The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  They got up at four, at their home, near Pascagoula, Mississippi, and at six were trolling off the Chandeleur Islands in thirty-five feet of water. Due south of Biloxi Bay, the Chandeleurs are seventy-five miles east of New Orleans. The skipper on this run was John Colle (kolly), and the fisherwoman Natalie Colle. With two drift lines and a third line on a downrigger, she was fishing for king mackerel. On each line she used a single hook and a treble hook and a hundred-pound-test metal leader. (“Mackerel have such sharp teeth.”) The bait on each line was a ribbonfish, “which we call a silver eel, a skinny eel—the single hook goes through its mouth and nose and the treble hook goes on its back to make it seem to be swimming right, even though it’s dead.” The line itself was thirty-pound-test, appropriate for a king. Each rod was seven feet long—“a king/ling rod, a standard king-mackerel rod.” The rods were held vertically in hardware rod holders.

  Off the curving Chandeleurs, the Colles were following birds. (“Where there’s birds, there’s baitfish; where there’s baitfish, there’s fish.”) They trolled around the feeding schools. (“It was real slick water, real calm. We could see the schools.”) Suddenly, one of the drift lines moved. Natalie picked up the rod. For forty-five minutes, the fish on the line held her off. It felt sizable, and Natalie wondered how it might place among the tournament kings. When the fish came to the boat, though, it was a blacktip shark, about five feet long, with three sharksuckers riding on it. She released it, and rerigged the line.

  Something hit heavily at noon. The rod was in a rod holder. The reel, on light drag, started “zinging.”

  “We had the clicker on. Tournament rules—you reel it in yourself. I went to the rod, put it in my rod belt. I’m thinking, It’s a big king. A real big king. The prize king! Before long, it jumped. It shook in the air. It was a tarpon! Again, he jumped. He twisted in the air. We call it skyrocketing.”

  What Natalie had on her line was like this—described for all time by Thomas McGuane, in the collection he titled “An Outside Chance”:

  The closest thing to a tarpon in the material world is the Steinway piano. The tarpon, of course, is a game fish that runs to extreme sizes, while the Steinway piano is merely an enormous musical instrument, largely wooden and manipulated by a series of keys. However, the tarpon when hooked and running reminds the angler of a piano sliding down a precipitous incline and while jumping makes cavities and explosions in the water not unlike a series of pianos falling from a great height. If the reader, then, can speculate in terms of pianos that herd and pursue mullet and are themselves shaped like exaggerated herrings, he will be a very long way toward seeing what kind of thing a tarpon is. Those who appreciate nature as we find her may rest in the knowledge that no amount of modification can substitute the man-made piano for the real thing—the tarpon. Where was I?

  When her tarpon jumped, Natalie saw a spray of blood leaving the gills. This was neither the scene nor the fish she had imagined, and she felt an impulse to cut the line and let the tarpon go. Her father, John Colle, suggested that she stay with it. In all his years, he had never caught a tarpon. His father’s dream had been to catch a tarpon. He never did. And now his father’s granddaughter had a tarpon firmly hooked—a fish at least as big as she was. The tarpon, in a sense, was hanging by a thread. Her monofilament line was thirty-pound-test.

  An hour passed as Natalie dealt with the tarpon. “He fought and fought. He would surface and jump. He stayed strong the whole time. I’d huff and puff and reel and get him in close, and he’d take off again. At least ten times he did that. I thought the rod was going to break. It was totally bending over. Then he would sound, and sit there like a dead weight. Every time he did surface, he would take my line back out and just sit there.”

  John Colle had shut off the engines. Now and again, the tarpon pulled the boat. This way. That way. Several times, Natalie walked completely around its periphery “trying to keep him clear.”

  After an hour and fifteen minutes, little had changed. “Was I exhausted? No, I’m in pretty good shape. I work out a lot. I do triathlons. I got, if anything, kind of bored. You have to keep the rod tip up the whole time. I’m kind of a hyper person. My attention span isn’t real long. When he sat there, I could not reel him in. So I just sat there, too. Each time, he came up a little more slowly. He would make an arch and go down again. When he was making the arch, you could see the brilliance of his body shining off the water. I thought, This is a beautiful animal and he’s fallen into a terrible trap. He came close to the boat four times, regained energy, and went off. After an hour and a half, we missed him twice with the gaff. The third time, my father and I hoisted him into the boat together. My first tarpon. My first time, for sure. I had no plans to catch that fish.”

