A note from Bob: it is coming on the two-year anniversary when I took my then 15-year old son, Ben, down to Florida to go deep sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico with my dear friends Dan, Bill and David.  It was quite an experience for all of us and I had to write about it.  It took me almost a year (two sittings exactly) to finish my recollection of this Gilligan-type adventure.  While it might not be the most professional piece I have ever written, I had a good laugh with it and a few beers while waiting for a plane.  Here it is:

A Fish Tale

A faint warning was the only clue: “it might be a little rough when we get into the channel” said our captain, a 46-year Florida transplant well versed in the art of understatement.  His passengers, excluding his semi-seasoned first mate, were hunched together in the backseat, impaling their hands on the metal handrail, sinking deeper into their seat with every corresponding wave pounding, questioning what they were doing in a 24-foot World Cat fishing boat at 4:45 in the morning, pitch black, with 70 miles to go and no relief in sight.

Every once in a while a small grunt was heard from the passengers, like a female tennis player unloading on a forehand.  These grunts usually occurred when one’s spine was condensed because the seas provided little cushion when the twin Yamaha 225, four stroke engines launched our little ship airborne.  The inevitable, “what comes up must come down” applies here, and there were no soft landing, no sea of glass this fateful early morning as we ventured West in search of gold, no I mean goldfish, no, fish that we could turn into gold or gold plated memories or some of all of the above.

The passenger roster included two Cramers, two Gryboskis, and one captain named Howe who lived up to his name telling us the how’s and why’s of fishing strategy, technique and etiquette such as when peeing from the boat it doesn’t really matter if you get most of it outside the boat or on the rail or in the boat, nobody cares; drinking beer at 5am was actually in the sailor’s manual of the US Navy and cured motion sickness, frayed nerves and fear of touching fish or bait; no complaining of any kind was allowed and if evident, one would join to ranks of previous passengers (a particular lawyer and nephew come to mind) who had dared to wish they were home with their Mommas or anywhere else on earth but 76 miles out in the middle of the Gulf, puking their guts out, getting baked by the sun or simply wiped out from reeling in a 45-pound jump-in-the-boat Amberjack.

Our 13-hour pleasure cruise was just three hours old when our Captain throttled back on the controls thereby announcing we had arrived at our first fishing hole.  To this passenger, this water looked identical to the billions of gallons of water we had just passed, naively leading to the question why we were stopping here and not just over there, or for that matter, 25 miles back closer to shore.  But a stop was a stop and that meant no more pounding, and with the sun rising to the east, the water blue and clear, things were looking bright.   However, fisherman optimism quickly turned to cold hard reality: our first casts of the morning yielded a fish that had in fact eaten our bait but on the way up from the bottom of the 200-foot sea had transformed itself into bait and was eaten by a shark.  We caught a mangled, half-eaten fish!  Yippee!  And to make matter worse, for 20 minutes, that is all we caught.  We wondered aloud the words of the late great Doc Gryboski who once had a bad fishing start, “is this a bad omen for the rest of the day?”

The fishing gods however were smiling upon us this Sunday morning.  A few expert moves from our Captain properly positioned us to start reeling in fish the way we expected to.  As the seas calmed and the heat soured,  Captain Howe made sure the entire crew learned the proper reel-in technique.  This passenger learned the hard way, first putting the pole into his ribs instead under his arm.  A 40-pound Red Fish on the line helped correct the poor positioning otherwise I’m sure I would have punctured my anatomy.

The atmosphere on the boat improved dramatically.  Fish were flying into the boat: my son, Ben, hooked a tuna that was neck and neck to either pull Ben overboard or become prized sushi.  For awhile it was a draw, but Ben called for reinforcements and his muscle-bound Dad (me) with his new improved fishing technique backed by Bill, Dan and David and the full power of the boat’s twin, outboard engines were able to apprehend this Starkist can filler and deliver our Charlie the tuna squarely into our hands. 

Oh, by the way, one nearly fatal (slight overstatement) blunder in this exquisitely planned Giligan style, fishing tour was a discernable shortage of Nachos chips.  Can you believe our Captain only bought one stinking bag!   There we were, adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, the sun beating us down, beers, fish remains, probably even urine that didn’t quite make it overboard, hooks flying, an ice cooler of the finest assortment of  dead fish you have ever seen, and we had one stinking bag of chips for 5 tired, sunburnt, starving guys.  It is a good thing we didn’t have a mutiny right there and then.  We could have tied our illustrious captain to the side of the boat and hightailed it back to the closest 7-11 we could find.  There has to be some kind of convenience store somewhere out here in the Gulf, right?

In any event, finally after a dozen more fish—we’d get one on the line and no one wanted to bring it in--our relentless Captain Dan acquiesced and announce it was time to head on in.  No finer words were ever uttered, not the Gettysberg address, not “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev”, not “one small step for man, one giant step for mankind”,  “Pack it up” was all we needed to hear; hatches were buttoned down (except for the one fishing rod that somehow got loose and flew into the water never to be seen again, but that was just bad luck and I wasn’t really looking and thank goodness it wasn’t MY fault),.  We quickly assume the travel position (that was Captain  Dan and first mate David in the plush, heavily padded drivers’ seats with all the fancy, shamsy equipment and us, the lowly crew, on this tiny bare bench in the back where all bumps were accentuated to drive your spine right into your brain).  Anyway, any physical pain could easily be tolerated with the knowledge we were headed back to dry land, with a cooler filled with fish, fish stories that could be told for years to come, and an experience to be remember. And, I kid you not, we were escorted back to land by a school of dolphins, swimming, jumping and I think just thanking us for coming out.