Denizens of the Deep
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Denizens of the Deep
true tales of deep-sea fishing
Books by Philip Wylie
Heavy Laden
Babes and Sucklings
Gladiator
The Murderer Invisible
Footprint of Cinderella
The Savage Gentleman
Finnley Wren: His Notions and Opinions
As They Reveled
Too Much of Everything
An April Afternoon
The Big Ones Get Away
Salt Water Daffy
The Other Horseman
Generation of Vipers
Corpses at Indian Stones
Fish and Tin Fish
Night Unto Night
An Essay on Morals
Crunch and Des: Stories of Florida Fishing
Opus 21
The Disappearance
Three to Be Read
Denizens of the Deep
and by Philip Wylie and
William W. Muir
The Army Way
Denizens of the Deep copyright © 1947, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1953 by Philip Wylie. Copyright renewed 1974, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981 by Frederica Wylie and Karen Prior.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Jane Sheppard
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-248-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-890-2
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword: an outdoor writer’s outdoor writer
Preface: some thoughts on fishing
Some fish
That misunderstood fish—the shark
There are no average sailfish
The admirable barracuda
A marlin is a fighting fish
Marine middleweights
Some fishermen and fishing spots
Miami invites you to fish
The compleat Florida angler
Nomads of the sea
The IGFA
Some fishing
Listen to this tale of woe
What makes a great days fishing?
this book is fondly dedicated
to two of the finest friends I have
who happen to be
two of the world’s finest anglers,
Helen and Mike Lerner
Foreword: an outdoor writer’s outdoor writer
If you know of Philip Wylie only as an old-time fishing writer, there’s much to learn. He was emphatically not an “outdoor writer,” in the sense that I, for example, am an outdoor writer. He was an actual, legitimate writer, who happened sometimes to write about fishing, simply because he loved it so.
His output included hundreds of mainstream articles, novels, serials, short stories, syndicated newspaper columns, and lots more. He also wrote screenplays while in Hollywood, was an editor for Farrar & Rinehart, served on the Dade County, Florida Defense Council, was a director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory, and at one time was an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy, which led to the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, according to his bio in Wikipedia.
But you would never know any of this from reading his fishing stories—he simply sets his angling life aside from all the rest, and writes like one of the guys.
Writers are an envious bunch. One of the ways I can tell if a thing is well written is that somewhere in the midst of it I will find myself thinking, “Damn, I wish I had written that!” With Philip Wylie, there are those moments on pretty much every page. He is an outdoor writer’s outdoor writer, a guy with wit, broad experience, and an obvious bone-deep knowledge of the fishing he writes about, and yet there’s none of the elitist tone in his writing that seemed to creep into a lot of stuff written in his era, particularly among big game fishermen. He writes like a guy whom you might have shared a boat and a beer with last week. Wylie’s stories were written, however, in the days when you could book an offshore charter boat and skipper for sixty-five to a hundred dollars per day, according to Wylie, who found it excruciatingly expensive.
Wylie is loaded with smart-aleck remarks that could have come from Dave Barry a few years back instead of a guy writing in the Eisenhower era. Like this: “Guys who buy a boat to save money on fishing are like those who marry their blondes [mistresses] to save money on jewelry.”
And this: “Every metal part on a boat ‘reacts’ in sun, saltwater, and air. And here, by ‘reacts’ I mean ‘falls apart in.’”
He talks thus about taking on really big fish, like tuna and marlin:
“At some point in the Homeric struggle, there is always a point . . . when the angler realizes . . . that he has set himself to do, for fun, something not unlike unloading a coal barge, alone, with a big shovel, fast—and no time even for wiping sweat.”
Wylie was also one of the first to write about the then-infant sport of flats fishing for snook, sea trout, reds, mangrove snapper, barracuda, baby tarpon, and the like. And he had the sense of what it could become—lots of exciting fish easy to catch on light, manageable, and affordable tackle, many even catchable without using a boat but by wading or fishing from a bridge or pier, and not requiring the shoveling of the coal barge, either, when one was hooked.
To him every day on the water was a blessing, and he had many after he moved to Florida. “I haven’t years enough, energy enough, or money enough to go on high adventures,” he wrote in this book of his latter years. “I merely have high adventures where I am.”
How can you beat that philosophy?
He was a friend of Hemingway and a force behind the founding of the IGFA with Michael Lerner. He lived in a day when “millions” of giant bluefin tuna went past Bimini in season, followed by a whole lot of very large mako and white sharks. He was evidently one of the few early on who appreciated sharks as a fascinating part of the sea’s web, in an age when most anglers routinely killed every one they could lay hands on.
