Howell Raines

Howell Raines' South Pacific Marlin Fishing Adventure

fieldandstream-editor — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 20:00:00 -0400

"It is ourlost fish that I believe stay longest in memory, and seize upon our thoughtswhenever we look back on fishing days." —LORD GREY

Field & Stream Adventure: The One That Got Away, Part II

fieldandstream-editor — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 09:00:00 -0400

(Click here to read part I of this story)

The Fourth Hour
Through the third hour and into the fourth, I was feeling pretty good. True, the marlin still seemed very strong, but we were cruising along at its pace, which eased the pressure on my arms and shoulders and created in me two illusions. One was that the constant, pestering weight of the taut line over what you might call the fish's left shoulder was bound to wear it down. The other was that our tribulations had ceased.

"Do not worry," Tuna exclaimed in what I initially took to be the spirit of troubles laid by.

"The water is out of the boat," he added.

I craned my head around and looked over my own left shoulder. Sure enough, he was not standing in water. He was proud of himself.

"How are you doing up there?" Tuna said.

"I feel good," I said. "We've passed four hours and I'm not tired at all."

Tuna had no way of knowing that I was not just another soft vacation fisherman. I wanted to assure him that I had been waiting a lifetime for this moment and that conquest resided in my soul. I desired to communicate, in the subtle, modest yet firm way of the Appalachian people, that for all the gray hair on my head, he had a gritty Dixie boy on his hands, a dead-game sport, as my dad would say.

"We'll wear him down," I said. "I think he's tiring a little. He doesn't have as much zip as he had when we first hooked him."

Yet this report did not seem to cheer Tuna as I had hoped. He stood at the tiller, steering us up and down the blue Pacific hillocks. He seemed curiously disengaged from the fish.

"Do you have a screwdriver?" he said.

I said, not testily but firmly, that I wondered why he needed a screwdriver.

"I have to pull up the floorboards," Tuna said. "I think the drain plug floated under the floorboards while the boat was full of water. Now all I have to do is find the plug."

Oh, yes, yes, indisputably, we still needed the drain plug. As long as we kept running along at half throttle or better, no water could enter the boat. But once we stopped to land the fish or when we, inevitably, ran out of gas, we would start sinking without delay. It was news to me that it had not only come dislodged from its hole but had gone missing entirely. If it was not under the floorboards, that would be additional news of a very bad kind. It was also news, of a surprising sort, that our drain plug was suspected of floating, since such items are customarily constructed of such sinkable materials as brass and hard rubber. If it comes out, it falls to the bottom of the boat and you pick it up.

"Float?" I said. "Why did it float?"

"It's wood," Tuna shouted back. With a touch of pride, he added that he had carved it himself.

"It has to be under the floorboards," he concluded.

It was time to rouse Tennant from his postpartum apathy. His color had shifted from green to pasty gray, and he moved when roused like someone swimming through an atmosphere that was thicker than that experienced by other humans. Nonetheless he made a good catch when I swung my Orvis fishing bag toward him.

"See if I brought my Swiss Army knife or Leatherman tool," I said.

He rummaged unhappily through the bag's several pockets. The zippers seemed deeply mysterious to him. As I suspected, the desired items were not in my fishing bag, but rather on my dresser back at the Captain Cook.

"Don't worry," Tuna suddenly exclaimed. "I found my screwdriver."

He held the welcome object aloft. It was cheap-looking, like the tools you see in the 99-cent bucket beside the cash register at TruValue. It was rusty. But it was, by God, a screwdriver. Tuna instructed Tennant to take the tiller and fell to work in the bottom of the boat, reming the half-dozen screws that pinned the plywood floorboard to the raised ribs of the hull.

Complications ensued. When we slid down the face of a long wave, Tennant failed to back off on the throttle. The boat gained suddenly on the fish.

