by Philip Wylie
Maybe this is the reason fishermen are so universally regarded as philosophical men: not their patience—which is commonly given as the explanation—but the fact that they are unworried by any prospect of abandoning their pursuit. They have a special bond with Nature—one that makes them as if ageless and unaging—which gives a special peace and perspective.
Fishing is patience. It is also high excitement. But its highest moments are not always made up of the “big one that didn’t get away.” Often that’s it—to be sure. But sometimes, the big one that did get away provides a more memorable experience than the one that broke a record. Frequently, too, it is the other fellow’s catch which makes a landmark in the recollection. And sometimes it is not the fish at all but a person met on a riverbank or at some salty dock—or it is a landscape, a seascape, or the mood of both.
I have fought and caught very big fish in whistling weather, far at sea, with green water coming aboard the boat and things breaking, things tumbling, mate and skipper falling on the sluicing deck, and night cracking down to add to our common ardors. Such adventures take a certain amount of stamina and even, perhaps, a trifle of sang froid, a touch of what, in less-classical words, is called “ice water in the veins.” I am not a particularly brave man; yet, like many others of sometimes flagging nerve, I have managed to get myself into several spots which, afterwards, gave me alternately a sense of bravura and sweaty moments in the late night when I remembered—and couldn’t get myself to sleep.
Yet, for all of that, and for sheer excitement, I think I had the most from the first big fish I ever caught. It weighed four pounds and a quarter. It was a smallmouth black bass.
All one July, with half a dozen other kids my age—which was twelve—I’d tried to catch one of the large bass we could clearly see from the banks of a private lake. Four- and five-pounders, they appeared frequently in the late afternoon, in the green shade of a stand of lofty white pines. We kids found them there early in the month. We set about at once, of course, to try to catch them on such random rods, reels, lines and hooks as small boys assemble; and we did not try sporty bait—artificial flies, plugs, spoons, or the like.
We used grasshoppers, worms, frogs. The mildly interested bass—sometimes a dozen were in view at once—would come up from their idle coursing in the verdant depths to inspect our offerings. And to turn away. But we soon found that if we threw in a grasshopper or live frog unattached to our gear, the wily fish would rise less suspiciously, take a good look, and engulf the prey—often with a soul-satisfying smash of the calm lake surface. However, we never hooked one, though various members of our barefooted, eager-beaver company bought, begged and stole gut leaders of the most transparent sort. Every ruse failed.
And then my great day came.
I took a rowboat out alone and anchored one sunny midmorning in a deep place in that pond. As bait that day I’d been able to provide myself with nothing better than a few bluegill minnows, hand-seined from along the banks. (We had preferred “shiners” and dace.) For some reason—the failure of all other means, no doubt—I decided to put a small split shot on my line and let my minnow ride down to the muddy bottom fifteen or twenty feet below. And I sat there a long while, not very expectantly. When my strike came, it was an easy thing. I imagined a bullhead or bluegill had taken my small minnow. But when I hit back to set the hook, things changed.
The bass took off deep. He tried several runs down there and I burned my fingers on a cheap reel that had a click but no drag. (I didn’t know about the burns until later.) Then the bass rose and jumped and I could see with my own naked, popping eye I’d hooked one of the lunkers we’d sought for so long. I suppose it took ten or fifteen minutes to fight the fish to the boatside. I daresay no subsequent and equal period of my life has ever put me under greater emotional strain or produced more pure excitement. And I got him. With the quenchless optimism of small boys we—all of us—carried landing nets when we went forth to fish. It was the first time I’d ever used one on anything but perch and small pickerel.
I heaved him aboard, upped anchor, rowed ashore like a demon and paraded through the summer cottages with sensational effect. He was proudly photographed by a dozen adults including two college men. He was, that night, proudly eaten by my family and myself. And to this day, every detail of that lake is fixed in my mind; I can still taste its sweet muddiness and smell the wind from the pines coming across it and see the brilliance of the sun on its cat-pawed surface.