Sailfish, on the other hand, Wylie and apparently everybody else routinely brought on board and clubbed to death, at least early in his offshore career, an act that would horrify most billfish anglers these days. He fished them on 18-pound test braided nylon, and with the reels of that time, it must have been a tricky proposition. He began to release them, as he did all other species not taken for the table, as he gained experience.
“The angler . . . if he has the time to spend . . . in the end becomes less angler and more naturalist,” he mused.
Simply read through the preface of this book and you’re likely to wish you could have known Philip Wylie and shared a boat with him. Read the rest of the book and you’re likely to feel you have. It’s a voyage well worth taking.
Frank Sargeant was long time outdoor editor of the Tampa Tribune and a senior editor of Florida Sportsman Magazine before he “retired” to work seventy hours a week at freelancing.
In looking over the informal essays you are about to read—a collection arranged by my publishers—I felt that the net effect might, in some ways, be misleading.
For instance, fish aren’t quite as easy to catch as it occasionally appears here. And the big ones in the sea aren’t quite as accessible to the average Joe as he might imagine from reading this. It costs money and takes time to go after them, although sea fishing isn’t exclusively a rich man’s sport.
I would not want my readers to imagine that I, for example, had ceaselessly fared forth on the Gulf Stream and come in with the cruiser half sunk by its load of fish. And so, to correct such possible inference, I felt a Preface advisable—a note, let us say, of caution, coupled with a certain amount of confession of the sort said to be good for the soul. To wit:
In twenty-odd years of marine angling, in hundreds of days spent trolling on the sea, I have caught exactly two big bluefin tunas. I have never caught an Allison tuna, a mako, a broadbill swordfish. In a thousand hours of trolling for blue marlin, I have boated two. During that period, of course, I “hung” many more. Say twenty. I fought them—and lost them.
On the other hand, you are going to see that I am widely regarded as one who fishes under a spell, an evil spell. For I have lost a great many big fish under circumstances which have caused strong men to break down, dithering with wrath and impotence. I am supposed to be fairly competent as an angler. I have been selected to fish in tournaments, on teams, representing my club—a thing no dub would be chosen to do. So, you see, it is a matter of foul fortune, not skill, that attends my many failures. Anyhow, that’s what I claim.
Let me explain the sort of Kismet (doom, I mean) that pursues me:
Some years back, I took dead aim at this problem. I decided to put an end to “Wylie’s blight.” I went about it modestly, selecting bass as my goal: I would build my own pond, raise my own bass in it, and then—by Triton!—catch a few!
Well, the pond was built in my mother-in-law’s back acres. Bulldozers scraped deep into a miniature valley and raised up a dam at its end. The winter rains and snows filled the basin with water. That first year, it leaked. Undaunted, I re-bulldozed. The next year, the Conservation people came—and stocked it. Thereafter, patiently, I fertilized the pond—and my fish waxed fat and energetic. Cattails grew. Frogs croaked around the perimeter; willows rose and bent gracefully over the millpond green water; turtles turtled all day long, and by night the surface seethed with bass taking insects. Big bass, at last, edible and hungry, themselves. Still I waited.
Let them grow.
At length the great day came. I decided to chance nothing. No trout rod, no flies, for me. I had my own fish here, in my private rain barrel, and I was going to break my jinx by actually knocking them off like bowling pins. So I used worms, my friends. I fished all day in the rain—and I caught one bluegill.
What can you do about a thing like that? Sure. There was a reason. There is always a “reason.” In this case, I figured it out—being an angler who understands better than nearly any other angler alive why it is you don’t catch ’em. It seems that there was about the largest crop of tadpoles in that pond in the history of batrachians. There were so many tadpoles that, if you scooped up a bucket of water, it looked like tapioca. My fish had no interest in worms. They had plenty to eat. In fact, they probably had trouble not eating, because every time they drew an aquatic breath they must have sucked in ten tadpoles. The bluegill I did catch was the fattest bluegill I’d ever seen—he had actual chunks of fat inside him.
That’s the sort of thing I’m up against.
You ought to know about it. You might run into it yourself. Or something like it.
There are other booby traps, hundreds, in angling.
In the case of lion hunting, I understand, the guide knows where lions live. You get in a veldtmobile (a word I just discovered) and the guide drives. He conducts you to some lion-infested purlieus and the lions look up as you step from the car. Leaning against a fender, you take dead aim, and kill one or two.
Not long ago, in an account of rhinoceros hunting, given by my friend Robert Ruark (who is an honest man), they went in a station wagon. They located dozens of rhinos, but never one to suit. To shoot, that is. Some had horns that were too small and some were personally runty and some were the wrong sex. They loitered around all day in the midst of this rhino-swarm and Bob read a mystery story while he waited for the exact rhino to come along. It never did, which is the only thing about his tale that surprised me.
