Deep Water Blues

by Fred Waitzkin

  This happened many years ago, if it happened at all. When I think of my dad, whom I adored, history and dreams become a seamless narrative. Now, as we leave Cat Island astern heading for Rum Cay, I envision Bobby and Abe walking the docks together.

  But how many more times will I be able to make this pilgrimage? I try to blot out this uncomfortable thought.

  My friends Doron and Jimmy are sitting with me on the bridge.

  James Rolle, seventy-five, has lived his entire life on tiny Bimini Island, three hundred miles to the northwest. When he was a young man, he was a stellar fisherman, ran a twenty-eight-footer out of Bimini for marlin and bluefin tuna. In the evenings, he rode a big Harley, the only one on the island, up and down the entire three-mile length of the Queen’s Highway, nodding to passersby like a king watching over his domain of sand, mangroves, and Australian pines, a few shacks on the hill. But now, and for the past thirty-five years, my friend spends his day weighing a couple of potatoes, onions, or chicken wings, or he sells soda or candy to kids. Jim and his wife operate a dusty grocery store about the size of a schoolroom, which is attached to his house on the hill. Jim is overweight and has bad knees. I worry he’ll fall and ruin himself whenever he tries to climb down the ladder to the cockpit. Jim is staring out to sea, lost in thought.

  Doron Katzman is tall, with heavily lidded crystal blue eyes and bushy gray eyebrows that seem to have a life of their own. He has a ruddy complexion and thick wiry gray hair. In his early twenties, Doron built a catamaran from scratch, and then, with little boating or navigational knowledge and few supplies beside gumption and tenacity, Doron and a fellow youthful lunatic left Israel and sailed the Mediterranean. Soon after, he sailed a small boat across the Atlantic. Doron is a sensitive, understated man, a master carpenter and lifelong sailing enthusiast who lives with his family on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Doron has traveled with me a few times on the Ebb Tide and has fallen in love with blue-water fishing. His newly discovered passion for trolling rekindles my own. Whenever he’s on the boat, I want to get one for him. I don’t want to let him down.

  For the first minutes of a troll, I’m all nerves, watching and wishing for the sight of a tall fin or a slashing bill ripping across the wake. But soon enough, I settle down and focus on the lures skipping, surfing, occasionally plunging into the white water behind the wake as we head toward Conception Island, where we’ll anchor for the night. Watching the lures follow the boat feels so familiar and comfortable, like focusing on the breath. I fall deeply into the plunge and dip of the lures—want to watch them forever. I’ve been enacting this meditation, focused on this same splash, dip, and dive since I was fourteen or fifteen years old fishing with my dad.

  I can feel Doron beside me falling into the rhythm of the troll.

  And then I glimpse, I think I see an enormous dark shape rising beneath the waves and I start to shriek, “MARLIN. MARLIN. MARLIN!!!” Cannot contain myself.

  I stare closely. Seconds pass. More seconds. I don’t see anything besides water and skipping lures. There must be a marlin. Must be a marlin!

  But only rough seas and my steadfast lures. I’m embarrassed. Why the hell did I yell “marlin” like a greenhorn. I’m the captain.

  John is staring up at me from the cockpit. What? What? He’s scanning the horizon for marlin as if they fly into the sky like birds.

  I met John Mitchell on a plane back from California seven years ago. He was sitting beside the window, drawing and writing tiny detailed notes in a fancy black drawing book. I was seated beside him. For hours he never looked up from his pages, and his concentration was such that I found it unsettling. It took all of my self-control not to grab the book away from him and delve into those pages. Finally, I asked him what the hell he was writing about, and he looked as if I’d pulled him out of a two-week meditation. Then we began talking and very quickly discovered a friendship that has deepened over time.

  John is a great painter but never fished before. He came along on this trip to draw, etch, or paint whatever we find on Rum Cay.

  “I don’t see any fish,” Doron remarks dourly.

  I don’t answer. I stare intently at the lures as if there still might be a fish lurking nearby although I know it was just my eyes playing tricks. How can I explain this? The fish in my head—the ones I caught in my youth with my dad and later on with my wife and kids and the ones that I read about in books by Hemingway and Zane Grey—have replaced the fish that have mostly disappeared from these waters. A lot of my fishing life takes place in my head.

