Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  So it may be that our shark-approach had been wrong for milleniums. Sharks are mechanized sets of teeth, sure. They can bite, beyond doubt. But when dealt with in a friendly fashion (rather than by cannon and harpoon), they seem willing to be pals. I’m not ready to try palling up with a loose, “wild” shark—but on the other hand, I’ve reached the stage I recommend to you: the word “shark” doesn’t paralyze me and the sight of a periscopelike dorsal fin, gliding around where I am swimming, doesn’t fill me with the sensation my last hour has come. Also, I don’t kill all sharks on sight for no reason, as many deep-sea anglers do. Living sharks have let me live, time and again; but like the sharks themselves, I’m a shade wary of the other guy; I can’t quite lose that “What-big-teeth-you-have-grandma” feeling, even though I’ve gradually found sharks to be a lot more interesting than horrifying. I’m sure, if I ever have a salt-water pond of my own, there’ll be a pet shark in it. Not a very big one, though.

  There are no average sailfish

  Nobody knows what is in the mind of a fish—or whether he has one. Some people merely know more than others about how fishes behave. And, from the behavior, they invent fishly states of mind. The moods and humors of brook trout, for example, have absorbed the time and discernment of millions of men for generations—men in the barefoot-boy stage, the investigating-scientist stage and the retired-millionaire stage. Books have been written about why trout do what they do and what trout, supposedly, feel. But there is not much of this sort of information on the sailfish, and there should be.

  In the era before the sailfish was commonly taken on rod and reel, marine angling was regarded by fresh-water sportsmen as decidedly second-rate—not an art, just a branch of commercial fishing. The tarpon, it is true, was an early exception but, somehow, the mere fact that this fish, when so moved, will enter fresh water and even live in lakes, qualified him as semimarine. People went kingfishing; people caught jewfish in the sea, on ropes; people hand-lined for bottom fish. And then they found out how to catch sailfish. It was the beginning of a new age for the angler.

  Well do I remember my first one. I was trolling straight back from the stern of a Miami charterboat—the line, twenty-four-thread; the reel, a 6/0 on a pretty heavy rod. My bait was an eight-inch strip of belly cut from one of the bonitas we had been catching. I could see it plainly, flickering and skipping in the clean, choppy water some thirty feet astern.

  “Here comes a sail!” the skipper yelled.

  I didn’t see anything, I was watching the bait.

  “Underneath it . . . behind it!” The skipper tried to tell me where to look, but I was too excited and too much of a neophyte to see the surging mass of chocolate brown that is a submerged sail on a sunny day. I did see his bill. It came out of water at an angle and looked like a black stick. I felt a min-nowlike tap. And that was all.

  “Drop back!” the captain shouted.

  For a moment, I couldn’t think what he meant. I forgot that a sailfish usually swats his quarry with his “sword”—which is more like a long, rattail file—and then lets it settle in the sea, stunned, before he gobbles it up. This particular sailfish, however, was hungry enough to try again, even though (and it must have surprised him) his first crack at my bait didn’t “kill” it. He put up his great purple dorsal, surfaced and rushed—again swatting the strip of belly, harder this time. This time I dropped back—that is, I threw the reel on free spool and allowed the line to run out, thumbing the spinning spool enough so it wouldn’t backlash.

  The result of that, naturally, was to stop the bait dead in:he sea. In those days, we counted to ten—slowly—before striking. Most people still do. And all persons who have had the experience will certify that those ten seconds are emotionally wearing.

  The bait sinks out of sight. The sailfish disappears in its general vicinity. The boat goes away from the scene at its steady four or five or six knots. Meanwhile the angler gets set to drive home the hook, knowing now that he has had a sailfish rise and a strike, but not at all certain that the fish will devour what it has swatted. At the end of ten seconds the angler throws on the drag again, lets the line tighten and, the instant he feels he weight of his fish, strikes back against it swiftly and strongly, three or four times. I did these things that day.