Here, however, the story takes a shameful turn. I was twelve and I was the only boy in the community who’d caught a black bass, let alone a four-and-a-quarter-pounder. If I had been a sportsman in the grownup sense of the word, I would, of course, have immediately told all the rest of my “gang” where and with what I’d caught the colossus. Unfortunately for this record, my thoughts took a different twist. I was not in the least eager to have some other kid take a bass as big or perhaps even bigger. I felt sure I’d found the “secret” of how to catch those wise lunkers. So, when I was importuned for the piscatorial details, I finally—and with apparent reluctance—told the other boys I’d caught that bass on jelly.
“You know,” I said, “we never got them to bite a frog or minnow or locust or anything on a hook. So I swiped a jar of jelly—good, firm apple jelly—and I put a gob on my hook and tossed it out and before it sank, even—whamo!”
All the rest of the summer, through August and until the schoolbell rang again, the lake was dotted with rowboats in which small boys—and some girls—were feverishly trying to get jelly, swiped from their mothers’ jam closets, to stay on a hook! Just as I’d figured, it didn’t. And the bass didn’t seem to care for it, anyhow. But, at the same time, I was out there, too, nearly every day, in a boat of my own—with jelly of my own, of course, as a ruse—and some further bluegill minnows, caught furtively. And it is only fair to report that even though I used gross treachery to aid me, I never did get another bass bite that year.
A time comes in the lives of most youths when they make things. They send away for parts and diagrams and assemble airplanes. They buy blocks of straight-grained white pine, fix them in vices in their cellars and, with drawknives and chisels, painstakingly begin to shape the hulls of model ships. Or they go, as I did for a while, from one drugstore to another—buying (with a different alibi for each purchase) such substances as sulphur, charcoal, potassium nitrate—or chlorate—and the like. The object of that is homemade gunpowder.
A time came for me when I read a book on how to split bamboo, shape it, glue the segments together and make a fly rod—and how to tie flies, too. The rods I made, I realize now, were absurdly clumsy things—the guides wound on imperfectly—and the reels fitting poorly. The flies I tied were composed mostly of substitute materials: I couldn’t come by buck tails or grouse feathers, offhand. They looked like no standard trout fly and certainly like no living insect, in spite of the variety in that vast kingdom.
Nevertheless, I fared forth with this ungainly equipment (and much information about how to cast) and I fished many times in streams and millponds that looked “fishy” to me. I lost most of my homemade flies in trees and high bushes and on logs too far offshore to reach. But at long last, one afternoon, a trout—a genuine brook trout, a good inch over the legal length, a trout that was perhaps starving to death or possibly astigmatic or myopic—took my fly and I took him.
Nobody—repeat—nobody ever brought a marlin to dock with greater satisfaction than I felt then. For who that goes in search of marlin makes his own rods and fashions his own baits artificially? Who does it alone and unaided from start to finish? Who does it from a book and without any guide but that? What a victory—that seven-inch trout! I cannot recall, exactly, the first sailfish I ever hooked and fought and brought to boat. But I shall not forget that trout—ever.
There is a satisfaction in catching giant fish, too.
My first whopper was a tuna and the day I caught him I’d invited a girl to go along. We set out
from Brielle, New Jersey, on a hot morning and went clear to Ambrose Light before anchoring and starting to chum. Hours passed. The wind came up from the southwest. The anchored cruiser began to pitch. And its skipper, who was as “green” as I (in the sense that he’d never taken one of the great game fish aboard his boat), began to worry about the weather.
Then, suddenly, the heaving sea around us showed the telltale whirlpools and “boils” sent up by the tails of tuna. Soon we saw huge glimmerings of them in the murky water. Tensely we waited and presently our coil of line on the gunwale began to slip rapidly into the sea: a tuna had taken our bait. I leaped into the fighting chair and struck when the slack line had payed out. The reel screamed and its oil smoked. The skipper cast loose the anchor on a flagged buoy (that slowly and forever sank as we tore away)and the fight began.
