C.J. Chivers

Operation Thresher: Fishing for Monster Sharks off The Shores of Rhode Island

Online Editors — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:41:55 -0400

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.

How Brown ended up on this boat is something of a story in itself. Brown is a generous soul, and as a former Navy officer he had made something of a personal goal in training one Air Force veteran of the Iraq wars to be a shark fisherman. That fisherman was Mike Perra, whom I met on assignment for this magazine. Perra in turn introduced me to Brown, who learned I was in the process of buying and outfitting a saltwater fishing boat to use as a personal sanctuary, meat-gathering machine, and family classroom. The boat was to be a workhorse that could do many things—a heavy hull with a deep-V that could make the run offshore but also fish in tight, giving my sons a chance to learn everything from drifting for fluke and chasing 11-inch scup on inshore rock piles to setting up in the canyons and trying for tuna, marlin, mahimahi, swordfish, and shark. Its limits would be set by our skills and desires, not by the boat.

In early 2008, as the boat was being built, Brown gave me a call with suggestions for customizing the vessel to be more effective—and safer. Brown listened to my thinking, rooted in what I had learned in the infantry: build in redundancy. The boat would be outfitted with extra batteries, dual engines, dual two-way radios, and GPS antennas and screens. Life jackets would be fitted with lights triggered by -water-activated switches. A buoyant ditch bag—to go over the gunwale with the crew were the boat ever lost—would carry a floating handheld radio, a first-aid kit, and an EPIRB locator beacon. And the boat would have radar—essential for fishing seas prone to swift weather changes and enveloping fogs; the more so for avoiding collisions with shipping traffic and while passing through the narrow entrances in the seawalls at Harbor of Refuge, where the boat would be slipped.

To this planning, Brown added a guiding thought: “Going to sea,” he said, “can be like going to space.” What he meant was that when something goes wrong, the elements turn harsh and unforgiving fast, and you should expect there to be nothing to help you except what you brought. Fresh water, tools, lines, food, bandages—-anything you might need could come only from your foresight. The sea as the cosmos? An exaggeration, for sure. But it was worth thinking of when running a boat at night on the open water, as I intended to do, because that is when striped bass feed best.

As we talked, Brown offered to guide a crew and me on an instructional offshore trip. He would come aboard as guest skipper, and watch over my shoulder, offering advice while we worked. He knew I had fished inshore, and had found my way around many of the rocks where striped bass stack. He also knew that venturing out—to the East Grounds, to Coxes Ledge, to the Acid Barge and beyond, toward the undersea canyons at the submerged continent’s edge—was another matter. He promised to demonstrate tricks for bringing large oceanic fish to the rail, and coach habits that make such trips possible in a small boat. Soon we were looking for crew.

The first pick was automatic: Mike Perra, the explosive ordnance disposal supervisor who lived nearby. Next was Tommy Frye, a carpenter friend who is also an obsessed fisherman and part-time mate out of Block Island. A former kickboxer, strong and fit in his 50s, he had picked up a nickname from his carpenter friends that suggested he would be ideal for wrestling big fish: “Silverback.” Rounding out the crew would be Tyler Hicks, the New York Times combat photographer who is my regular reporting partner, and who had taken up saltwater fishing with a passion.

Before the trip, Brown had given me an assignment: catch bluefish and have them iced on the boat. The day before, Jack, Mick, and I headed out to Block Island’s North Rip and trolled back and forth along the bar. But our luck was such that striped bass were thick that day. They kept jumping on before any blues struck. This created an unusual fishing scene: of a father and two sons grousing at excellent striper fishing, asking the seas for a run of blues. No bluefish came aboard that day. The next day at dawn we left the dock with only a few bluefish fillets Perra had brought from Massachusetts. To this we added buckets of bunker chum, flats of frozen butterfish, boxes of squid, and jugs of bunker oil. Perra had also brought along one of a shark fisherman’s mojo baits—a jug of bluefish blood he’d gathered himself, shot by shot, by bleeding blues as he hauled them in over the previous weeks. Brown was not quite content, and we stopped a short distance off the coast and briefly trolled a wire-line rig and picked up a midsize blue for fresh bait. Then we powered up and headed out.

Brown had sat around a table with us the night before and logged on to a satellite service that showed ocean surface temperatures offshore. He marked a spot of warmer water—almost 70 degrees. We arrived near the break after a three-hour open-ocean run.

