For the last eight years he has come to Homosassa every May, bringing up his own boat and often his own guide from the Keys where he lives, to fish for thirty days. If that fishing is good (last year he jumped some two hundred fish), it is anything but easy. Generally, Pate spends twelve hours a day on the water, more than eleven of them on his feet, looking for fish, casting precisely to them when he finds them, with tackle that includes, as its weakest link, a single strand of sixteen-pound-test monofilament line. A few years ago on such tackle he fought one tarpon for twelve and a half hours from seven-thirty in the morning until eight at night, without sitting down or eating, until the boat ran out of gas and he lost the fish. When he is not on the water at Homosassa, he is back at the house he rents on the river, studying tide charts, tying leaders, working on his tackle. He is rarely up beyond ten o’clock at night. He eats very carefully and takes over fifty vitamin pills a day, and at fifty-one he is still in perfect shape. Fishing on his level, like the upper reaches of any sport, is a matter of constant training, skill, and the putting together of dozens of little things properly. In this May of 1982, Billy Pate is in Homosassa to reclaim his world record, to catch a tarpon of more than 186½ pounds on a fly rod. He is serious about doing that, and he is leaving absolutely nothing to chance.
If you have done any fishing at all, it is almost impossible not to wonder what the fish go through in fighting a man, particularly a man as quick and deadly at beating them as Billy Pate. In height (six foot two inches), girth at the widest point (forty-six inches), and weight (192 pounds), I am very close to the size of the tarpon Pate was looking for in Homosassa; so to learn something of what such a fish might endure at his hands, I hooked his fly into my scuba regulator and fought him underwater as hard as I could for as long as I could.
He could have either released or killed me at the end of eleven minutes. But of course I am not a tarpon.
Of the roughly thirty thousand species of fish that inhabit the earth, the tarpon is arguably, pound for pound, the gamest. If gameness is the measurement we use to grade the style and endurance that an animal brings to the act of trying to save its own life, then few animals score as high as the tarpon. Their runs will eat three hundred yards of line before you can pull out and light a cigarette; their twisting, head-rattling jumps sometimes carry them twelve or even fifteen feet above the water, and occasionally into boats where they have killed or maimed fishermen. Big tarpon can kill you with a heart attack, too, by thrilling or tiring you into one, and they never, ever, lay over and quit.
In Homosassa, photographer Armando Jenik and I, in scuba gear, swam with the eighty-pound fish that Pate released for twenty minutes of the thirty minutes he fought it. Tarpon are school fish, and perhaps for that reason this one didn’t seem to mind our being there alongside it during its struggle: in full fight it even allowed me to rub my hands down its hard, trout-slick, silver-green sides. There in the water with a hooked tarpon you see how the fish uses its caudal fin in perfect concert with its broad, blunt tail to jump; you feel the sprung energy of its burrowing runs, and its silver quickness, and the fury with which it constantly shakes its head against the intrusion of the hook. And there is no way in this world you cannot admire the tarpon’s strength, speed, and endurance, or be moved and more than a little awed by the all-out prodigality of its effort and its absolute refusal to quit fighting until is is either gaffed or released.
But for all his gameness, that fish, at under a hundred pounds, was no match for Billy Pate at Pate’s own game, a game he owns.
The next fish he hooked, on the following day, was. The instant Pate saw the big female tarpon turn out of a daisy chain and take his fly, he knew it could be the one he was here for—his record returning to him, or even the two-hundred-pound dream fish, the one he had fished for almost three hundred days over eight years at this place to catch. Hooked, the tarpon made a long, dignified run west, after its school, without jumping once. As his guide, Rick Doyle, prepared to follow, Pate held his rod high, his face thoughtful, watching the line disappear off his reel in the direction of Mexico. His friend Patty Blair helped him into his fighting belt and glove, and then he and the fish settled in seriously to fight.
