found guiding on board a commercial boat—temporarily rigged for sports fishing—in distant Nova Scotia. And in winter, he may not see much of Miami. He may see more of the Florida Keys—or the Bahamas. He may do some fishing off Cuba. He may push down into the West Indies.

  As these lines are being written, the famed Tommy Gifford, for instance—who has tossed his well-made baits into half the salt water on earth—is doing some experimental big-game fishing off Jamaica. Bill Hatch—the dean of all world-ranging guides—just happens to be at home—in Miami—for the moment. Eddie Wall’s berth is empty, now, though: he’s in Bimini. And Eddie Wall is a gentleman of parts who has guided in many parts—an excellent example of the increasing fraternity of guides who think of a place to fish not as a given lake, or a certain river, a stretch of coast, or a set of keys, but any spot on earth where there’s open salt water.

  Well over six feet, with a good, jutting jaw and the clear eyes common in seafaring men, Eddie is of an unguessable age. His look is that of a man with many dramatic years behind—and many, many more, equally dramatic—stretched out ahead. The best clue to his age is his mate—a powerhouse youngster named Gene with a good war record and a passion for angling that is the base upon which a good guide is built. Gene is Eddie’s son. T
here is no good way to tell, by his mild and easy way of talking, where Eddie Wall originated. It was Alabama. But when he thinks of the places where fish have taken him, he thinks of all the waters around Florida, of the Florida Keys and the Bahamas and the West Indies, of Maine and Nova Scotia, of the sea off Georgia, of France and Italy and the north coast of Africa—and, especially—of a lonely little bunch of rocks in the South Atlantic.

  He hasn’t been in the Pacific—yet.

  Sea nomads like Eddie have various means of getting around. Some take their own boats up and down the inland waterway on the east coast of the United States every year—fishing north in summer, south in winter. Others are hired to go on trips to far-off places, where their guiding knowledge is added to the knowledge of local boatmen. A commercial fisherman in Nova Scotia, for example, may own a whaleboat, or the equivalent, in which a sports fisherman may set up a fighting chair. But—until fairly recently—most Nova Scotians had no idea how to go after monster fish with such trivial tackle as rods, reels and linen lines.

  Eddie has assisted professionally on numerous such expeditions. Tuna and broadbill swordfish are the quarry along the cold and foggy coasts of Canada. The angler, the boatman, and the guide go out in the gray dawns to the edge of a tidal rip and pour overboard ground-up bait to attract tuna. This is called “chumming” and, when the shapes of the tuna appear in the water or when “boils” made by their mighty tails break soundlessly on the sea-surface—a baited hook is slipped into the stream of chum. A tuna is allowed to take a lot of line while it swallows such a bait. Then the drag is thrown on, the angler strikes, and one of the hardest, most dogged of sea battles is on. Only those who have tried it fully appreciate the sensation.

  When a tuna hits, when it begins its celebrated initial run, an angler feels that he has inadvertently hooked into a passing express train. If the water is deep and the tuna sounds, he feels as if he had foul-hooked an elevator that had broken its cable. He sits with a rod—like any kid fishing in a pond—while, however, five or six (or more) hundred pounds of powerful fish is diving like an upended rocket, farther below him, perhaps, than the distance from the top of Manhattan’s Empire State Building to the sidewalk! Even twice as far!

  It is a most peculiar experience—exhilarating and also somewhat alarming. This writer has experienced it many times—most recently, only days ago, and on Eddie Wall’s Playmate, off Bimini. And let the bass or trout fisherman reflect that the tuna fisherman has not only the familiar problems of currents and rocks to contend with—as well as the problem of bringing in a fish that weighs not five pounds but five hundred and has run out not fifty yards of line but a thousand—but the further problem of sharks! For a hooked tuna is an invitation to a hungry shark. Many a time, shark and angler divide the fish. And many another time only the utmost effort brings the fish to boat ahead of menacing shark-attack. Indeed, the last minutes and yards of a tuna scrap may be accompanied by yells, boat-beatings, hat-wavings, cushion-throwings and rifle fusillades aimed to discourage sharks, while the angler concludes his mission.

  Tuna, however, taken north or south, in the seething pearliness of a Nova Scotia fog or the hot glare of the Bahamas sun, are not Eddie’s top fish. And neither are mako sharks. “The king of them all,” he says, thinking of his northern experiences, is the “broadbill swordfish. Blue marlin”—he hesitates and shakes his head—“blue marlin are sure spectacular. As a matter of fact, the longest I ever had a customer on a fish was only four hours—and that was a marlin.” Anybody who has fought a big fish for four hours may be inclined to resent the “only.” I have. I do. But Eddie shakes his head. “Still—for speed and power—for something I can’t give a name to—I hand it to the broadbill as the fightingest fish alive.”

  “How big a one have you ever caught?” I asked Eddie. In guide parlance, it should be remembered, that question refers not to the guide himself, but his customer, client, or charterer. It means, how big a fish has ever been caught on the guide’s boat?

  “Couldn’t say, exactly. We’ve brought in a lot of fish over seven hundred pounds. Broadbill. A mako that went just over seven. A lot of tunas over six hundred. On one Nova Scotia trip—we got seven broadbills. Seven on a single trip is pretty fair. They’re hard to come by.”

  “What was your most surprising catch?”

  He thought that over for a while—and smiled. “I can tell you the catch that surprised the most people. Tuna.”

  “Tuna?” I didn’t see that they should surprise anybody. Tuna range the waters of the earth and most sea-going men are familiar with them.

  “It was over in France,” Eddie explained. “Off Brittany.”