The presence of trawlers merited a stop. As the big vessels’ crews hauled back the nets and the fishermen aboard sorted the contents, they tossed back the by-catch—the nonmarketable species. This created two long slicks of food trailing downtide from their sterns. Many species of offshore fish are opportunists. Like seagulls, rats, or bears, they are attuned to the habits of man. The open-ocean water column can be barren, and the sound of draggers sorting catch—the whine and grind of the winches retrieving the nets, and diesel thrum of idling engines—can be a meal bell for sharks and tuna, which will rush the boat from afar to feed from the discards as they are shoveled over the side. Would these draggers toll in sharks? Brown watched as other boats edged in tight, dunking heavy baits into the slick with thick rods and reels the size of mason jars. He looked into the water, which was clear and a shade bluer than the inshore green. He reached into the bait box, tossed over a dead squid, and watched it drift away quickly. The tide was moving fast.

He had a better idea. In a crowd, he knew, a boat needs to create its advantage. He told me to drive off about three-fourths of a mile and stop. Then he lifted a heavy bucket, riddled with drilled holes. Inside was a log of frozen bunker chum. He lowered the bucket into the water, lashed it to a stern cleat, and told me to drive back slowly toward the slick.

This was Lesson One: the drag bucket.

If there were sharks in the area, they would be moving toward those draggers. Brown had a plan to deceive them. As the bucket trailed the boat, the warm seawater was thawing the frozen chum, which leaked through the holes. We were making our own long slick, a drapery of blood and fish oil that grew as we moved. I steered the boat perpendicular to the draggers’ by-catch slicks, crossed them, and continued on for another third of a mile. Now any shark approaching the draggers from their sterns, and seeking a slick, would encounter ours, which led to our boat. As I cut the engines, Brown was already rigging three rods with Penn 80s loaded with 100-pound-test. For terminal tackle, Perra had attached a piece of 600-pound mono to an 8/0 600-pound swivel to 460-pound 7x7 stainless-steel cable to another swivel followed by 400-pound steel wire to a 14/0 hook attached with a haywire twist. Brown rigged each rod with its bait. The first held a whole bluefish, the second a bluefish fillet, and the last a whole bunker. Each was suspended beneath a party balloon, which he let out downtide. Each reel was in free spool, with only its clicker on.

A seagull landed beside the boat and paddled alongside. Optimism? Maybe. But Brown was of a practical mind. “If we don’t catch something within an hour,” he said, “let’s go.”

Shark On
It didn’t take long. After a few minutes one of the reels began to squeal. Something had taken the whole bluefish and was running off. Whatever it was, it was strong and fast. It had picked up an 8-pound fish and was propelling itself away at a clip. Brown gingerly lifted the rod from its holder as more line peeled away.

“Who wants this fish?” he asked.

Frye took the rod, keeping its tip low and pointed toward the fish. Three species were the most likely predators here: blue sharks, threshers, and makos. Threshers have small mouths. It’s best to let them carry a large bait for a while, so they have time to take it in. Frye waited. Several seconds passed. The fish stopped. Frye hauled back, hoping to drive the hook home. Nothing was there.

The fish had dropped the bait.

Frye reeled in the bluefish and examined it. It had a crescent of small bite marks. “Thresher,” Brown said. “Anything else would have mangled it.”

The fish had slipped off ahead of the hookset, but Brown had made his point. There were several boats around, fishing conventionally. None had any action. Brown had coaxed a fish toward his baits in minutes. Never mind the popular impression that shark fishing is simply letting blood and fish oil call in the beasts. There was something more to this.

A Turn For the Worse
The fishing went quiet after the first strike. After an hour, Brown had us move off toward the temperature break, where we set up again the same way—absent the draggers. Perra and Frye took turns ladling chum over the side and cutting butterfish into nickel-size chunks and flicking them over. As we drifted on the tide, the day took its own direction. To the west, low on the water, the sky turned a dark gray, leaning toward black. A lower ridge of clouds, white and swirling, formed a leading edge. The sea was calm. But we knew what this meant. “Let’s get those lines in fast,” Brown said. We were about to get slammed.

To the north, a larger vessel was visible, perhaps a 35-footer with a low tuna tower. It was powering up, too, and about to dash. We knew our boat would be faster before the seas slowed us, and that we could tuck in behind her and be available to help each other. The bigger vessel could also break the waves, making it easier for our smaller craft to keep headway in what would soon be steep, snotty seas. “Follow that boat,” Brown said.