  With the third backward drive of the rod, the sailfish put in his second personal appearance. Something in the strip bait he had just taken into his mouth was annoying him, pulling him around, sticking into him. The thing to do was to shake it but, pronto. So, in two or three seconds after my first heave, he drove straight up into the air—all seven feet and fifty pounds of him—his sail spread full, his bills open wide and his great blue eyes rolling with—what? Fear and horror? Hate and fury? Something.

  He leaped high enough to walk under if there had been a walk, hit with a mighty splash, leaped again and repeated, four or five times. Everybody on board was yelling. They told me, “You hung him, boy!” They advised me to, “Look at that baby jump!” I knew I had hung him and I could see him jump.

  I could also feel him. Indeed, he was loosening up my shoulder joints preparatory to yanking off my arms. However, the rod butt was firmly seated in a gimbal—a sort of universal joint below the front edge of my chair seat, and I am a fairly strong citizen, and very determined. The sailfish undertook, in the ensuing dozen seconds, the two-hundred-yard dash, submerged. I had, before that time, caught trout, bass, pickerel, pike, muskies and some smaller sea fish. This was my first experience in hooking the equivalent of a naval torpedo driving for an enemy warship.

  At the end of the dash, the sailfish paused and tried leaping again. Then, begrudging every inch, he permitted me to horse, or pump, or heave him back toward the boat about three quarters of the distance. At that point it occurred to him that perhaps he could rid himself of the oral nuisance by sounding, and down he went, a hundred feet or so. I horsed him back, inchmeal. He leaped again—took to greyhounding and tail-walking—tried to circumnavigate the boat, and ran out of ideas until I had him alongside. Then, just as the skipper seized the leader and reached over to grab his bill in a gloved hand, he jumped one more mean time.

  After that, the skipper got him. He heaved the flopping monster up along the ship’s side, and the mate dispatched him with a truncated version of a police billy. Tenderly, then, he was brought aboard. He seemed to come to, eyed us dolefully, and whacked the deck with his tail. My friends admired him and eagerly inspected his incredible colors until they faded. Me, I was too beat-up, shaky and generally dazed to see much of that.

  I have been at some pains to describe this event for the reason that it records the perfectly typical taking of a perfectly typical sailfish. Twenty-eight minutes had elapsed from the moment the fish struck to the moment the skipper dispatched the fish. A little longer than seven feet, a little more than fifty pounds in weight, the fish was about average. And, in the average taking of the average sail, there is only one major difference today, and one minor.

  The major difference lies in the now-common use of outriggers for sailfishing, two of which are usually carried by the deep-sea fishing cruiser. An outrigger is equipped with a halyard like that used for raising a flag. The halyard is provided with an ordinary snap clothespin. In this, a twist of the angler’s line is pinched, and the clothespin is run to the tip of the outrigger, so that the line extends from rod, aloft to clothespin and thence back down to the sea.

  The outrigger trolls the bait outside the ship’s wake, which is regarded as an advantage, and, since it holds the bait from so high a point, often yanks it clear out of water as the boat rocks or pitches, giving the bait all the action of a flying fish. When a sailfish hits such a bait, the line is pulled out of the clothespin, a large amount of slack falls onto the sea, and thus the bait automatically and instantly “dies” in the water until the forward run of the boat takes up that slack. The angler using an outrigger doesn’t have to remember to “drop back”—free-spool his reel after the strike.

  T
hat makes sailfishing easier. And the minor change is the increasing popularity of light tackle for sailfish.

  Now, as I’ve shown, there is a typical behavior for the strike and the fight of a sailfish. But there must be a qualification made concerning that statement: precious few sailfish seem to know what is expected of them—and it is this fact which gives character to the species and variety to the sport of taking it. Too damned much variety, as a rule.

  For example, I once had a friend who was an old salmon angler and who held deep-sea fishing in low opinion. Thinking to change his mind, I took him out for sails. We will call this person Mr. Jerkins, because he turned out to be a bit of a jerk. It was the middle of winter—January—and, naturally, I explained that sailfish were scarcest in the winter and we’d be lucky even to see one. So, of course, we saw about fifty that day.

  I got Mr. Jerkins set in the stern of the boat, myself alongside with a light rod and line, and I told him to relax, as we would doubtless be trolling for hours without action of any sort. Two minutes later, a double-header rose behind our two baits. Naturally, I instructed Mr. J.—for the tenth time—in dropping back.