  We were trolling, at that moment. Trolling, ourselves, for tuna. A single, whole mullet danced in the sea behind the Playmate. Eddie took a look at it, and a look at Gene to be sure he was watching, too, along with a final glance up at the miniature “crow’s nest” where a Bimini native boy was scanning the azure sea for signs of the big fish. Then he went on:

  “The French tourist department knew it would be a good idea if big-game angling could be introduced in France. This happened last year. The Breton sardine fishermen had had plenty of trouble with tuna—getting in their nets and lousing them up—since the Year One. So the French invited Mr. Lerner to try to see what could be done—sportswise—on those tuna. Mr. Lerner asked me as a guide.”

  Michael Lerner, as the reader may know, is a world-famed angler, hunter, and organizer of scientific expeditions which have included a number of top fishing guides.

  “Once in a while,” Eddie continued, grinning at the memory, “those French sardine fishermen got a chance to harpoon a tuna. Usually it broke off. When we showed up on the Brittany coast with some rods and reels and line—a fishing chair and a couple of motors—we got just about a national raspberry. It was polite and quiet—but you could see that a lot of francs were going to be bet that we could never nail a tuna with such gear. We sort of half-converted a couple of local boats for fishing our way—and we went out with the fleet.

  “The weather was decent—cool, though. A well torn-up net from a few days back made it plain that the tuna were around those parts. So we started to fish. Well—we got one. Got one, in spite of the fact that it was darn near impossible to maneuver the boats—our engine conked, too—and the chair-rig broke up in the fight. There was something in the nature of a celebration when we brought that fish in. Celebration and feast. Tunas are darned good eating—and the whole fishing village ate tuna that night. Furthermore—they sort of hated tunas for the net-smashing—and it was a revenge to fish one out like a trout. There was—also—the matter of future sports-fishing profits—to add to the fun.”

  Eddie started to go on—interrupted himself—peered at the bait—and shrugged. “Thought I saw a swirl there. Barracuda—or the like. Guess I didn’t. Anyhow—we showed the town movies of big-game angling in New Zealand and Australia. Trips Mr. Lerner had made. Black-marlin fishing—and so on—in colored film. Rigged up a projector in a sardine cannery—and the whole town came to watch. No seats—they stood for two hours and they were just about as enthralled as any bunch I ever saw. Being fishermen themselves. Mrs. Lerner went out a few days later and astonished them again—by taking a tuna. In all—we got seven tunas and I guess big-game angling is officially launched in France.” His tone changed slightly. “It’s a white marlin.”

  So it was. Black bill and dark fin surged to the surface behind my tuna bait. Young Gene rushed for light tackle and, in seconds, he had a strip bait overboard. The idea was to drop it back and lure the marlin to take it instead of the tuna bait. This particular white, unfortunately, was too hungry to dally. He grabbed the whole mullet, yanked the line out of the outrigger, and started off. When the line came tight, I had him—on the thirty-nine-thread line we were using for tuna instead of the nine-thread line we’d quickly put over.

  Tuna tackle is intended for tuna and even an eighty-pound white marlin—on such gear—has no chanc
e. I kept the drag tight—at the point intended for a tuna strike. The hooked marlin turned away from the boat and tried to swim—but all he did was create a big wash. He couldn’t even turn the reel! So he gave that up and executed a few, twisting high jumps. Then I brought him to the boat and signaled to turn him loose. It then proved, however, that this fish was wanted by the research scientists at Bimini—wanted for food for some rarer live specimens.

  “What,” I asked Eddie, when the boating activity died down and we had rebaited for tuna, “was your most interesting trip?”

  It was the answer to that question which, in my opinion, makes Eddie Wall uniquely interesting among the sea-roving guides.

  “You know where the Ascension Isles are?” he asked.

  I did know.

  “A Godforsaken heap of rocks between South America and Africa, belonging to Great Britain. Before the war it had been merely a cable station; perhaps a dozen people had lived there in near-intolerable loneliness. High, rocky shores, two scraps of beach, no harbors but only the dubious lea of the rock pile itself, wind blowing all day and all night, seas smashing eternally, dust scouring the naked landscape, millions of birds using it as a rookery, and millions of turtles climbing over each other and digging up each other’s eggs when they came in on the heavy seas and tried to use the two inadequate beaches for breeding. That was Ascension before the war—just about the last stop at the End of Time. But, during the war, an airfield had been blasted and bulldozed on this bitter land. It had become an intensely busy station on the transatlantic flyways. It was also used as a rest area. Thousands upon thousands of American soldiers came to know endless months of service upon this sea-loved epitome of desolation.

  “Fresh food was their problem,” Eddie said. “Especially fresh meat. It just wasn’t. They knew there were fish—plenty of fish—in the waters around the islands. But how to take them? Seas rolling all the time. No boats available. No know-how among thousands of men. One of the Britishers stationed there used to get small fish—a lot of them—plug casting. But there wasn’t any tackle except his light rod—and you can’t feed umpteen thousand guys with a black-bass rod and a few plugs. Some place! They couldn’t even let the men go swimming there. The seas were so rough they knocked guys out. And when you got stunned in those seas, you were done for—and done for in a creepy manner. Not far offshore was a belt—and I mean a dark, visible belt—of literally billions of black triggerfish and they’d eat anything—even a piece of paper out of your hand. We tried that, later. Anyhow—if a swimmer got stunned by the seas, or fuddled, those little triggers would eat him. They told me that three bathers were taken that way—and all they got back was the clean-picked skull of one of them. So they didn’t swim at Ascension.