"Slow down, slow down!" I shouted, too late. There was a big belly in the line. I cranked rapidly to try to take up the slack before the fish could slip the hook. But my cranking was rowdy and undisciplined. It caused the rod tip to jiggle, and this, my first crude move, threw a loop of slack line around the tip-top guide on my fly rod. I knew instantly that this meant trouble, and sure enough, when the boat slowed on the uphill side of the next wave, the fish took off, yanking the top section of the three-piece rod from the ferrule where it joined the middle section. The jerk of the separating rod seemed to inspire the marlin to try out its overdrive. Line peeled from the reel and I watched the end section of my rod, firmly looped into my line, disappear into the waves.

"Don't worry," Tuna said, looking up from his work. "We'll get the rod tip back as soon as I get the boat fixed. Just hold on."

Oh, yes, of course.

"I have it!" Tuna called in a few minutes. I watched over my shoulder as he held aloft a big square block of wood that had been whittled into a blunt point on one end. I wouldn't exactly call it a square peg, but I could see, given its irregular shape, how it had slipped out of the perfectly round hole in the transom. In any event, Tuna pounded it home and scooped out the last of the water. Then he took the tiller again and once more we went pelting after the marlin and that portion of the fly rod that was now in its possession.

After 30 minutes of playing the fish on the stumpy butt sections, I had regained enough line to catch sight of my missing tip section, still firmly looped in place.

"How sick are you?" I asked Tennant.

"I'm better," he said. "Still a little shaky. I'm all right."

"Then I need for you to get up here in the bow and put this rod back together when I reel the tip section back in. Do you think you can do that?" "I'm not sure. I'll try," he said.

The only problem, of course, was that Tuna had to gun the engine so I could regain line. The extra speed pushed the boat into the waves so hard that its bow was rising and falling 6 or 8 feet at a sweep. I was sure the bucking-horse ride at the front of the boat would make Tennant spew again as soon as he got in position. On the other hand, I knew that Tuna had to be at the throttle if we were to have any chance at all. As for me, I was not about to surrender the rod. So there was nothing to do but send my ailing friend forward.

Tennant is, shall we say, an unhurried person. To say that he took up his station in the bow deliberately is to exaggerate his speed exponentially. I passed the time by explaining how he was going to have to take the tip of the rod in hand without stressing it, then unwrap the half hitch that the fouled line had thrown around the rod's top guide. He had to perform this quickly but be all the while prepared to let the whole works go if the fish sped away. Once he had the rod tip in hand and the knot undone, he must deftly reunite the male and female sections of the rod ferrule, or joint, all the while making sure that the guides were properly aligned. Given the lack of cooperation from the fish and the speed at which the boat was moving, this would not have been an altogether easy task in calm water.

Finally Tennant was in position and I cranked the tip within his reach. He did everything perfectly, and suddenly, we were not sinking, the tackle was in order, the line was tight, and Tennant was not throwing up. Our great travail was over, but my expectations of whipping the fish by the end of the fourth hour proved illusory. Even so, in midafternoon, the wind backed around to the south and the seas flattened a bit. We were able by gunning the boat to close to within 20 feet or so of the marlin. I could see my fly plainly in the corner of its mouth. I had a solid-gold hookup. Tuna was coaching me constantly, warning me not to get impatient and apply too much pressure, and his eagerness made it necessary for me to declare an intention I thought he would oppose.

"We're not going to kill this fish," I said.

"Don't worry," he said. "We'll just get the fly back and take some pictures."

Now the fish was swimming right beside us. Another few feet and Tuna could have touched the leader, which under the international rules of billfish tournaments meant the fish could be counted as caught and released. The rule is a conservation measure, the logic being that if a fish is that close to the boat, you could snag it with a long-handled killing gaff if you chose to. Since we were not in a tournament, had no gaff anyway, and had already cast aside the holy rules of flyfishing, none of this really mattered. But I understood Tuna's reasoning immediately and bought into it. If he could get the leader in hand, we could honestly say we had fulfilled the technical requirements of "catching" this fish.