But it was impossible. As the leading edge of clouds overtook us, the wind switched on at a gale. Sheets of rain came a minute or two behind. Sea smoke—formed when cold air drifts across warm water—swirled. Water lashed by sideways and pelting. Visibility shrank to perhaps 200 feet. And the seas climbed. The conditions rendered the radar useless. Even when we adjusted the clutter settings, fighting to steer and use the electronics at once, it read the air around us as a solid band of water. Judging from the picture, we might as well have been in a hole, and there was no chance of finding the boat ahead and vectoring toward it. The boat had vanished. We were alone. My mind flashed through the inventory as the bow slammed into a building wave. Sixty-five miles out: life jackets, flares, water, first-aid kit, emergency beacon, and floating radio. Solid crew. Luck. Had we packed luck?

Brown’s bright eyes sparkled, mixing wonder and concern.

For almost two hours we pushed north, rising, falling, moving slow. The spray lashed us. Hicks, Perra, and Frye huddled on the deck, and Brown and I stood at the helm. The storm moved east as we traveled, and slowly we came out of its grip and into the light. The wind died as we pulled away. Fortunately there was no lightning. We emerged to rough seas but manageable winds, and as it grew safer we accelerated. Three hours later we could see the outline of Block Island, and passed it by our right bow. We were drenched, stiff, and cold. But safe. Time for the dock. We came to an idle, and dumped over the extra chum, food for the crabs and gulls. With the engines quiet, we huddled and checked on one another, shaking heads at a trip stopped in a moment by a backdoor squall.

“Sea smoke?” Brown said. “You don’t get that very often.”

Lesson Two was intact: A small boat taking trips like these should have a weather radar service. That storm had not been in the forecast and there had been no warning of it over the radio as we fished. (The boat now has the service, which displays moving storms on the screen.)

Sharkers In Training
Lessons logged away, Hicks and I soon headed back to Afghanistan for work, leaving the rest of the fall fishing to Brown, Perra, and Frye. We all resumed our normal lives. And yet one trip can inform others in strange ways, because if accounts of large fish slipping the hook serve any purposes, then one of them is this: to inspire fishermen to return to the water, filled with ideas and hopes.

Jack and Mick had sat at our kitchen table the night before we departed offshore, and had listened to Capt. Brown talk about the sharks a few hours’ steam beyond the break walls. That was hours after they had chased bluefish with hopes of filling the bait cooler. And they had seen us return the next evening: soaked, cold, tired, walking slowly but talking fast. They were younger that day—aged only 8 and 6—too young for a journey toward the canyons in a 26-foot open boat, too young to put the brakes to fish that could weigh several hundred pounds. Their time offshore was yet to come, and in any event there would be no more chances to chase a mako or thresher that fall. But since that evening the boys have been preparing. When work allows me to be home in summer, and the blues turn up in schools and start hammering plugs off Point Judith, no fish can come aboard without the command, unprompted and eager, from one of the crew: “Bleed it, Dad.” And that is just a part of it. Each trip to the rips to haul bass, each drift over the deep rocks inside the Hooter Buoy, each night jigging squid at anchor on Nebraska Shoal, and each of the journeys back to port, with me at the helm and Jack and Mick standing in the bow on lookout as we thrum slowly through an all but impenetrable fog, each time, in other words, when we fish, they ask: When will you take us for shark?

Operation Thresher: Fishing for Monster Sharks off The Shores of Rhode Island

Online Editors — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:41:55 -0400

“Bleed it,” he said.

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

“There,” he said. “Boat.”

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

“Head over there,” he said.

This was Lesson One: the drag bucket.

A seagull landed beside the boat and paddled alongside. Optimism? Maybe. But Brown was of a practical mind. “If we don’t catch something within an hour,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Who wants this fish?” he asked.

The fish had dropped the bait.

Frye reeled in the bluefish and examined it. It had a crescent of small bite marks. “Thresher,” Brown said. “Anything else would have mangled it.”

Brown’s bright eyes sparkled, mixing wonder and concern.

“Sea smoke?” Brown said. “You don’t get that very often.”

