On the first day, I fished like a donkey, managing to blow my first two strikes. On the second, I tried to set the hook by using the rod as instructed, yanking the line with my left hand. The sail threw the hook on the second jump. But I was getting there; for the first time, I sensed that my learning curve was improving. Meanwhile, my friend Gerry Krovatin, a young lawyer from New Jersey (who had been wary of coming with us because he was the least experienced fisherman in the group), took his turn, struck his first fish and boated it a half hour later.
The next morning, we had been enjoying two hours of leisurely talk on the boat when a big fish came up on the rigs very quickly. Once again there was an explosion of action and everyone ran to a station to handle the teasers while I prepared to cast. I tried to be cool and not to panic, to remember the requisite technique. The captain yanked the teaser out and the fish switched to my fly, took it, turned sideways and started to run. I hammered the line to set the hook so hard with my left hand—I had forgotten to wear a glove—that it cut my skin very deeply in two places. But I nailed the fish and the hook went in; then, as the fish made its first ferocious run, I slammed back on the rod to drive the hook in deeper. For the first time I felt sure I had done everything right. The fish ran about 150 yards and then it jumped.
The sail is a majestic fish. There is something both thrilling and terrifying about the power of that first run; skilled technicians have spent years trying to develop a reel that will not burn with the heat caused by a speeding fish. For the novice, it is a brand-new world. The first run is an introduction, both thrilling and terrifying, to a great fish. The angler feels the shrinkage of his own power and mastery even as he feels the quantum increase in the power of the fish.
It ran and then it soared, a jump that was about as definitive a statement on the desire for freedom as I have ever seen. It flashed silver in the sun, shaking wildly, and then it jumped again. I held my breath, but this time the hook held. There was yet another run and a series of jumps, all of them equally regal. I was torn by the combination of my awe at what the fish was doing and my certainty that somehow the hook would be thrown. For all fishermen there are special moments, and for me there are these: the first legal-size bass I caught in Highland Lake, with my father smiling approvingly; the nineteen-pound bluefish I once took off Nantucket with six-pound tackle; the first bluefish my daughter caught on her own; and finally this moment, a good-sized sailfish solidly hooked on a fly rod, breaking the surface again and again.
The fish jumped, I was told later, eight times. The fight lasted about thirty minutes and would have been an hour if the captain hadn’t used the boat to close in. The fish, Captain Chavarria said as we released it, weighed about ninety pounds. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. My arms were tired as they never had been from any other kind of fishing. My left hand bled badly. It was a glorious moment.
In a way, it was not that much about skill (I lost the next two fish I hooked, both after long runs and several jumps). It was more about will and determination, the willingness to try something late in my late life even though I might fail at first. It was also about the preference of catching one sailfish on a fly rod instead of six or seven or eight of them on a heavier trolling rig. I had been right in trusting my instincts and sensing that this sport, which put so slight a rod against so powerful a fish, would touch something deep in me that had been waiting there all those years.
WHY I FISH
From Town & Country, April 2000
We had gone out early to catch the live bait, our boats hitting the water by 6:30 A.M. We spent the first twenty-five minutes catching the bait, casting for small fish on the surface, stockpiling them, so to speak, and keeping them alive in small tanks on the boat in order to use them as bait for the larger fish. Catching the bait is great fun in itself, with a feeding frenzy on the surface, as the skipjack and bonito corral tiny minnows and drive them to the surface of the water, and the birds swirl around them overhead. We use the birds as a marker to find the skipjack and bonito we will need for bait. In this case the fish that are the hunters will be caught and immediately used for bait for the giant fish we now seek. On this particular morning it took only about twenty minutes to load up with bait. This was the second day of our fishing trip on the Pacific coast of Panama, and the first day had not gone all that well for me: the good news was that I had caught one sailfish; the bad news was that a relatively small yellowfin tuna, a brute of a fish, had smashed the spinning rod I had just bought for this trip—a rod that, compared to the ones I used fishing off Nantucket, had seemed much too heavy when I bought it but had lasted for only one fish. That did not bother me too much—what I really wanted on this trip was my first marlin, and if a small tuna could smash the new rod, I had cause to fear what a giant marlin might do. Thus, I gladly switched over to the rods supplied by the lodge.