  “I’m sure we’ll catch a marlin today. I feel it,” I say to Doron, who nods.

  It’s true. I feel it.

  “Maybe,” Doron answers, his Israeli accent filled with merry skepticism while he watches the lures. “Freddy, you always feel it. Every day you feel it. We didn’t catch one in two weeks fishing last summer, not one.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Not one.”

  And yet my mind is filled with marlin and tuna as we troll south—so many memories of great game fish—a picnic of marlin in my head.

  It’s a windy overcast day pushing into a four-foot head sea. In the horizon, the gray ocean and sky are indistinguishable. I look at the GPS, adjust the course. Usually on these trips, my wife is the navigator. She always knows exactly where we are. She knows which knobs to turn to get the answers. She constantly recalibrates the course while I stare at the lures and dream. Electronics make me nervous but I’m beginning to get the hang of the GPS. I better or we’ll never find Rum Cay.

  “Hey, Jim,” I say, “When you were a charter skipper, you traveled to all the islands, right?”

  He nods yes. Jim has a sullen expression. He doesn’t want to talk.

  “Just using a compass? No electronics, right?”

  “When I started fishing, I had no compass, Fred,” he says impatiently.

  “Come on, Jim.”

  “I tell you, I had no compass.”

  “How’d you do it then? How’d you find your way?”

  “I just did it. Just used my eyes. We all did it in those days.”

  “How’d you do it, Jim? How could you travel from Bimini to Cat Island without a compass?”

  “Just followed the white line.”

  “The white line? What white line?”

  “The white line in the ocean, Fred. That’s how I found my way.”

  It seems to me with age Jim has become more inscrutable. He unnerves me when he gets this way—when I can’t reach him.

  Despite myself, I look for the white line in the ocean. Jim stares ahead of the boat, perhaps lost in memories of old fishing days. But more likely, he’s worrying about the tiny grocery store on the hill on Bimini. These days the shop, run mostly by his wife, is often out of potatoes or onions, and Jim doesn’t have the money to order produce from the States.

  Many afternoons, Jim and I have sat on milk crates in front of the empty shop, Jim slapping mosquitoes and sand fleas, which for some reason leave me alone. He glances up or down the dusty road a baseball’s throw from the Gulf Stream, and he shares observations about neighbors or friends we have both known for fifty years.

  “The world down the road has gotten much harder,” he said to me recently.

  “What do you mean, Jim?”

  “You have one problem and the next day you have one that’s worse. One day you feel like I can do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow, you feel like you can do it tomorrow. But tomorrow never come.”

  I love this crew, but also they make me uneasy. No one can handle the twin diesel boat in a tight spot but me. None of these guys knows how to handle a four-hundred-pound fish beside the boat but me. Of course Jim could do it, but that was a lifetime ago. No one can navigate but me, and I’m not a good navigator. There are challenges ahead. I want to make it to Rum Cay, but also I want to get there and make it home
with my crew intact.

  Despite myself, I look for the white line. I couldn’t spot it, but the chart plotter guided us right into the enchanting Half Moon Harbor of Conception Island, a Bahamian national park, where no fish or shellfish may be caught. The sun came out. The water in the protected lee of the island was perfectly clear. From the bridge, I could see crawfish and grouper on the bottom.

  We dropped anchor behind the highest part of the island in about twenty feet of water. I’ve spent many nights here over the years. There were no other boats. The wind was blowing twenty or maybe a little more, but protected by the bluff there was hardly any wind at all. We were safe from the weather here. Made me feel like a kid in a favorite hiding spot. All this largesse was ours. It was about 5:00 p.m. We were all hot and ready to dive in.