Despite all of Pate’s skill and readiness, the odds were in the tarpon’s favor. What makes sportfishing a sport is allowing the fish an edge. The bigger that edge, within reasonable limits, and the more interestingly the contest is contrived to favor the creature that didn’t ask for it, the more challenging the fishing. Extreme sportfishing is a fascination with what is so challenging as to be nearly impossible, such as boating a tarpon of nearly two hundred pounds on a fly rod with a sixteen-pound-test leader. At least nine out of ten such fish, hooked on such tackle, are lost, in any of a dozen possible ways. But this one was not. The hook was well seated in its bony mouth; the leader did not fray; all of Pate’s ornate, carefully tied knots held; the drag on his reel didn’t slip or freeze; another tarpon didn’t swim across the line or a rock cut it. And after three and a half hours Rick Doyle—using a special pair of nonslip gloves, his feet hooked under a special toe-rail built into Pate’s boat—crashed a special spaceship-metal gaff into the back of the giant female tarpon, miraculously kept himself from being pulled overboard, and pinned the fish to the boat. All the little things had come together perfectly, and Billy Pate had what he had come here for—the new world record.
Reduced to strung-up meat on the dock, that record weighed 188 pounds. Looking at it hanging next to Billy while various photographers took pictures, and seeing the two of them framed like that—like a photograph of an accident, an odd collision between instinct and ambition—made me hope that fifteen-or sixteen-year-old fish, which, very likely, had been coming to Homosassa for its own good reasons for more years even than Pate, caught out of a daisy chain, had finished what it came there for, too.
THE BIG GAME
RENDERED INATTENTIVE BY VODKA AND VALIUM, A LEGENDARY big-game fishing captain was roped to his bunk one evening by playful cohorts aboard a mothership called the Petaj, anchored along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The cohorts completely immobilized the captain except for his right foot, the big toe of which was connected by a string to the ship’s bell, so that when he woke and began to struggle, he would find himself paralyzed to the clanging of the “red meanies.”
Later this captain took revenge on one of the men who had Gullivered him, another legendary big-game fishing skipper with the nickname of Brazaka, a bearded rouser whose client in those days for much of the black marlin season was the actor Lee Marvin. The offended captain commandeered a helicopter on a hot, calm day, loaded it with dozens of eggs and gallon jugs of ketchup, and flew up the reef, looking for Brazaka’s boat. When he found it, he proceeded to bomb it from the hovering chopper. With ketchup and yolk running down his hatches, Brazaka abandoned the tower for the cabin and shouted for his client to join him there. But Lee Marvin, emboldened perhaps by liquid refreshment, stayed on the tower, taking grave hits and waving his fists at the chopper.
“I can’t come down, goddammit,” he bellowed to Brazaka. “I’m the hero!”
In search of giant black marlin, I lived aboard the Petaj myself for ten of the Good Old Days of the 1970s and 1980s, and while I cannot personally guarantee the veracity of the story above, I can say it neatly fits the tenor of that time. And quite a time it was. Hunting marlin by day on a gameboat called the Hooker, rock music on the tape player, rum and Coke in hand, a bit of white powder energy enhancer in the galley should it be needed, a couple of eponymous young women from Cairns aboard for making sandwiches, etc. Then around dark you would run in from fishing to the mothership, anchored somewhere along the reef, for an evening of conviviality (drinking games, perhaps more sandwich-making by the young women . . .) and refined competition (the nightly “Petaj Olympics” consisted of arm-wrestling, holding a chair upright by one of its legs until it dropped, and racing upside down like howler monkeys along the ceiling framework of the boat�
��s main cabin).
It was a hearty and durable group of immoderates living this fish-till-you-puke life on the Petaj: boat manufacturer and international angling’s enfant terrible Tim Choate; Ronny Hamlin, the infamous “Captain Hook,” about whom swirled stories of legendary naughtiness; brash Peter Wright, nicknamed the Lauderdale Mouth, who was fast becoming one of the best big-game fishing captains of all times; and Jody Bright, then one of Wright’s deckies, a young, wisecracking, indefatigably cheerful Texan.
I was there as part of a television film crew making a segment for The American Sportsman. My first morning on Peter Wright’s boat, I took a seat in the fighting chair and popped a Foster’s. Bright leaned against the transom, watching the camera and sound men ferry their gear on board from the Petaj for the day’s shoot.