A Sportsman at War

Online Editors — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:34:20 -0500

Sometime near midnight, in blackness near the Duxbury Pier Light, Mike Perra steers his 23-foot boat through shifting drapes of light rain and fog. The surface of Cape Cod Bay slaps the boat’s aluminum-plate hull. A single fish, a bluefish weighing about 5 pounds, rests in an icebox on the forward deck.

It is a weeknight in late September. The hour is late and the bay is empty of boats. But Perra is not done. He is still looking for fish, hoping to find a feeding school of large, fall-run striped bass, the sort of fish that provide meat and memories to fishermen during the many months in New England when the stripers are not around. The air is cool enough to pull fog from the sea, but it is not quite cold. Yet the night feels of a season nearing its end. Perra, who seems irretrievably at home on this boat, is packing out.

At this moment and in this place, he is Capt. Mike Perra, a fisherman who is a descendant of fishermen reaching back to the whalers of Nantucket. Twenty miles from the dock, between boulder piles and shoal, in darkness and wrapped in fog, he peers at the radar screen. His title—captain—is both permanent and transient. He is, after all, so committed to his sport and to life on the brine that he holds a master’s license allowing him to command vessels up to 50 tons. But on land his title shifts and is replaced by rank. On land, he is Senior Master Sgt. Michael Perra, the EOD superintendent of a specialized unit that destroys insurgent bombs. He’s also a husband and father soon to return for a third time to Iraq.

Much about him suggests a methodical mind. Here is a man who tends to details, as evidenced by his lean frame, unwrinkled plaid shirt, and trimmed hair that is inclining toward gray. Even on a day away from his military base he has a close shave. Now he studies the monochrome screen, where a small blip glows. His boat is approaching something in the darkness beyond his nose.

“You see a buoy out there?” he says softly, toward the broad back of his friend Scott Allan, who stands at the bow, watching the sea. Scott is large, John Wayne large, with a mechanic’s sure and heavy hands. His right hand bears the tattoo of a huge hook embedded in flesh; his left, a compass rose. A third tattoo, etched onto his neck, takes the shape of gills. They make a curious pair: the lifetime explosives specialist, buttoned down but game, and the bear-size, tattooed mechanic who could shove his way into a Harley Davidson ad. But the sea is a binding force. Together these men chase fish through the waters that wrap around Cape Cod—bass and blues, cod and haddock, tuna and thresher sharks—with an intensity that has filled this boat with meat. They have hundreds of hours together on the waves and can exude, in an instant, the collective mischief of men who regard each other as brothers. They are serious now. The chart plotter shows their treacherous nighttime route, with depths fluctuating along the channel: 46, 50, 71, 1, 4, 2. Look away, miss a buoy, the boat is stuck.

A can buoy appears ghostlike off the port side. “There it is, Mike,” Scott says. “You’re clear.”

Minutes later, Mike pushes the throttle forward. The boat jumps on plane, trailing a phosphorescent wake. He is running for the Cape Cod Canal. There, in the inky depths and unrelenting current, he plans to work live eels off the bottom, hoping to tempt striped bass from their ambush sites, enjoying a night of simple pleasures before he flies overseas to a land of ambushes of another sort.

EOD: to anyone who has been in Iraq in recent years, these three letters carry weight, instantly identifying those associated with them as people you want on your side. It’s shorthand for explosive ordnance disposal, a military community that for years was a largely uncelebrated service within the services, responsible for cleaning up unexploded ordnance and for rushing to the occasional bomb scare. Since the summer of 2003, when makeshift bombs began killing or ruining the lives of tens of thousands of service members and civilians in Iraq, the profession has become a frontline job, a principal means both of keeping roads clear and of developing intelligence about insurgent and terrorist cells. Deployed in teams that leave the bases and roam, EOD units are on constant call in the most dangerous areas of Iraq. In the best cases, bombs are found by other units, and the teams arrive before they explode. In the worst, the teams scour the smoldering ruins and debris, looking for forensic clues. After enlisting in the Air Force in 1982, Perra, now 42, chose the business of trying to outfox explosives for reasons that, years later, are best described as boyish. “I thought it looked cool,” he says.

A quarter century on, he finds he is in extraordinary demand. The Pentagon gathers specialists like him from around the country to create temporary units for rotations to Iraq, assembling the scattered parts into single commands. On this night, as Mike fishes, his newest unit, the EOD contingent of the 332nd Expeditionary Civil Engineer Squadron, is scheduled to fly to Iraq in November for a seven-month tour. Perra is in Massachusetts. The unit’s officer-in-charge is in Georgia. The 10 three-man teams they will lead together are spread throughout the United States. In a few days, they will all converge for several weeks of final training, and then board a plane for the Middle East.