  She decided to go in and enter the fish “before he loses a lot of weight”—fifty miles to Dauphin Island. As Ynot reached the sound and swung into the Aloe Bay Channel, she was, as she would later describe herself, “beaming with excitement.” She was thinking, This is going to be great. Maybe I’ll set a record. Maybe as a woman angler I’ve accomplished something. It all seems worthwhile—the heat, the sun, the effort.

  Now Ynot, after waiting its turn, at last nudges the dock. A Jaycee says to Natalie, who is standing in the bow, “You have a kill permit—right?”

  “A kill permit?” she repeats.

  “A fifty-dollar tarpon kill permit. You can’t enter the fish if you don’t have one.”

  “But I didn’t know I was going to catch it—I wasn’t trying to catch it.”

  The Jaycee says he is sorry.

  “We were not aware of it.”

  The Jaycee repeats that he is sorry.

  Her great surprise is not as great as her palpable disappointment. Her triumph in vapor, she is struggling to deal with the psychological bends, and in this moment is confronted by a professor from Massachusetts saying, “Can we have your fish? We’re marine scientists. We’re going to do research.”

  She is bewildered but she gives him the tarpon. “All right,” she says slowly. “You can have him. At least it’s good for research.” The tarpon is lifted by two men and carried in a trough to a large scale. Ninety pounds. The tarpon is driven off in an A.T.V.

  Tarpon permits are a requirement of the State of Alabama. Over the years at the deep-sea rodeo, tarpon permits have not been required, because they have always been superseded by the “permit for scientific collecting” that pertained to the American Museum of Natural History. Because Gareth Nelson retired and the tournament was not sure that anyone would be here to replace him, the tarpon permit is mentioned on the competitors’ tickets this year for the first time—mentioned, as Natalie Colle sees it, “in little-bitty writing.”

  The Colles might have won prizes for most beautiful boat, most beautiful competitor, most beautiful fish, but those are not categories in this tournament, and Ynot goes up the channel into the haze. She is heading back to Pascagoula, the largest deepwater port in Mississippi, where a tugboat named Natalie is one of seven vessels in the fleet of Colle Towing—“the place with the big American flag”—where her great-great-grandfather worked, and where she works now. What Natalie Colle doesn’t know is that her tarpon’s complete and bushy structure, mounted on mahogany, is destined for a wall at the Massachusetts Museum of Natural History.

  “If we do a nice job with this fish, it’s a major exhibit piece,” Willy remarks at the dissecting table, knife in hand. “This is the largest living representative of a group that hasn’t changed much in a hundred and twenty-five million years. They are the fishlike elopomorphs, and are generally thought to be closely related to eels. Eels and tarpon have similar larvae—leptocephali—so thin they’re almost transparent. I mean big larvae, some of them like a foot long. As larvae metamorphose either into eels or into fishlike elopomorphs, they shrink. It’s counterintuitive. Bonefish and ladyfish are elopomorphs. The group also has an interesting fossil history and is probably among the most primitive of the teleosts. We study
them to get that insight.”

  In a day or two, Natalie will send her tarpon’s measurements (“I’m sixty inches, he was nine inches longer”) to J. T. Reese Taxidermy, Inc., in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which will feed the data into a computer and reproduce the tarpon in glass and fiberglass, and send it to Pascagoula. Willy, meanwhile, at the dissecting table, begins to remove the tarpon’s skin. With the knife, he is as slow and careful now as he was swift and casual in addressing the shark, because the tarpon has three thousand bones, including six sets of intermuscular bones, the tips of which touch the skin. Eventually, he holds up what appears to be a vest of chain mail. A single tarpon scale is nearly as large as a playing card, and the third of it that is not overlapped by other scales is covered with what appears to be silver plate. You can read the age of the tarpon in the rings of the scale. This one is thirteen years old. Like shad scales, tarpon scales are deciduous—lightly attached, easily removed— and almost pure bone. People collect them as souvenirs and paint seascapes on them where they are shell white, above the silver.