Perhaps it was the vibrations of our optimism that provoked the marlin into showing us what it had left.

Which turned out to be a lot.

One moment, we were going along side by side and Tuna and I were plotting how to get the leader close enough for him to grab, and the next the marlin was tilting its nose down and playing submarine. That is to say, with me exerting maximum pressure by jamming my gloved hand against the spool of the reel, the marlin sounded.

Down and down it went, as if it had an Evinrude strapped to its butt. My two football fields of backing melted away and I could see the exposed spool. When there were about a half dozen wraps of line on the spool, I clamped down, figuring to break the fish off at the leader rather than the bitter end of the backing and thereby save my fly line. The line came tighter and tighter; the tip of my rod plunged into the water. By the fraught feel of things, I could tell that everything between me and the fish was at the breaking point. And then the last thing I expected happened. The marlin stopped its descent and began swimming horizontally again at a leisurely pace exactly 699 feet below us-600 feet of backing, 90 feet of fly line, 9 feet of leader.

At this great depth, the fish swam more slowly, with a kind of casual power. We motored along, keeping pace. The rod was bent to its most severe arc, the line pointing straight down in the piercing blue ocean, as if pinned to a peg at the center of the earth. There was no question of pumping the fish to the surface with main force. Fly rods are notoriously short on lifting power, which is why you don't use them in bottom-fishing for grouper or halibut or for that matter were able by gunning the boat to close to within 20 feet or so of the marlin. I could see my fly plainly in the corner of its mouth. I had a solid-gold hookup. Tuna was coaching me constantly, warning me not to get impatient and apply too much pressure, and his eagerness made it necessary for me to declare an intention I thought he would oppose.

"We're not going to kill this fish," I said.

"Don't worry," he said. "We'll just get the fly back and take some pictures."

Perhaps it was the vibrations of our optimism that provoked the marlin into showing us what it had left.

Which turned out to be a lot.

Field & Stream Adventure: The One That Got Away, Part I

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 05:20:00 -0400

This is a South Pacific fish story that begins on Darky Lake in Canada. In June, for four or five years running, my sons Ben and Jeff and I went there to flyfish for smallmouth bass big enough to swallow those we caught on mid-Atlantic rivers like the Potomac and the Delaware. The wilderness fishing in Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park was dreamlike but repetitious, and in 1995, at our familiar campsite, I experienced a sensation so unusual that at first I did not recognize it. I was bored with the best fishing of its kind in North America.

Upon returning to my newspaper job in New York City, I conferred with my closest friend from back home in Alabama. Tennant McWilliams is a university dean, justly renowned in educational circles for his sound judgment and steady temperament. We have hunted and fished together since we were 15, and for years, I have relied on him to talk me out of the wild-hair schemes that come to all fishermen. He had seen me through a teenage phase of chasing giant hammerhead sharks in small boats and later impulses to invest money in "undiscovered" fishing camps. I thought he would talk me out of my newly conceived plan to battle angling ennui by fishing in all the exotic places we could never afford while raising our families. Now, in our early 50s, we were both well-employed and beyond the reach of alimony, tuition, and orthodontia bills. Even so, I thought Tennant would say "you're crazy" when I said that only an expensive excursion to Christmas Island via Honolulu in pursuit of our first fly-rod bonefish could restore our zeal. Instead he said, "Sign me up."

The Republic of Kiribati does not refer to its Christmas Island atoll as a "paradise of fish and birds" for nothing. In a few days we had caught so many bonefish on flies that we turned our thoughts to the bigger creatures outside the reef. So it came to pass that we chartered Tuna Smith, a well-known bonefishing guide who owned a panga-like skiff, to take us offshore in search of giant trevally. We cast with spinning rods and trolled with conventional tackle to no avail, at which time Tuna, a strong, cheerful man who greatly resembled Don Ho, inquired about the contents of my tackle bag.