“So what do you do in this ratfuck?” he asked me.
“I’m part of the talent. I get to fish.”
“Uh-huh. How do you get to be that?”
“Be a rock star or a movie actor or politician or something.”
“So what are you?”
“None of those things.”
“So you’d be sort of talentless talent, huh?” said Bright.
“You could say that.”
Another pause. “How do I apply for that job?” he asked.
These were lads with tattoos of billfish on their souls—Peck’s Bad Boys of angling who neglected to waste time on anything much but fishing and partying or to discriminate between the two, having a nonstop wet dream of fun in a faraway place catching huge fish to loud music with a buzz on. I felt I was among friends.
I also loved the fishing. I had done some blue-water fishing from the time I was ten years old, but on that first trip to Australia I was really a light-tackle angler—a fly-rodder mostly, of high values and refined sensibilities—with no idea of all the fun I had been missing. I had no idea of how a thousand-pound black marlin, rising as suddenly and menacingly as a revolution behind a teaser twenty feet off the stern (with its stubby, wicked, baseball-bat-thick bill slashing the air, its great brown and indigo shoulders pushing a wake, its infinitely wild and unconcerned eye as wide as a butter plate), can cause a grown man to drop whatever he is holding, experience incontinence, even cry out aloud for his mama. I didn’t know about how a marlin chasing a bait will “light up” and glow in furious neon throbs, or about the miracle of seeing a half-ton fish clear the water and seem to be push-pinned onto the air like Michael Jordan, and then the soul-stirring crash of water when it lands. I didn’t know about the thrilling physicality of putting the beef of your legs and back and arms into a fleeing weight four or fives times your own; or about the precision and delicacy of touch—a talent rather than an expertise—required to fight big fish well; or about the seamless synergy of effort between an angler, a captain, and a wireman who are all good and have fished together often; or even about how absorbed you can become during the waits between bites in watching the baits, the birds, the wind-lines on the sea, with the torporous but dedicated attention of a polar bear waiting by a seal hole, knowing any second all hell can break loose.
I fell in love with all that on my first big-game fishing trip to Australia, and also with the nomadic nature of the sport: the footloose adventurousness of following fish and seasons across the blue surfaces of the last true wilderness left on earth in quest of the 1,561-pound black, the double-grander blue, hearing every Jimmy Buffett song a thousand times, redemption . . . There didn’t seem to be any consensus on the exact whereabouts of the destination, only on the unquestionable importance of the journey. And again, I felt I was among friends.
I remained among them for the next dozen years or so (as I do today, though less strenuously), and during that time I went in search of big-game fish along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States; in Mexico, Hawaii, Canada, and the Caribbean; in South and Central America, New Zealand, East Africa, Australia again twice; and the islands of the South Pacific. I don’t list all this sporting restlessness in order to boast. No doubt I could have built a more productive, wiser life by staying home, sticking to any number of knittings and fishing bass ponds on the weekends. But big-game fishermen do not often lean toward moderation. Once hooked, it can come to seem that everything else can be put off. On hundreds of nights I have gone to sleep in faraway ports, still watching silvery bait trails on the walls of my closed eyes, having forgotten to call home. Blue-water anglers have always stared at the sea more than they need to—maybe because in its unexamined vastness and wildness it seems singularly capable of delivering something at any moment that there are no words amazed enough for: to bust a move that no one has ever seen before.
Pearl (Zane) Grey went to the South Pacific’s Tuamotu Islands in 1927 because of reports he had heard in Tahiti of huge yellowish marlin that lived in the waters there, marlin so ferocious that they attacked native canoes with bills protruding from their lower rather than their upper jaws. He never found such a fish (neither has anyone else), but it was a quest worth angling for. Grey was the most renowned big-game fisherman of his generation. And with the books and stories he wrote about his fishing adventures around the world, he did more to popularize and romanticize the sport than anyone of any generation, including his near contemporary and fellow novelist Ernest Hemingway.
While Grey was not the writer Hemingway was, Hemingway was not nearly the angler-adventurer that Grey was. There was absolutely no posturing in Grey’s motives for fishing and adventuring—he did both as simply and intently as a farmboy putting a cane pole over his shoulder, hiking off to every pond within walking distance, and fishing in them until dark, day after day, not for some new element of a persona, but for the biggest things that lived in the ponds.