Going after big fish is nothing like that. Nothing whatever, even if you discount the difference between a boat and a veldtmobile. There is a difference, even there, too! Bob said the bumpy rides into the eland country (or maybe it was the gnu country) made Mrs. Ruark uncomfortable. Well, Mrs. Ruark ought to see how it feels to spend a day on a thirty-two-foot cruiser in a forty-mile wind blowing against the current of the Gulf Stream! The Ruarks said it was mighty hot in Africa, also. I will give them ten degrees and bet even, on the cockpit of a fishing boat hard by the Tropic of Cancer, in mid-July, on a cloudless noon when no breeze is blowing. We tropical fishermen don’t think it’s warm unless the brightwork sizzles when you spit on it, and the skipper makes toast on the forward hatch-cover. Well, almost.
Then, fishing guides don’t even know where marlin live. Nobody knows. A tiger or an elephant is a fairly local species. You can follow your beaters into a certain valley in the full assurance that, right in the high grass ahead there are water buffalo and, for heaven’s sake, look out! Hunters have what they call “signs” to go by. Signs like footprints, for instance. But tuna leave no tracks even though some of them do seem to travel the same seaways at approximately the same time every year. On the whole there is mighty little “sign” for fish.
People say, of course, that a passel of hovering birds is sure evidence of fish. But I have personally investigated the sea beneath 1,365,854 flocks of birds, ranging from pelicans to plovers, and all I usually found there was the garbage just dumped by a passing freighter. Off and on, for most of my adult life, I’ve looked for marlin sign, too—and I spotted it only once. It happened off the Florida Keys and the “sign” was the sight, here and there, of mackerel with broken backs flopping on the surface. From this we inferred that marlin were swatting at mackerel schools, and we were apparently correct because we hung two marlin that day. But this “sign” had never been seen before by our guides and they have never seen it again, that I know of. Bear sign isn’t that scarce.
When you hunt for big fish you just hunt blind. No way to tell where they “are,” usually. For all you know, they may be right there under your baits—a half mile down, in the dark—not seeing a damned thing or interested in top-water food. If giraffes had wings and spent a good deal of time soaring near the stratosphere, that would make the finding of giraffes like the finding of, say, a broadbill.
All your fishing guide does know for sure is that, in past years, somebody or other did catch a fish of the species you seek, somewhere in the neighborhood of the spot where you’re trolling. If lions spent some of the time in Africa and some of the time in Poland, lion hunting would be more like fishing. For you can leave your home in Baltimore, say, and travel to Miami—one thousand lousy miles and more—and fish for a week for white marlin and never get a strike. Then you can come home and discover they’ve been catching white marlin like herring, right off Ocean City, Maryland. Things like that make guiding tough. They make fishing tough.
I won’t carry the analogue much further for fear of making certain kinds of big-game hunters look sissy. But I guess you get the idea. Put it this way: When a hunter goes to Africa for a few weeks of shooting, he always comes back with enough “heads” to make his den look like a petrified zoo. But when a big-game angler goes big-game fishing for a few weeks, he often comes back with a sunburn, and nothing else.
However, even one big-game fish puts the angler in a spec
ial league. Catching one is something like having appendicitis. You will notice that a person who has had an appendix operation talks about it with authority. He talks authoritatively about all appendix operations. In fact, gradually, he becomes a lay authority on general surgery. This also happens to anglers. Let a mere man or woman nail a blue marlin, or even an outsized white marlin, and you will thereafter find yourself, whenever that person’s around, in the presence of an all-round big-game angler.
Besides, if you fish a good deal, even though you don’t catch many, you’ll see some caught. You can talk about that.
In my own case, I’ve sat for hours—maybe a little listlessly at times—while some of the largest fish in the world were taken by my guests. Any experience missed by me has been directly observed by me. Let that stand as an answer to those several skeptics who, upon reading the fiction I have written about deep-sea angling, wrote to say they thought I’d never fished at all. That’s what I’ve done most of—fish; not catch fish.
The essays ahead are factual. They concern data known to me; they contain accounts of events that happened to me or in my presence; and they also report fishing anecdotes collected by me from credible sources. So far as I am aware, there is no “fiction” in this book. However, since fishermen appear to be the sports world’s stickiest people about detail, let me say that even when a writer composes fishing fiction, he is held strictly accountable to fact. Nothing must happen in a story that could not take place in reality.
Once, just once in the hundred or more yarns I’ve written about deep-sea fishing, I described a certain fish—a permit, actually—as having a “streaming” dorsal fin.
Well, a permit is a pompano and I was thinking absently of an African pompano which, it happens, does have a set of dorsal streamers. But you would think I had attributed the Gettysburg Address to Washington! Letters poured in. My phone sang day and night. I was corrected by ichthyologists, small boys, fishmongers and maiden aunts. I hadn’t believed there were that many people in U.S.A. who’d ever even heard of permits!