It was a clear, beautiful day: by early morning the sun was out, the sunscreen was being slathered on, and we had a brilliant backdrop as we worked about a mile or so off the Panama shoreline. There is a sense, on a day like this, of simplifying everything in your life. I have fished all my life. My father shared his love of it with me when I was a little boy; he died when I was young, and it remains one of the rare things we were able to do together. There were special days in the period when we lived in Winsted, Connecticut, when we would fish Twin Lakes, fifteen miles away, instead of Highland Lake, the local lake, which were particularly treasured. Twin Lakes not only meant far better fishing, it meant that my brother and I could catch fish like grown-ups; that is, it meant that we could use live bait (minnows) instead of worms. That love of being on the water has always remained with me: the one way I know that I can leave behind the rest of the baggage of my life. I think of it as being a form of therapy. It is on the water where I am most serene, and I am a fervent believer in the ancient fisherman’s motto, “Allah does not subtract from the allotted time of man the hours spent fishing.” Because of that, I have over the last six or seven years tended to make one trip each winter to a fishing resort like this, usually in the Caribbean, sometimes in South America, usually accompanied by four or five friends. We tend to be fishing connected; that is, we have all fished together back in the States—usually in Nantucket, where I have a home—and more often than not of an age (now in our 60s), although we have in the last year or two tried to bring in some younger friends. Though fishing is at the core of the trip, and we all fish hard, it is also true that these trips are the only all-male things that any of us do. None of us belongs to an all-male social club, and none goes to an all-male poker night. So there is something old-fashioned about it, and the conversation, particularly for men who are in general loath to reveal their inner feelings, is often surprisingly intimate, particularly as the week progresses, and we become increasingly candid with each other. My wife tells me that this is the male version of what she and her friends do every year when they go off to a spa. Certainly these trips are more about friendship than they are about catching giant fish. We have done this in a number of places: fished for peacock bass in Venezuela, for sailfish on a fly rod on one coast of Costa Rica and tarpon on light spinning tackle on its other coast, and, of course, for bonefish in the Bahamas. This is our second time in Panama.
On this, the second day, we had been fishing for only about forty minutes when the strike came. We fish two to a boat, and we rotate turns, trying to be as fair as possible as to what constitutes an at-bat, so that no one gets shortchanged. On this day I am fishing with Pete Van Horn, a Texas businessman, and I am up when the fish moves on the bait. “Marlin,” said the captain as the fish approached, and he whispered the word, as if not daring to speak too loudly for fear of driving the fish away. When a marlin strikes, you are supposed to let it take the bait and run until the fish turns the bait in its mouth. Only then do you try to nail the fish. So I watched nervously as the fish ran with the line, endlessly, it seemed to me at first, and then finally on the appointed signal from the captain I dr
ove the rod hard and set the hook.
Because it was my first marlin strike, I became a little boy once again as the fish made its first casual run with my bait, my heart beating too fast, the doubts about setting the hook properly all too real. I grew up fishing every day of the summer as a boy on a fished-out lake in northwestern Connecticut, always optimistic, but catching, if I was lucky, a couple of legal-size bass a season; then, in my mid-30s, I bought a house in Nantucket and became reasonably adept at light-tackle saltwater fishing just offshore. In addition I’ve done some trout fishing in the Rocky Mountain area, but I grade myself as a competent, if somewhat marginal, fly-fisherman. For most of my life big-time deep-sea fishing was, if not beyond my reach, certainly beyond my imagination. But in recent years that has begun to change, because of the democratization of travel, the drop in the cost of long-distance travel, and the transformation of once private homes into hospitable commercial fishing lodges.