This night is one of his last chances to fish.

Scott is unhappy about this, out of worries about the dangers his friend will face, and out of selfishness, too. In July 2007, Scott and Mike and another friend had taken this same boat, the Mean Mary, about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, and caught a thresher shark that weighed between 425 and 450 pounds. The fish, with its whiplike tail, was nearly 14 feet long. The preparations for that trip underscored Mike’s penchant for detail. Earlier in the summer, he had caught dozens of bluefish, bleeding each one and collecting the blood in jugs, mixed with fish oil and sand. The bluefish fillets were diced and cubed and spiced with menhaden oil and then frozen in 4-gallon plastic buckets. At the sharking grounds, they thawed and ladled this chum, making a trail of bluefish chunks. Now and then they poured the oily blood-and-sand mix over the side. The sand carried the rich smell deep into the sea, to call predators up from the bottom. The big thresher hit a bluefish fillet suspended about 15 feet beneath a floating balloon.

Scott relates the story wistfully. He wishes Mike would not leave again for Iraq. “I have told him that I’d rather he retire,” he says, as the Mean Mary races through the dark.

The boat comes down off plane near where the canal dumps into Cape Cod Bay. Mike has brought along pogies for chunking but also has a bucket of live eels. The night has been slow. Before sunset, schools of bluefish had been herding peanut bunker on the surface near the shoreline between here and Plymouth, and the Mean Mary had joined a small group of boats chasing them. But even though the birds were working and the water foamed with swirling schools, the fish were oddly selective. They boated only one. They have yet to see a bass.

Mike takes a rod rigged with a 2-ounce egg sinker, slides a hook through an eel’s jaws, and lowers the bait into the current under the boat. His mind is here, and there.

His closest call, he says, was near Abu Ghraib in 2004. He and his partner had been working on a dirt road, and they repeatedly drove over a bomb, known in his trade as an improvised explosive device, or IED. It was well hidden—a 155mm artillery round buried in soft soil—and they did not see it. After they passed over it a third time, an Iraqi teenager pointed it out. In this simple way, Perra was spared by one of the inexplicable and indifferent vagaries of war. Some IEDs are rigged to explode by pressure plates, set off by the weight of a tire or a foot. Others detonate upon the command of a spotter, someone watching from behind a darkened window or in the brush. EOD teams are extensively trained, and now, a few years into the war, they are thoroughly equipped. But training and gear only help so much. Some days, a man’s best tool is luck. “Bomber was out to lunch,” he says.

He is silent briefly; the attention this war story brings on him doesn’t suit him well. Everybody in EOD has their stories—except those who did not live to tell them. “All of the guys I’ve deployed with so far, they’ve all had close calls,” he says. “If you’re out there, you’re not doing one IED a day. You’re doing three or four or five. And you start talking about sleep deprivation and missing meals and getting beyond tired. A lot can happen to them, and it has.” He is fishing as he speaks; his rod bounces as he keeps a feel on the eel. He is a voice in the darkness, explaining the routines. As a man who faces bombs, he practices making each movement precise, drilling himself to stay alert and calm despite the drudgery, exhaustion, and repetition, because, in a way, the rhythms of war can be like the rhythms of the sea, where all is monotonous and easy for hours stretching into days, and then, in a blink, everything turns bad. If you are in the middle of it and luck has blessed you and you are spared in the first instant, your life depends on how well you have prepared the gear and the men you are with, and your wits.

There are differences, of course, between the perils of the sea and the perils of Iraq, among them the fact that in Iraq there are people all around who are trying very hard to kill you.

Mike explains why he is headed back. Of his 26 years in uniform, 12 were reserve time, leaving him short of the necessary 20 years of active duty to retire and receive a pension. But there is more: The men you are with. Those five words contain one of the basic lines of thinking that accompany a soldier’s experience of war. It is the ageless measure. One sure way a soldier can take an account of himself lies in how well he looks out for those beside him. Iraq is a mess; no sane mind would have wished that it would turn out how it has. But here is a reason to go back, something to commit to that is both larger and more personal than the reasons the White House and the Pentagon offered when the troops first went in. “My single biggest worry is losing a team, or losing a member of a team,” he says. “That’s where my mind is. That’s what keeps me awake at nights.”