  These two sails, however, were born crazy. Or stupid. They had no plan to swat our baits and then wait for them to sink. They rose, fanned the air with their purple fins and rushed. When they hit, they simply gulped both baits. I was an old fisherman, by then, and so I struck forthwith and hooked my fish. Jerkins, however, dropped back and his sailfish, feeling a hook in his mouth and having the convenience of a slack line—supplied because of my instructions—jumped lightly once into the air and threw the hook.

  Mr. J. saw what happened and told me he ought to have hit it instanter, like any salmon. Reluctantly, I had to agree. My fish, meanwhile, was sizzling between sea and sky and he was watching it with interest. I handed the rod to him. “Take him in—get the feel of the power in him—get some practice.”

  Mr. J. took the rod. The instant he did, that particular sailfish acted as if it had been chloroformed. He sulked a little, waggled his fins feebly and allowed himself to be boated with no further fight. I have seen sailfish give up because they have been hooked deep in their interiors, or in the eye. This fish was hooked in the jaw, where he felt nothing except restraint. But he quit.

  When he was boated, Mr. Jerkins said softly, “So that’s the battling sailfish, eh?”

  We baited up again and I began to pray quietly for another opportunity. One came along, presently. It rose up to within a dozen feet of the surface under my bait. As I was anxious to get Mr. J. hitched to an infuriated sail, I reeled in cautiously and lifted my bait out. The sail, a brown blur down below, moved over to the other bait, rose, and hit like a thunderclap. Mr. Jerkins dropped back—we waited without breathing—and he struck. Instantly the sail came raging out of the sea.

  I began to relax as I saw my companion tense and look worried. But, again, after that second jump, the fish seemed to lose interest. Once more Jerkins hauled it in without much struggle. When it came alongside, I peered over and saw that, in the first twisting leap, the fish had thrown a half hitch of the leader wire around its tail. This had come tight with the result that the sail was bent like a bow—the leader the bowstring—and it couldn’t swim at all. I explained this, but Mr. J. seemed skeptical.

  Mr. J. got his last hit just before he went in. A beautiful afternoon—a calm, sapphire sea and the sun getting ready to paint pictures on the western cloudscape. Only, when he hung the sailfish, being lucky, or maybe even a good angler for all I’ll ever know, he also hung about three bushels of sargasso weed. This golden, tangled stuff fouled his leader, suffused itself over the face, fins and person of the fighting fish, and slowed him down to zero. Again, with no difficulty, Mr. Jerkins heaved in fish and encumbering mass of weed.

  “So that’s sailfishing,” he repeated as we went in. “Hunh!”

  He won’t go out again—goes to Maine for salmon—and he tells all comers that sea fishing is just an old man’s pastime.

  An old man’s pastime. The phrase haunts me.

  I think of another friend of mine—a man named George—who was cruising toward the keys, towing a dinghy, when he noticed that there were two sailfish jumping around sportively on the near sea. An idea struck him. He baited up for sail, cut his motors, stepped aboard the dinghy and began to troll from there. Sure enough, one of the sailfish rose and hit. George dropped back and struck and hung the fish. His companions then cut loose the dinghy, which was what George had planned.

  There he was, at sea in a rowboat, with a large sailfish on his line. The fish did some expert leaping at first, and every time it surged into the air, the dinghy rocked and shipped water. George was on his knees on a middle seat at the time.

  “The last jump of the first series,” George recounted, “threw me flat on my pan. When I got up, I had a bloody nose and the sail was running. The skiff picked up speed and for the next quarter hour we went for a sleigh ride around the ocean. Then the son of a gun quieted down and I began getting in line.

  “I couldn’t be sure whether I was pulling him to me, or the skiff to him, but, anyhow, we came together. Close. At this point it occurred to me I was without gloves, and without a billy to hit him with. How was I going to boat him? While figuring on that, I see that he is figuring, too. I swear he was lying there looking straight at me—his eye as big as a teacup and ornery as a wild pig’s—figuring. Pretty soon he jumped, not merely out, but at me.