I had caught sailfish in the past, and properly encouraged by the size, strength and beauty of the fish, I even went out and bought a fly rod strong enough to cast for a sail (though in truth it is more like trolling than fly-casting), and a few years ago I caught my first sail on the fly rod. But I had never caught a marlin, nor had anyone else in a boat in which I had fished, and the excitement of it, why it seemed to move other fishermen so much, had so far eluded me. Yes, I had thought, they are bigger than sails, but I still wondered what all the fuss was about.
On this day I found out. Our first visit to Pinas Bay had been several years ago, and it had not gone all that well. We had liked the lodge very much, but the fishing that year was quite poor. The people who ran the lodge had been very apologetic; our fishing had been way below normal because of that year’s El Niño, a major change in the normal weather that had thrown the temperature of the water off significantly and driven most of the big fish away. Pinas Bay, otherwise famous as a game-fish base camp, we were assured, was undergoing the worst fishing it had offered in several years. It did strike me that I had heard variations on this theme before: if only you had been here last week, or, for that matter, next week, the fishing was/would be far better.
But, as I say, we had liked the lodge very much and were delighted to be back. It is simple and clean, carved out of a mountain-side in a gorgeous spot on the west coast of Panama. It was built in 1961 by a Texas oilman named Ray Smith, who used it for a time as his personal preserve; for the last thirty-four years it has been open for sportfishermen. A flight of about an hour in a chartered Twin Otter from Panama City gets you there. It is located in a beautiful setting, and the view is always spectacular as you work your way up and down the Panamanian coast. Of the different resorts I have stayed at as a fisherman, Pinas Bay strikes me as being by far the best, extremely well run, and the courtesies, befitting the simplicity of the location, are greater than the amenities. The people who work there are all very nice, and the food is quite good to very good, particularly, it seems to me, if you order the fish every night (grilled fresh yellowfin tuna, grilled fresh mahimahi, grilled fresh snapper). As my fishing partner Dick Steadman says, everything they have control over, they do very well. The one thing they do not have control over, of course, is the quality of the fishing.
That certainly wasn’t a problem on the morning I learned what the fuss about marlin was all about. The fish was flerce, unspeakably strong, and with a mind of its own. It began as a match of strength, his against mine. To my strength, of course, we added the skill of the captain, who readily maneuvered the boat to take up the line every time the fish had made one of its long and powerful runs. When I was a boy of about eight, the first lesson of fishing taught me by my Uncle Moe (who was the most serious fisherman in our family; indeed it was said to be the only thing he was serious about) was never to horse a bass; that is, never try to overpower a fish. With a marlin that rule remains true, but also absolutely unnecessary—there is no possible way to overpower a fish of that size and strength.
And so the battle began, my job, it seemed to me early on, to survive, and to keep reminding myself that all of this was a good deal harder on the fish than it was on me. It was already hot by that hour, and within a few minutes I was soaked with sweat. Although I am in very good shape and my arms and hands and wrists are all strong from working out and rowing a single scull, some twenty-five minutes into the fight I felt a weariness in my arms, and for a brief moment I wondered whether it was worth it all; then I thought of all those fishermen whom I had heard about who had battled giant marlins for five and six hours and more, and I wondered whether in fact after a certain point it was fun.
What was fun, of course, was watching the marlin, which began to jump and to make dazzling leaps in the air, sometimes jumping straight up, and sometimes hurtling through the air like some kind of low-flying luminescent projectile. The marlin is a simply beautiful fish, the beauty, silver and dark blue, shown to maximum advantage by these spectacular leaps. If I had been moved at first by the sheer strength and power of the fish, now I was moved by its innate beauty, and by the pleasure of watching the struggle of a fish that large, that strong and that handsome. It was the first time in my life that I had been in absolute awe of a fish that I was hooked into.
And that, I think, finally made it fun, the beauty and the explosiveness of the fish, and the respect that I immediately came to have for its lionhearted courage: Van Horn told me later that the fish jumped some eight times, and on every jump, he added, I let out a huge roar, cheering, it seemed, as much for the fish as for myself. So it was that the battle went on for some forty-five minutes. The fish, our captain said, probably weighed about 350 pounds, not that big on the Richter Scale of marlin, but quite big enough for me. In the end we brought it in, close enough for the mate to touch the leader, which made it an official catch, and then we cut the leader, and the fish seemed to give a lazy half-roll, and then swam away (the hook, we were assured, would eventually come out of the marlin’s mouth on its own), leaving me in the boat, a man who had always heard about how marlin were somehow different, and was now a believer.