  Doron went in first, took a few languid strokes and then sprinted back to the ladder hanging off the stern. He claimed a shark chased him back to the boat. These guys kill me. They can’t tell a shark from a grouper. And Jim with his white line in the water. What a crew! I pulled on my trunks and dipped a foot in off the stern—warm as a bath. I dropped over the side, snorkeled nearby. Gorgeous here, heaven. There were crawfish right beneath the transom. I flipped onto my back, closed my eyes, felt the sun on my face. I was thinking about having a beer and a great dinner later with my friends. Then I heard John calling, “Shark, shark.” I tried to tune him out, but he kept shouting, “Shark, shark.” When I flipped over and looked down, there was a two-hundred-pound lemon shark racing up at my feet mouth open. Before I could move, the shark had my flipper in its teeth and was shaking its head—thankfully, missed the foot, but it pulled off the flipper. I sprinted for the stern ladder. Doron was imploring for me to get in the boat. I was trying. Missed the bottom rung of the ladder with my one flippered foot. The shark was coming at me again. I grabbed the ladder while kicking its head with my one flipper. Doron was now leaning over the side with a lobster spear jabbing the shark in the back while I climbed out.

  I made it into the boat in one piece. For some reason, these sharks had it in for us. Five or six of them circled the Ebb Tide, waiting. I’ve been cruising these waters for half a century, and this had never happened before.

  Doron made us a great dinner of ribs, rice with corn, a salad, but I couldn’t get the sharks out of my head. I’ve seen many sharks in these waters—often snorkeled with them—but I have never been attacked before. I thought about the Haitian boat off Rum Cay and the half-eaten bodies lying on the bottom. Could the sharks have developed a taste? Or maybe there just aren’t so many fish around here to eat.

  After dinner, Jimmy had settled into an old swivel armchair by the door, his favorite spot on the Ebb Tide. Over the years, I’ve often asked him to tell me stories of the islands. Usually Jim insists, “Fred, I have no story to tell,” but then I pester and coax him. Jim has an unusual narrative gift. He can make a walk down the dirt road across from his store come alive with pathos or humor or dread.

  “Tell us a story about sharks,” asked Doron.

  Jim didn’t answer. Across from him in a tattered chair sat John Mitchell with his drawing pad. John was almost always drawing one of us. At the beginning of our trip, modeling for him felt awkward, but after a couple of days, his work seemed to heighten the stakes of a moment.

  Jim had a stern, impenetrable expression, as if he resented the imposition of our company.

  Then, as if a window had opened, he was suddenly back a half century on the flying bridge of his twenty-eight-footer pulling into Weech’s Dock on Bimini, with a four-hundred-pound blue marlin lying in the cockpit, its blackened head draped over the transom. Jim was a powerfully built twenty-two-year-old man who believed that nothing in this world could stop him.

  “So we get back from the morning fishing trip, there was three guys waitin to talk. They want me to carry em down to Cat Cay, ten miles to the south. I was happy to go. It was May, which is tuna time, and lots of Bimini fellas down there fishin on the boats for giant bluefin. My good buddy Bradford Banes was mate on one of the boats. Banes was a great fun-loving man. He’d been away fishin for two, three weeks, and I miss hangin out with him in the evenings.

  “These fellas wanna troll to Cat Cay and stay there couple hours, have dinner with one of the rich homeowners they knew, and ride back.

  “ ‘What you charge us, Cap?’

  “ ‘Two fifty for the day and an extra one fifty because I’ll have to bring you back in the night.’ I was on a roll. I coulda charge em anything. Things breakin my way. I already catch a marlin and made a day’s pay. I want to go down to Cat Cay to see Banes and these guys payin me four hundred dollars to do it.

  “We troll down and watch this pretty sunset peekin through some clouds that was makin up in the west. We catch another marlin and turn it loose.”

  Jim turned to me.

  “Fred, there was so much fish back then. Not like now. I tell you, guys down in Cat Cay was killin giant tuna. Boats catchin five, six fish in one day—six, seven-hundred pounders. But they lost many more than they catch. Big schools of sharks always trailing the tuna. Often we’d hook a big tuna and before we reel it to the boat the fish half eaten. It was bloody out there I tell you. A man couldn’t survive a minute in the water round those tuna and shark.

  “Anyhow, Banes was waiting for me when we get into the marina. ‘Jimmy, look to the west, man. For sure, big storm comin at us. You can’t go home tonight, man. Weather bad.’