  “He jumped on this side of the skiff and on that side. He’d pull against me and then spring out and the line would go slack and I’d flounder over backward. Don’t know how many times he threw me. Maybe six. Anyhow, he stayed within twenty feet of me and I finally realized he was thinking of getting in there with me and sparring it out.

  “At least, I began to see that one of those jumps—accidentally or on purpose—might make us shipmates. I thought, too, maybe he’d ram. I’ve heard of marlin trying that—on purpose or in a blind rage—and I began to wish I hadn’t bothered with this notion of dinghy-fishing for sail.

  “Then what? He took a long, hard, mean run straight to the cruiser and my damned fool mate tried to gaff him as he went past. Don’t never gaff a sail if you can help it. It just makes ’em twenty times as devilish.

  “The gaff caught him in the shoulder. The mate heaved, the fish came out of water and raked a long mark on my cruiser with his bill. Then he broke the line, shook himself off the gaff, and me—I fell back again and this time, overboard. Never have I gone after a sail in a dinghy since.”

  The advice about not gaffing sailfish is sound. And the need of a stout pair of gloves for grabbing one by the bill—the conventional method of taking a sailfish—was brought home to me long ago. My friend, Larry Schwab, the writer and theatrical producer, had a handsome cruiser named the Pirate Wench on which he was wont to cruise amongst the keys and islands. A good mariner but not an expert angler then, he had sometimes fished from his yacht but never had taken a sail from her.

  By that time, I’d caught a dozen or more and felt thoroughly able to act as a guide. I said that I would go out with him and get him a sailfish. His captain would run the boat—he and Mildred, his wife, would fish—and I’d be the mate. It worked, somewhat to my astonishment. We went out to the edge of the Gulf Stream. We baited up. Larry and Mildred began to troll, straight back. Pretty soon a fish rose behind Mildred’s bait and, with none of the aplomb common to fishing guides, I told her what to do. She did it. Pretty soon she was fighting one lively sail.

  Remember now, that I was responsible for boating that fish. The captain had had no experience in such matters. While Mildred fought the sailfish—and it battled her as if its life were in danger, which it was (the sea was rough, too, which added to the battle an element of lift, rock, yaw and nose dive)—as she fought, I began to think about the boating job. There were no gloves of any sort on the cruiser, it proved. I hadn’t thought to bring any. Moreover, as the fish was worked closer and closer
to the moment at which I was to seize the leader, lean over, grab it, heave the sail aboard and stun it with a milk bottle I had collected from the galley, another series of thoughts entered my head.

  The moment of boating a sailfish, even in calm weather, is not unattended by small perils. There was a mate, for example, who some years ago, leaned out to execute this maneuver just as the sailfish decided to try a final desperate leap. The fish jumped—and stabbed the mate clear through the abdomen.

  There was another would-be sail boater—up the Florida coast—who had the same experience but, in his case, the fish had stabbed him through the eye and into the brain.

  These thoughts disturbed me. I began to wish the fish better luck. But Mildred got it up alongside. Gingerly—and barehanded—I took hold of the leader. At that instant, to my great relief, the leader, which proved to be rusty, snapped. I commiserated with the disappointed Mildred. Technically, since I’d grabbed the leader, she had caught her fish even though she didn’t have it to show, so I suggested that we go on in.

  Larry, however, was all for more fishing. Resignedly, I sat back to watch baits. And with some trepidation I soon saw another sail behind Larry’s flickering strip of fish belly. Larry reacted with great violence and excitement. I prayed that he might miss, but he didn’t. In no time he was sweating and panting and his reel was snarling as a goodish sail took line. And in no time (it seemed to me, though it was half an hour or more) I came again to the desperate exigency of barehanded boating.

  I grabbed the leader and looked down. There, a yard or so underwater, swimming hard and getting nowhere because I hung on, was the sailfish. Tentatively, I pulled. He came up a foot. I pulled again. He came another foot, and another, and there was his bill—exposed in the air at the water line, for me to grab. The water line, however, was heaving up and down a yard or so. Everyone on board was tensely watching me. And I was tensely watching the fish.