This is a sleeplessness many vets know. Mike’s wife, Mary, says that when he has come home from other deployments, he has paced about the house in the night, looking out windows as if he is peering beyond the blast walls of a fire base. She hears him padding through their home and sees him silhouetted and quiet, gazing into the yard. “Sleep is one of the things you have given to Iraq,” she told him over coffee one morning. “It is gone.” There are remedies for this brand of insomnia. Anyone who seriously chases striped bass understands that striped bass, among their many attributes, are perhaps the best diversion for nighttime restlessness that the sporting life has given us. Bass feed best in darkness, especially big bass, which can relieve itches that are otherwise hard to scratch. In the darkness of this night, Mike emanates ease.

The men you are with—he downplays his other worries. What if that 155mm shell had exploded underneath his vehicle? What if, to borrow his own explanation for the life he was allowed to continue to live, that Iraqi bomber had not stepped away for lunch? Things happen quickly in Iraq. Lives change in a snap. Members of EOD teams often videotape their work, for debriefing and coaching later. On occasion these tapes have captured scenes of teams whose missions ended in a flash. One instant there are men. The next, a sickening crack and a roar of flame. All that remains is scattered helmets and boots. The Mean Mary drifts on the tide. Mike says he does not dwell on what could be. “I guess in a twisted sort of way, if you get blown up you don’t even feel it. So it doesn’t matter very much.”

There are no striped bass tonight, out here in the light rain, and so there are few distractions. He is looking for words that explain a form of psychological pragmatism that has adhered to frontline lives for as long as there has been war. It is a timeless armor, an acceptance of mortality, contemplated and compressed, that defends a man against nothing except his own mind. He has found that it fits. “My point is that you’re gone,” he says. “You’re there one minute and you’re not the next. You can’t think about it too much, because that is what it is.”

He fishes another hour. Still there are no bass. Mike turns the boat toward home.

In the morning, Mike rousts himself for work and heads down to a friend’s waterfront plot of land to walk his dogs. He lets them out of his truck near a stack of lobster pots, and they burst off into the brush. Mike sits on a weathered dock. Nearby, in the shallows, what seems to be a small school of stripers is thrashing near the reeds, apparently having cornered a pod of bait. Mike looks at the spectacle briefly but pays it little attention. Time is short. Soon he is headed back to a war. He has an unapologetic dismay about how it has been waged. “If we wanted to win, we shouldn’t have gone in with 130,000 troops,” he says. “We should have had half a million and gotten the job done.” But there is a difference, he stresses, between assessing the course of the war honestly and supporting the job that he and his fellow soldiers have been left to do. “I’m for the troops, obviously,” he says. Perra, who wears hearing aids, the result of a life around explosives, has the air of a man comfortable with silence, and with understatement. He is quiet for a moment. “Of course I’m for the troops. I’m one of them.”

He heads home to drop off the dogs before heading to the base. Mary puts out coffee. She has been giving the house a makeover and has specks of green interior paint on her hands. “That’s how I deal with the stress when he is away,” she says. “I paint and clean. The house was spotless when he got back last time.” She is a retired Air Force noncommissioned officer. Her brown eyes are unwavering and strong. Mike is leaving. She is not enjoying her urge to paint.

“I don’t want to be alone again for seven months,” she says, “and I have an opinion about the war that I don’t want to express.” She looks at her husband, who looks back, giving little away. She is clearly his match, facing down the man who faces down bombs. Mike is silent. She stares at him before deciding whether to finish her thought. She continues. “I have a feeling that we’re fighting a battle for 1,000 years, and we’re losing all these people. I don’t want him to go.” Mike sips his coffee. Most every family that has sent someone to Iraq has been here.

“This morning I saw his skivvies on the floor,” Mary says, “and I just started to cry.”

They sit for a while in the kitchen, looking out the window at the autumn foliage. His boat is on a trailer. Dogs roam their yard. Mary fills a coffee cup with words on its side. It reads: HAPPINESS IS IRAQ IN MY REARVIEW MIRROR.

Mike heads out the side door. Work calls, at least for now. He has plans to go fishing next year, after his third tour in Iraq. There is an early run of sharks in the Mud Hole off Rhode Island. Later, there are sharks on Stellwagen Bank. Between now and then the haddock will be thick, and Scott will take the boat out and chase them, to keep the Mean Mary in shape. By the time Perra’s seven months of thwarting bombs are over, the sharks and the striped bass will have started swimming back, and the two friends will ride the swells together, chasing schools.