It is quite a shock, even after sailfish and amberjack, and sharks, to tangle with a tuna or a marlin or some other fish of that ilk. For quite a while I felt as if, in a horrid nightmare, I’d taken on Jack Dempsey for a grudge-fight. Every time the tuna raced away I felt the pressure would pull me apart. Every time he slackened his assault and I horsed him rhythmically back to a point some hundreds of yards from the boat, I felt that I could not possibly do it again. But that was all in the first hour. (Besides, you will remember, I had that girl on board; she was an important girl—she is Mrs. Wylie now—and, after all, I’d told her I was something of a fisherman.) The second hour was, surprisingly, less alarming and painful. I had “settled down.” I had my second wind. And I even got through the third hour in reasonable condition.
But, by the time the fourth hour began, the wind was blowing a good thirty knots and the sea was heavy. We were miles up the Lower Bay from the region of the Lightship, where we’d hung the fish. The afternoon was waning. Nevertheless, the skipper remained dauntless (he’d been a “wooden ship” sailor in the “iron men” days—as he often reminded what he considered wooden types of charterboatmen) and I hung on because there was, in the lexicon of sports fishing, nothing else to do. I did not even know, then, how to “use” a heavy sea to help in the taking of a heavy fish—the way to employ the rise and fall of the boat itself as a substitute for back-breaking effort, getting in line from the lift of the waves instead of the personal lift of one very weary P. Wylie. But I panted on and the tuna finally turned almost belly up and I heaved him alongside.
The bruising adventure was ended, I thought; actually, it hadn’t begun. Our skipper had rigged a derrick for “boating” monstrous fish. It was his own idea. This was now lowered: a “V”-shaped boom—and the tuna was gaffed. The gaff-rope led over a pulley at the apex of the boom and from that point to a block-and-tackle. Captain, mate and girl manned the lines and—sure enough—five-hundred-odd pounds of tuna came up and out of the raging sea. The derrick was so designed that, once the fish had been elevated to a sufficient height, the boom could then be raised by a second block-and-fall, bringing any sea giant neatly aboard.
But the ingenious captain had not figured on the strain of a horse mackerel at the end of his tubular steel supports. And he had not figured on a heavy sea. The great fish hung out there in the air, astern, against the fading sunset, swinging in tremendous arcs as the boat rolled and pitched. Now it swept far away—and now in toward us so that all hands had to duck the whishing passage of its tail. Then, suddenly, both bolts which anchored the derrick sheared. Like power-driven lances, the great steel rods tore into the cabin, splitting out pieces of its wooden sides and smashing its windows, in a crash and roar of glass which was, luckily, thrown outward on both sides. And luckily—very luckily—nobody happened to be in the path of the back-rammed steel. Nobody was hurt and only the superstructure of the cruiser suffered: it looked as if it had taken a burst of small cannon shells.
The tuna went back in the sea, of course. And the gaff came out. Furthermore, in spite of its minutes of prodigious dangling, it was alive, still. It swam. But the hook hadn’t been removed and I grabbed the rod once more. Once again I brought the tuna back to the boatside and this time, with ropes and backs and no derrick, skipper, mate and I brought the fish aboard. Darkness was falling then.
We headed home, quartering the wind the long way to Brielle, without any glass to protect us from the surging seas and without any dinner. We didn’t make port until after midnight and I shall never know why we didn’t go on the rocks at the difficult Manasquan inlet: small-craft warning had long since been sent out. Perhaps it was true about the skipper and iron men. Anyway, he brought in safely his half-wrecked boat, the girl, his mate and me and my first really big-game fish. I must report here, in all honesty, that the next morning I had to have help to get out of bed. I do not know how many thousands of muscles the anatomists have located and named; but I do know every one of them, on me, that day, was not just stiff and sore but nearly paralyzed and in a state of excruciation. For two days afterward, bellhops had to help me get dressed.