  The flesh looks wine red, but the red muscle is only a veneer over a white inner mass. When fish swim idly, routinely, steadily, Willy says, they are using red muscle, but when, for any reason, fish require great speed they use white muscle. The flesh of the tarpon, like the flesh of an orange, is divided into segments. In this tarpon, each segment is about half an inch wide. The intermuscular bones are ossified connective tissue between the flesh segments. The intermuscular bones are attached variously to ribs and to the vertebral column. They are so numerous that the skeleton, to a remarkable extent, will resemble the complete fish. With the filleting knife, Willy makes long slices between the intermusculars—angling with them toward the tail—and then begins scraping with the cooking spoon, driving shredded flesh along and off the bones as if he were cleaning a pitchfork.

  Detaching the skull from the bony curve that is known as the pectoral girdle is not easy without an axe, but Willy patiently succeeds, commenting as he works: “Fishes have a loose pelvic girdle, just floating, whereas the pectoral girdle is attached to the back of the skull tightly—the reverse of land creatures like us, tight in the pelvis and loose in the shoulders.”

  Now he has the tarpon’s head in his two hands and, with a little pressure, causes the mouth to open so wide that a small car could park inside it. Or so it seems. “The hyoid drops down, the top of the head comes up, then the two sides go out. What an incredible expansion! It flares the suspensorium!” Between the lower jaws is a bone called the gular, common in fossil fishes but rare in the modern world. Also evident, with steel connective wire, are Natalie Colle’s hooks—one in the urohyal bone, ventral to the gill arches, and the other in connective tissue between the urohyal and the lower jaw.

  Going into the tarpon’s swim bladder, Willy removes a thick, spongy cord that resembles lung tissue. “These fish come up to the surface and gulp air,” he comments. “It’s because of this special tissue in the swim bladder. In the Florida Keys, tarpon come up, breathe air, and eat what tourists feed them.”

  With a wire brush, he scrubs the cavity of the tarpon along the bottom of the backbone, locus of the kidneys. You could knit a wool sweater with two tarpon ribs. Not long ago, Willy was diving in the Cayman Islands, and he went into a natural tunnel in a reef. The tunnel was full of tarpon. Hundreds of tarpon. “They are not skittish,” he says. “They are so peaceful. They let you swim around them.” Much like caribou.

  Albert Reynolds, a Mobile stockbroker who is a former chairman of the rodeo, takes me out to the action in his twenty-two-foot single-engine Grady-White. Through early-morning air too thick to be haze, too thin to be fog, we go to the western tip of Dauphin Island and then run south about seven miles. Suddenly, in the cottony seascape, looms a great standing structure, more than two hundred yards long, in three parts joined by long aerial footbridges. Rising through fifty-seven feet of water and continuing on up ten stories, the Triple Rig, as the fishermen call it, is Chevron 864MO, largest of the numerous platforms that collectively produce a hundred million dollars’ worth of natural gas in this area of the Gulf each year. Broad and squarish, the central structure resembles an oil refinery, with Erector-set skeletal girders. Three pipes come up beneath it, because it is the center of three radial wells. Its highest point is a long, cranelike tilted arm, whose upper end is abloom with orange flame. A safety device, it is known on the rig as “the flare.” Signs wherever you look say “Danger Poison Gas H2S.” The tower at one end supports a three-story house, the crew’s quarters. The tower at the other end accommodates a fourth well. Under the connecting footbridges are passages of open water, where boats can go through the platform. Eight boats are fishing here. A couple are tied to the structure. Most are trolling. Like shuttles going back and forth in a loom, ours and the other trolling boats woof the Triple Rig. The oil and gas platforms of the Gulf have the same effect as artificial reefs. In a softbottomed environment unappealing to invertebrates, they offer hard surfaces for the likes of barnacles and clams, which in turn attract reef fish and transient species. Out of sight of land, out in the marine wild, one of the best places to go fishing is under the Chevron flare.

  One boat, surprisingly, is Play ’N’ Hookie. Where we are fishing earnestly for prizewinning kings, Steve McConnell has stopped off to fish for shark bait. He is fishing for bonitas to take to deeper water and drag past the noses of hammerheads. The symbiosis between oil or gas platforms and recreational fishing is personified in Steve McConnell. Half his time, he lives on a rig. He is an operator of oil rigs. Every other week, he leaves his home, in Mobile, to spend seven nights headquartered on Eugene Island 42, about fifteen miles from land, south of Morgan City, Louisiana, at the Atchafalaya Basin Sea Buoy. Frequently, he fishes from the rig, catching king mackerel, red snapper, dolphin. Employed by Sonat—a company that sells its crude oil to Shell, Chevron, Mobil, and Exxon—he runs seven other rigs, too, across four hundred miles of the Gulf. Every day, he flies from rig to rig in a helicopter, and fishing rods are always aboard.