Most military families face moments like this, especially since late in 2002, when the accelerated cycle of deployments began as it became clear that the United States would invade Iraq. Now it is five years later; each week fathers and sons and wives and daughters are headed to Baghdad or Bagram, to Kirkuk or Kandahar. In the banter between Mike and Mary, in the wordplay and knowing glances, the depth of their friendship is evident. Soon it will be Mike’s turn once again on the line. And then if luck and skill win out, he will be home again. Mary’s coffee cup says something about rearview mirrors; Mike’s front license plate reads: EOD. It is time to go. “I’ll be home,” he says—it feels like a promise—“in time for the fish.”

The Life Ahead: C.J. Chivers Teaches His Children to Fish

colinkearns — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:14:41 -0400

The transformation began in a matter of hours.

It started beside a rack of low-priced rods and a display of lures in a sporting-goods store. The selection was skimpy. But to my sons, Jack, 6, and Mick, 4, this was a portal to a secret world. For two years they had been stuck in a city. Now their fishing lives were about to begin. They wanted to know everything.

What is this? A swimming plug. And this? A jig. What do you catch on jigs?

We were on an unexpected summer vacation on the Finnish coast, not far below the Arctic Circle in a region bathed in light. I was trying to put together a simple kit for what I hoped would become a season of fishing school. Everything I touched yielded questions: What are bobbers? Why do we need a net? How does a handline work? What will that huge lure catch?

Pike.

I looked at that plug-a wooden jerkbait, light gray with black spots-and thought of heaving it out over submerged boulder piles populated by striped bass. Jack was looking at it, too. He was old enough to sense it: Only a big fish would smack a lure like that.

"What's a pike?" he said.

We left 30 minutes later with three rod-and-reel combos, a landing net, a small tackle box, and an assortment of sinkers, hooks, bobbers, and lures. Pike would come later. First we would go slow. Down the block was a marine-goods store. We walked in and bought kid-size life preservers and a few yards of rope. Farther down was a shack selling beach toys, where we picked up a wire fish basket and a canister of worms.

On our back porch the boys watched as I spooled reels, assembled the rods, and tied on small, freshly sharpened hooks. My hands moved by habit. I snipped the line with my teeth. My wife, Suzanne, had packed food: sliced apples, ginger cookies, water, and two containers of juice. I shouldered the backpack, picked up the rods, and walked off. The boys followed, firing questions on the way.

"What will we catch, Dad?" Jack asked.

"I don't know," I said. "We'll see."

I knew I should manage expectations before reaching the docks. I had been here two days, and busy most of that time. I knew nothing about fishing this place, except that we were far enough into the archipelago that the water might be less brackish than sweet. "Sometimes you don't catch anything," I said.

"We'll catch something," Jack said.

"Yeah," Mick added. "Look at the water. There's millions."

The harbor, a basin dredged in flats, was a series of wooden docks with slips for pleasure craft. The channel leading to the sea was a few hundred yards away. No one was fishing. Villagers strolled by as we set up. You three are cute, their quizzical glances said. But odd.

The boys crowded tight as I baited the hooks and flipped them out. "Watch the bobbers," I said. "If they move, you have a fish."

One of the bobbers plunged. Jack pounced on the rod and pulled back. Out of the water flew a yellow perch. It flipped on the dock until I lifted it in my hand-a green-and-yellow gem with orange pectoral fins and bright eyes. Its smell rose around me, grassy and fresh.

"What is it?" Jack asked.

"It's a perch," I said. He saw my smile and grinned back.

I had expected flounder as much as this. Mick grabbed the fish to study. My mind whirred. Yellow perch? These boys are about to learn.

An Accidental Academy

We had traveled to Ekenäs, a town of Swedish-speaking Finns, for the best of reasons. And then we were blessed with luck, though it did not seem so at first.

We lived in Moscow, and Suzanne had been expecting our fourth child. But she could not find a maternity hospital she trusted there. So three weeks before the due date we rode the overnight train to Finland, bound for a hospital with a good reputation. My plan was to set up the family in an apartment, head back to Russia for work, and return for the big day.