The girl who witnessed this exploit may have been led (falsely) to imagine me as a man of immense character and stubbornness. As Mrs. Wylie, she has learned since (if such was the case) that my character falls short of that degree of virtue in many areas. But, in the matter of fishing, I have thus far done all I could to hang on to every one I hooked, with a single exception. That principle is pretty absolute—in fishing. (Though, before I went after big tunas again, I made sure I was in better “condition” than I’d been on my first day.)
The exception? When would an angler—a proud man—give up on a fish? I did it once, off Bimini, years later. We’d hung—one hot, still afternoon—what we believed to be a blue marlin, on a special outfit that held a thousand yards of nine-thread line. Nobody, in those days, had “taken” a blue marlin on nine-thread.
The fish went down and the afternoon hours passed. Squalls came up from across the Bahama Flats. Lightning cracked all around us in the turbulent sea and lightning flew amongst the black clouds. Cold winds blew intermittently and brought tumults of stinging rain—hurtful, hard rain in which I had to stand, fighting the deep-down fish on my light tackle. Clear, sunny hours passed too, when I was hot and sweated hard and the mate poured buckets of sea water over me. Waterspouts drove by—sometimes too close for comfort. Night fell and the weather closed in. We began to lose sight, from time to time, of Bimini’s faint lights. And with the prospect of being lost out there all night, in foul weather, the skipper asked me to bring the fish up or break him off. In trying to do the former, I broke him off—and we went home fishless for dinner.
That was the only time I ever broke one off deliberately. And it was the nearest I’ve ever come to boating a blue marlin on nine-thread line. I wasn’t very near for, if it was a marlin (and we were never sure, since no one saw the strike and the fish never jumped), I was doubtless a long way from success—for it might have been a five- or six-hundred-pounder, probably an impossible catch for such tackle even under perfect conditions.
Still, I remember that unsuccessful afternoon as vividly as the equally uncomfortable one on which I got the tuna. Why? Because, I think, the best part of angling is the chance. It is the gamble. It is not catching fish that matters most, but being occupied with fishing. For those who take their excitement from betting on horses, the principal thing is not to win—who ever got rich at that?—but to be at the track, to see the ponies run, to try to pick a winner-at-long-odds. In the aggregate, over the years, the bettors lose. Once in a while, they do make big strikes—and get the biggest of the thrills they seek. But they are satisfied to be at the races—win, lose or draw; and so it is with angling.
So it is, I should say, except on special occasions. To be sure, any beginner in quest of any particular fish will yearn to get a hit from it, tangle with it and net it, boat it or haul it ashore. But the maturing angler will gradually lose that avidity: fishing, not fish-catching will become the greater part of glamour for him. But, as I say, there are exceptions. For instance, any normal man, taking out for his first time a
close friend, will revert to his own first overeagerness and avidly implore Triton, Neptune, Poseidon or some other Fish-God for luck—for his friend. And once in a while you are put on your mettle. As a rule, that’s bad.
I recall a time (I’m sure “security regulations” do not hold here, any longer) early in the Second World War when I had the custom of taking fishing on a charterboat, on alternate Sundays, enlisted men, and then officers—who happened to be on duty at the local Naval Air Station. The commanding officer was a very good friend of mine and a gentleman much admired by me. He—or perhaps his WAVE—made up the regular Sunday list of four who would accompany me. But one Sunday I was sent a “ringer”—a man the C.O. phoned was a “doggone civilian” but a “close friend” whom he “hoped I’d take out,” as “the guy loved fishing.”
Of course, I accepted the civilian. He proved to be a rather short but very sturdy-looking bird of middle age, with a reddish face and a pair of the most penetrating eyes I’ve ever tried to penetrate back. He wore slacks and a woolen shirt and an old mackintosh—and he was accompanied by a brace of very respectful lieutenant commanders, both wearing wings, both—I happened to know—hot pilots and superior training officers at the base. The situation perplexed me until introductions were made and I heard my guest’s British accent. Civilian he might be; VIP he surely was; and there was something indomitable about him, something Churchillian.