Grey loved fishing for big fish as much as any man who ever lived, and he personified the restless, dreaming spirit that is at the heart of big-game fishing and that gives it more in common with high-altitude mountaineering than with other kinds of fishing. At a time when just getting to those places was a major undertaking, he fished in California and the Keys, Nova Scotia, Mexico, Panama, New Zealand, Australia, and all over French Polynesia. He caught swordfish, giant bluefin tuna, sailfish, blue, black, and striped marlin, mako, and thresher shark—more of the major big-game species by far than any angler of his time. On his third trip to Tahiti he caught a 1,040-pound Pacific blue marlin, the first fish of over a thousand pounds ever taken on rod and reel. No one caught another “grander” for twenty-two years.
In 1992, Jody Bright—by then a world-traveling big-game fishing captain—and I and a small group of stalwarts went to the Tuamotus ourselves, also questing. Jody was looking for Big Mama, a Pacific blue marlin larger than the world-record 1,376-pound female caught off of Kona, Hawaii, by skipper Bobby Brown’s boat on a day when Jody was supposed to be Brown’s wireman but jumped onto another boat to help out a friend. For the past few years Bright had been studying commercial fishing catch reports from Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Australian, Indonesian, and U.S. long-liners. Those reports break down the Pacific Ocean into five-degree latitude boxes and report the number of hooks being fished in each box, the number of vessels fishing them, and the monthly catches there by species. By dividing the number of blue marlin caught into the overall monthly weight of the catch, Bright was able to identify the average size of the fish concentrated in particular areas for particular months. Amazingly, no sport fisherman had ever done this before.
What he found was that the largest concentration of big female blue marlin in the Pacific occurred in the Tuamotus during two months of the southern hemisphere spring. Then, poring over nautical charts of the area, he found shallow markings next to deep water, and by drawing a line between those markings, like connecting the dots, he discovered the outline of a bank.
It was the exact place where Big Mama might live, he told me over the phone—maybe part of the undiscovered breeding grounds for the Pacific blue marlin. And where was this unnamed bank, exactly? Somewhere in
the Tuamotu Archipelago, was all Jody would say. But that was enough. My own quest was less ambitious than his or Grey’s. Though I had paid in thirty-something years of dues to marlin fishing, I had never caught a Pacific blue, or any marlin over five hundred pounds; I wanted nothing more from the Tuamotus than to put those two together.
On the forty-seven-foot Buddy Davis gameboat we had had brought down from the Society Island of Tahaa, we did a few days of warm-up fishing around Rangiroa, the most populated island of the Tuamotus, in water that no more than three or four boats had fished in the sixty-five years since Grey had been there looking for his yellowish marlin with the underslung bill. Jody was the captain; I was the angler; David Beaudet, whom Jody had brought over from Kona, was the wireman.
Though some captains will tell you they can put a marlin in the boat with a corpse in the chair if the corpse can reel, the beauty and thrill of big-game fishing resides in the teamwork between captain, wireman, and angler. The bigger the fish, the more important that teamwork becomes. The angler hooks and fights the fish, adjusting the drag and his own labor to react to whatever the fish is doing, to keep it off balance and turn its head as often as possible. The captain anticipates his angler and uses the boat and the sea conditions to help him. The wireman keeps the angler facing the fish by turning the fighting chair, advises him on drag or reel gearing the way a caddy advises a golfer on clubs, and then wires the fish when it is ready. (This last is one of the diciest duties on earth: in big-game fishing you are allowed up to thirty feet of wire leader, which is connected to your line at one end by a swivel and to your bait or lure at the other end; an angler can fight a fish up to the boat with a rod only so far as the swivel, and it then becomes the wireman’s unenviable job to bring the fish the rest of the way in for gaffing or release by wrapping one hand in front of another around a thirty-foot piece of galvanized wire that breaks at about four hundred pounds of pressure, and hauling the fish into the transom.)
The Next Valley Over Page 8