  If you float a wooden plank, fish will be attracted to its shadow and shelter. You can fish productively near the plank. If you don’t have a plank, try an oil rig. The public-relations benefits of rig fishing have not been lost on the energy companies. Chevron, in fact, has a “Rigs to Reefs” program, in which rigs that have ceased to produce oil or gas are disengaged from the seabed, toppled onto their sides, and, in many cases, dragged to appropriate fishing sites.

  Albert Reynolds has three lines out, thirty-pound-test, with stainless-steel leaders, and fishes them close to the boat, scarcely ten yards back. He outlines the thought processes that go on in king mackerels’ brains: “Near the boat, they think they’ve got to get it and run. Way back there, they look it over and think something’s wrong and go away.” As baitfish he is using blue runners—foot-long jacks locally known as hard tails. Gentle-mannered and quietly bemused, now in his upper sixties, Albert Reynolds has been fishing the rodeo forty-five years. He once took a second prize with a speckled trout but “can’t remember when.” His boat is Shazam and his wife calls him Captain Marvel. He has been successful enough as an investor for this to qualify as a reference to his work. “You catch the right fish, you can make a lot of money,” he remarks about the rodeo. It may not be the All-American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs, and it’s not the P.G.A. championship, but as fishing tournaments go it has attractive money. There’s a prize worth thirty thousand dollars for most overall points, a five-thousand-dollar jackpot for the biggest king, and another hundred and twenty thousand dollars spread through the various categories. Rocky Marciano fished here.

  Something hits a hard tail, and a reel zings. It is my turn to pick it up. The reel is rigged for right-handers, so I try turning it upside down, which makes Reynolds chuckle. It also doesn’t work, and I fish right-handed. The thing on the line feels heavy. It is active in the water column. It is stronger than a bluefish. It feels like a big roe shad. As I
hold up the rod tip toward the Chevron rig and the billowing flame, I pass the time, mentally, at an A.T.M. in New Jersey depositing the five thousand dollars. Nice fish. You can tell. You can feel it. Baby grand. And after eight or ten minutes it is out of the water and into Shazam. King mackerel. Forty-six inches long. Nineteen pounds, ten ounces.

  I remember Willy Bemis saying about kings, “They’re aggressive, torpedo-shape, fantastic animals. They’re running very strong right now, fifty-pound size.” I have at least caught dinner.

  All afternoon at the judges’ stand, fishermen arrive with long insulated white vinyl bags, like bulky ski bags zippered up for travel. These are king bags, so called, and the zippers open to reveal torpedo-shaped fantastic animals: a fifty-four-pound king, a sixty-one-pound king, a sixty-three-pound king. Robert Shipp, one of the judges, says, “The big kings are more than a hundred miles offshore. Fast boats go sixty miles an hour to get them. It is not uncommon for them to run a hundred and fifty miles to weigh ’em in.”

  Shipp, an ichthyologist at the University of South Alabama, is the author of “Dr. Bob Shipp’s Guide to Fishes of the Gulf of Mexico.” Long before he became an official of the tournament, he came to Dauphin Island every summer to teach his marine-vertebrate course at the academic sea lab. The immemorial judge of the tournament was Roy Martin, mayor of Panama City Beach, Florida. Over time, as prizes grew larger, and decisions with them, the mayoralty of Panama City Beach became an insufficient qualification for the rodeo bench. There came a great question: Is this a very small blue marlin or a very large white marlin? Roy Martin took the fifth. The tournament’s underwriting bankers asked Bob Shipp if he would become assistant judge. Sure, he said. A student of the population biology of fishes, he was interested in the tournament for the fish. A question even more controversial soon arose as well: Is this a young king mackerel or a Spanish mackerel? Spanish mackerel have spots, and so do young kings, which resemble mature Spanish mackerel. This was all sort of academic until the jackpot prize for the biggest Spanish mackerel approached and then surpassed a couple of thousand dollars. Shipp—gray hair, equanimous mustache, handsome as a tenor—was addressed one day by a fisherman he describes as having “one or two teeth, breath of beer and garlic, and bloodshot eyes.” The fisherman laid a fish before Shipp and said, “That beauty is a Spanish mackerel.”