Mick Chivers lowered the rod as the gaff struck the bluefish and his brother Jack swung the fish over the gunwale. It was a nice fish—about a 6-pounder—good both for the table and for light-tackle game. Using spinning tackle, Mick, who is 9, had hooked the fish on a popper in about 15 feet of water. The fish had run, circled the boat, and leapt twice. Now it was headed for ice. Except that in Mick’s mind, there remained a step.

“Bleed it,” he said.

On this day I served as both skipper and mate for sons who soon will do these things for me. I took the knife from the bait table and made a series of quick cuts. As the blood began to rush, I put the fish nose down into a bucket.

We had been thick into a school of feeding blues for almost an hour. Mick and Jack, 11, had boated nearly 10 fish, keeping me busy in the best kind of way. The cooler was heavy with meat. The blood in the bucket was already 2 or 3 inches deep.

Why would three guys in a boat busy with fish add a step like this?

The answer could begin in many places. But it certainly does not begin here, on this early August evening off Point Judith, R.I., as we harvested blues. It’s better told from an October three years before, and a journey to catch a shark.

Guest of Honor
Capt. Bill Brown, skipper of the Billfish and one of the country’s better-known shark-chasing charter captains, surveyed the Atlantic horizon from under the T‑top of my boat. Brown trained decades ago as a Navy pilot, and though he was 61 years old on this cool fall morning offshore, he retained a visual acuity no one in the day’s four-man crew could match. We were roughly 65 miles out, rising and falling on a light swell, near the edge of the temperature break near Jenny’s Horn, a jagged edge on the 30-fathom contour line. The green-sea-meets-blue-gray-sky horizon seemed blank to the rest of us. But not to the guest captain.

“There,” he said. “Boat.”

We squinted toward where his blue eyes were locked. Nothing.

“Head over there,” he said.

I pushed the dual throttles forward. The boat rose onto plane and began to rush forward, heading, it seemed, farther into the nothingness. After a mile the outline of a white sportfishing boat began to take shape. Then more. The boats were clustered around a pair of trawlers hauling back their nets. Several minutes later, I eased back on the throttles. Our 26-foot center console settled softly into the swell, well short of the bobbing pack. The day’s sharking tutorial was about to begin.