"Have you got any big streamer flies?" he said.

We had been trolling off the northwest corner of the island, where ocean currents boiled against the steep flanks of the old volcano. The water was hundreds of feet deep here, and its upper stories were trafficked by schools of baitfish that, in turn, pulled in schools of small tuna. From time to time, we could see the splashes of feeding fish, but we had no takers on our big plastic lures. So Tuna thought a smaller fly might attract a strike.

As it happened, I had a brand-new, tandem-hooked billfish fly purchased by mail order from the Fly Shop of Redding, California, for what seemed to me, then and now, the bargain price of $4.95. A nice fly it was, and I had bought it, as I buy so many pieces of tackle, prophylactically. I felt that someday, somewhere I might need it, never mind the fact that I had never caught a billfish and had, in fact, seen damn few in my life.

"How's this?" I said to Tuna, holding up a concoction of green and white plastic filaments tied like a ponytail.

"Perfect," he said. "Tie it on your 10-weight fly rod, and let's troll for a few more minutes before we go inside the reef for bonefish."

I tied my Fly Shop billfish fly to my 20-pound Orvis leader with the 80-pound shock tippet. I paid line from my Orvis Battenkill 10/11 Salt Water Reel and within minutes I was trolling with my 9-foot, 10-weight Sage fly rod. I confess that I was not casting my line as intended by the designers of all the products named above and as mandated by the International Game Fish Association of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I think of myself as a flyfisherman and so present myself to the world, but I was trolling as openly as any wire-ling, beer-gutted, bowling-shirted New Jersey plumber on his annual outing to murder a Cape May bluefish.

I think Tuna was explaining the fine points of how the international police force would operate when the strike came. He talked about that a good deal to fill the odd moments of the day. As ocean strikes go, it was gentle. The fish made a short run, pulling line from my fly reel, and then turned docilely and began swimming toward the boat and then past it. I had to wind rapidly to take the slack out of the line.

"What kind of fish is it?" Tennant asked.

"Probably a bonita," said Tuna.

At that precise moment, an astonishing blue-and-silver creation came out of the top of a Pacific wave that loomed above our puny boat like a hillock of cerulean jelly. There is something impressive about looking uphill at a fish that seems half as long as your boat. In The Outermost House, Henry Beston wrote about big rogue waves "coming like a king" out of the sea. That is how I think of that moment. The wave rose above us like a king, and an impossible fish climbed into the sky like the son of God. What I'm trying to express, I suppose, is that on the stroke of that moment something rolled over within me, something at the center of my chest. It was, I think, the tumblers of my heart.

"It's not a bonita," I said.

Tuna, whose attention had been elsewhere, saw the second of three greyhounding leaps.

"No, it's not a bonita," Tuna agreed in a tone of calm acceptance that I assume is taught in the temples of his Baha'i faith.

"It's a marlin," I finally managed to say, feeling a foolish sense of triumph at being able to state the obvious.

It was, indeed, a Pacific blue marlin, and by every available sign, this particular marlin was in fine fettle. It was a young marlin at the brimming height of its powers. Scientists of human aging would have to report that I, a stocky, graying man just past 50, could not be regarded as being at the height of my physical powers. On the other hand, I had reached through calculation and steady effort the ability to fish in some of the waters about which I had dreamed. So it came to pass that the marlin and I met in the roomy precincts of the far Pacific. Now we were both doing what we had to do. I was holding on. And the marlin, having gotten its introductory leaps out of the way, was hauling ass. [NEXT "Blueness and Bolts Therefrom"]

Blueness and Bolts Therefrom
I had always wondered what it was like to fight a big fish for a long time, and the moment of my education was at hand. I had the tangible sensation of learning new things, moment to moment, and it became apparent that the things came in two categories, those that are surprising and those that are boring. I also had the feeling that time had slowed down, and that while the pressure of the fish is always there, the mind wanders. When someone speaks to you, you hear what they said, but you also hear its echoes inside your head. So there was a long historic echo when Tennant spoke a sentence after the fish had been on the line for several minutes, and the affair began to settle down into an orderly struggle.