HOMAGE TO PATAGONIA
From ESPN.com, February 7, 2001
It had taken any number of phone calls to find out that the one place in Rio Grande, Argentina, which was showing the Super Bowl was the Posada De Las Sauzes, or as the gringos might say, the House of the Willowbrushes. There we could see the Gigantes of New York play the Cuervos of Baltimore.
Patagonia is home to both awe-inspiring scenery and outstanding trout fishing. For on the sports world’s most sacred day, the Sunday of all Sundays, my friends and I were fishing for brown trout in what is virtually the end of the earth, the southern part of Patagonia, by dint of a trip scheduled nearly a year in advance. That is a trip agreed on well before the most unlikely of all scenarios had become reality: My beloved Gigantes, 7-9 last season, and a somewhat sloppy 7-4 in mid-November, had gone on a surprising roll, getting better by the week, ending up in the Super Bowl, their chances greatly enhanced by an amazing dissection of the Vikingos of Minnesota.
My friend Dick Steadman, who was also a serious Gigante fan (and a former football star himself, having played center for Punahou High School in Honolulu in the late 1940s at roughly 150 pounds), and I thus found ourselves caught between two formidable athletic pulls, the desire to catch some of the largest and most formidable fresh water fish imaginable, and the love of and commitment to a favored football team making a most unlikely championship appearance. For that tiny minority of my fellow Americans who take football more seriously than fly fishing, I should point out that fishing for brown trout in Patagonia is a kind of championship in itself, a rare opportunity, or perhaps more accurately a rare privilege.
The Argentinean Rio Grande is exceptionally difficult to get to, requiring almost two days of travel; the conditions under which you fish are extremely demanding, winds up to 40 miles an hour; and the trout themselves, which are sea-going, but which come back to fresh water to spawn, are well
worth the immense effort, and can easily run up to 35 pounds.
Thus the choice between fishing and watching the Super Bowl was between one kind of madness in irreconcilable conflict with another kind of madness. When the shocking contradiction of our schedule finally manifested itself, Steadman and I had flagged our group leader, an ebullient friend of mine named Richard Berlin, to explain the gravity of our problem. Berlin, who lives in the Boston area, was not personally affected by the crisis—his Patriotas had disappeared from serious contention on about the fourth week.
Still, Berlin is a good pal, and he knows obsessive behavior when he sees it (after all, he owns some 20 fly rods), and he phoned Pat Pendergast of the Fly Shop, which was midwifing our trip, and explained the dilemma carefully. He had these two good friends, he said, both of them almost normal under most conditions, who were now caught between their conflicting obsessions. They wanted, in his jaundiced view, to do the unthinkable, to interrupt, however briefly, some of the greatest fishing on the continent in order to see a football game.
The trout in the Argentinian Rio Grande can run up to 35 pounds. Pendergast, a man who clearly had his priorities much better ordered—there was trout fishing and then there was everything else in life—listened patiently, as if to the counsellor for two madmen who was loyally carrying out the most undesirable of instructions, and then said he would do what he could to find some place where the game was on. Then he had paused and added his own view of things.
“Richard,” he said, “I think you’re fishing with the wrong kind of people.”
That might or might not be true. But there we were at last, a mere 6,000 miles south of Tampa, hoping that somehow a television set which carried the game could be found. Even then there was, of course, a serious conflict in our schedules: the visitors to the Maria Behety Lodge fish twice a day, from roughly 8:30 to 12:30 in the morning, and then again from about 6:30 to 10 P.M. at night. The game itself was to start at 8:30 Rio Grande time. The trip from the fishing pool to town was about an hour, which meant that we would barely have time to start fishing before we left the river for the game.
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