  “We could already hear thunder and sky in the west lit up with fireworks. Banes right. We’d have to sleep on the boat and try going back to Bimini in the morning. So Banes and I went down to Lewistown. That’s what they call black town on Cat Cay. All the mates was there and some good-lookin Bimini girls that work in the houses of rich white folks. We shoot pool and whatever else goes on in the bar down there. Banes telling his jokes. I love that guy.

  “Around eight thirty I say, ‘Let’s go back to the boat case my people come down and I’ll tell em we ain’t goin back tonight.’

  “ ‘No way, not tonight,’ says Banes looking at the lightnin to the west.

  “But we get to the dock, the three white guys already waitin and they want to go back to Bimini. They don’t know nuthin about storms at sea. Banes was nervous, I tell you. He says, ‘Jimmy if my mommy was laid out on Bimini this night, I wouldn’t go out there in that storm. Look at the fire in the sky, man.’ It was true. Lightnin just explodin on the water. Banes was begging me not to go like he knew something terrible gonna happen. And I should’ve listened, would have change a whole lot.

  “But I was a young man and believe nothin bad could happen to me. I thought I could walk on water, Fred. All the older fellas with years on the sea were frighten and tellin me not to go. I guess that also gave me a push to do it.

  “ ‘I’ll give it a try,’ I say to the fellas. ‘I think I can make it.’

  “ ‘Oh no, Jimmy. Not tonight.’ That was the last thing Banes say to me. When you young you just do stupid things. I was gonna show these fellas.”

  Jim paused a moment. The three of us stood up as if we were thinking the same thing and walked outside to the stern of the Ebb Tide. We were all curious to take a look. I snapped on the underwater lights on the transom. There were the sharks, five or six of them, patiently circling the boat. Waiting.

  Jim never moved from his chair.

  As soon as we were back settled inside, he continued.

  “The weather was real bad. Even with a spotlight I couldn’t see fifty feet in front of the boat.”

  “No compass, Jim?”

  “I told you, Fred. Didn’t have no compass. I just idling my way ahead, three, four miles an hour. I was a blind fella with sheets of water in my face, feeling my way. We was thrown around, water breakin over the bow and lightning all around us. Any second seem lightning would burn up the boat. I couldn’t hold a course if I knew what cours
e to hold. I was afraid we’d hit Piquet Rock or one of the Turtle Rocks. That would be the end of us. No one would ever find us in that wild ocean.

  “Every time lightnin hit the water, I stare ahead and try to glimpse a rock. I pick my way from one rock to the next, like I was rock climbing stead of running a fishing boat. When I couldn’t see, I prayin I didn’t hit a breaking reef. I wait for a burst of light and then I see a rock and get my bearing for a minute or so. But through it, I figure I’d make it back. I’d show Banes and the guys. No one else would have tried it on such a night but I did.”

  “No white line, Jim?”

  “Not on that night. Now fifty years later, it feel like a miracle making it through that fire and wild water. Feeling my way into Bimini harbor. But I made it, just like I told Banes and the others. Tied her up for the night. Man paid me four hundred. I went home and went to sleep.”

  “What about the sharks?” asked Doron.

  “The story ain’t quite finish,” Jim answered.

  “Around ten the following morning, on Cat Cay, Bradford Banes decide he want to get back to Bimini to see his family. He went to the captain of his boat, guy named Eddie Wall and say, ‘Cap, let’s go home.’ Wall don’t want to go cause the seas too rough. But Banes push him, and he argue if Jimmy could do it, they could make it easy. Their boat was a lot bigger than mine. Wall didn’t want to go but was fed up with all of Banes’s arguing and cursing.

  “There was no more lightnin, but the wind was now blowing hard from the west, maybe thirty-five or forty knots. When it blow that way is a big surge comin cross the sand bar there in front of South Bimini. A boat has to get through big breakin seas to get in the harbor in such wind.

  “When they get off Sunshine Inn, the boat was caught in the surge and fell onto her side. Brad sittin on the bridge on one of the chairs with his arms fold like he had no concern in the world. When the boat roll, Brad was toss right into the water. There was fellas working outside the Sunshine Inn, they see when he went over.