"You are handling this beautifully," he said.

I thought not of the fish or my friend's generosity, but of how much he sounded like his father and how pleased the old man, who was born in 1901, would be that these two boys he had shaped so forcefully, his son and his student, were still friends as we passed into our 50s. I thought also that in the becalmed waters of middle age, American men yearn for a certain amount of chaos. We will travel far and pay dearly to get it. And I thought that I, by God, was getting my money's worth.

The way you whip a big fish is to chase it for as long as it takes. The trick is not new. Izaak Walton, writing in the 17th century, recommended throwing the pole into the water and letting the fish drag it around until it was exhausted, a trick that I sometimes saw replicated by Alabama cane-polers during my childhood. Tuna planned an open-sea version of this strategy, with our boat as the cane pole. We learned in short order that he was a marvelous boat handler. We raced through the ocean's hills and valleys behind the marlin, and it was thrilling to be up in the high bow of the boat, tasting the warm, salty spray and feeling the relentless pulse of the fish, leading us south. Tuna coached me constantly not to put too much pressure on the line. We would tire the fellow out in due course. All we had to do was be patient.

There was something else about Tuna that I apprehended in those first pelting minutes. He really wanted to catch this fish. Beyond that, he believed we were going to catch it. A guide cannot fake conviction, and there is nothing worse than being in a boat with someone you are paying, but who does not much care, one way or another. Right off, I sensed something elemental in Tuna's response to our situation. I can only describe it as the primal optimism of someone who has grown up conquering sea creatures of all sizes and for whom there is no other business than living the life that the sea and the world have put in front of him. More than anything, I did not want to disappoint him.

The fish had slowed in its swimming a bit. It was still going steadily away, running about 6 feet under the surface, out to the side of the boat so there was a long bow in the line. I asked Tuna to move in more directly behind the fish to reduce the drag on the line. I was afraid the weight of the curved line would pull the hook or break the tippet. Even though the seas were running 10 feet or better, the waves came in long swells, without a lot of surface chop. So Tuna was able to gun the boat ahead, closing on the fish and enabling me to regain a hundred yards or so of backing.

After we had been engaged with the fish for some time, perhaps a half hour of bouncing along the waves, up and down, I heard a strangled noise from the rear of the boat and glanced back over my shoulder. Tennant's head was hanging over the gunwale, and from time to time, he shouted passionately at the sea. He is not a large man, but he seemed to hold quite a lot.

Seeing my friend in the embrace of mal de mer reminded me of a comment I had read that compared being seasick to a lover's jealousy. You think you're going to die and everyone else thinks it's funny. One glance at Tennant, who had ceased shouting at the ocean and had fallen back into his deck chair, convinced me that this would not be a good time to share this witticism.

"Drink a Coke," I told him.

"I don't think I can keep it down right now," he said.

Even so, I was encouraged. He had spoken a sentence free of complaint and containing no mention of the shore. Good thing, since there was no way in hell he wnd until it was exhausted, a trick that I sometimes saw replicated by Alabama cane-polers during my childhood. Tuna planned an open-sea version of this strategy, with our boat as the cane pole. We learned in short order that he was a marvelous boat handler. We raced through the ocean's hills and valleys behind the marlin, and it was thrilling to be up in the high bow of the boat, tasting the warm, salty spray and feeling the relentless pulse of the fish, leading us south. Tuna coached me constantly not to put too much pressure on the line. We would tire the fellow out in due course. All we had to do was be patient.

"Drink a Coke," I told him.

"I don't think I can keep it down right now," he said.

Even so, I was encouraged. He had spoken a sentence free of complaint and containing no mention of the shore. Good thing, since there was no way in hell he w