Suzanne woke early the first morning with contractions. False labor, we thought. She had delivered three children already. We had seen this pattern before. Within an hour it was clear the labor was not false. We started walking for the hospital with our three children in tow. We had no phone. The town was asleep. We did not know where the hospital was. Soon Suzanne was in advanced labor on the lawn of a gray stone church. I wondered, Would she deliver this baby here? A car came by. I hailed it and we piled inside. The driver, a man in a pressed white shirt and red tie, looked at Suzanne. She was between contractions, perfectly calm. Another contraction seized her. She stiffened and moaned. "This only happens in the movies," he said and put his car into gear. Ten minutes after we arrived at the hospital, William was born.

What did this have to do with fishing? Living in Russia and having William in Finland created certain problems. We could not travel with him to Russia yet, because he had neither a passport nor the visa required to cross a border. And getting a passport and visa would take weeks. All plans were upended. I would not be going back to Moscow this day. We had begun an impromptu vacation, marooned on an island in the northern Baltic Sea.

The idea appeared that evening, as Suzanne and I sat in the apartment's kitchen, gazing at our newborn. A summer-session fishing academy would be held. I would teach the boys to fish, preparing for the lives ahead.

Catching On

Summer twilights extend nearly to morning in Ekenäs, where drenching rains inland drain past the islands and create eddies in a sweetwater flow.

It was June 18. I sat in the glow planning lessons in fishing and safety skills. Some would be easy, like baiting hooks, setting bobbers, and unhooking and handling fish. Others would take time, like learning to jig. And a few would be frustrating at first, like developing the timing required to snap out proper casts. There would also be important lessons-including filleting, which required handling a finely sharpened blade-that they would only watch. But fishing is not just an assemblage of skills. It is a mentality, a way of viewing your surroundings in fundamental terms, as a naturalist and a predator alert to the world. I would teach my boys about the food web and the life cycles of whatever fish lived here, and the joys and satisfactions, embedded in their DNA, of harvesting their own food.

At first the perch came slowly. But after a few days of plumbing the harbor, we found patterns-and bigger fish. I sensed that we had stumbled onto a boon. I am a lifelong and essentially addicted fisherman. Proximity to gamefish has influenced where I attended college, where I have worked, and ultimately where my wife and I decided to buy a house in Rhode Island, for our upcoming move back to the United States. And I knew something important as I set out to teach Jack and Mick during this unexpected window in family time: that no matter how many lessons I had in mind, without a cooperative and tasty run of fish, my informal angling academy could flop.

But Ekenäs, as it happened, had yellow perch. And what could be better? Perch are small and handsome and feed in packs. They strike hard but fight lightly. They prey on a range of forage, feed in varied conditions, are comfortable in the shallows, and are not especially selective. They have no sharp teeth, making hook removal safe. They would be my assistants. If I could put the boys near the perch, the perch would do much of the teaching themselves.

Within a week, Jack and Mick were moving from epiphany to epiphany. Mickey, his blond hair trimmed tight and bleaching under the sun, was fishing simultaneously with a rod and with a handline. He handled the second line instinctively, like an ice fisherman of yore, wiggling a small vertical jig with a piece of worm. He quickly fooled a heavy perch, nearly a foot long. It flopped on the dock and he dove on it like a loose football. He was 4 years old, a child adrift in time.

"Jack," he shouted. "Jack! Look!"

Life Lessons, With Fork and Knife

At home I opened the basket's door and let a load of perch, perhaps two dozen in all, slide into the sink. Jack and Mick pulled up chairs and climbed up to watch. The sound of a knife being run across a sharpening stone filled the air. My daughter, Elizabeth, came running; she wanted to see, too. She was just past 2 years old and did not yet have the patience or swimming skills to spend long hours on the docks. But she was drawn to the creatures her brothers brought home. "Give me one," she called out. "Boys!"

We are meticulous with fish in our house, and I transferred most of the whole perch into the freezer before I cleaned them, to keep them cool until it was their turn.

I took a larger, thicker fish from the sink-a perch Mick had jigged up-and rested it on the board. Then I slipped the knife in, following the skeletal contours from head to tail. One fillet, grayish-white and with a tracery of fine black lines, was clear. I flipped the fish and removed the meat from the other side.

The pile of fish shrunk and the pile of meat grew. For all the perch's many qualities as an instructional fish, they have another value as well: They are delicious. A basket of cold perch is a natural treat on the order of a basket of peaches still warm from the tree. When we finished with the knife, I took a stack of chilled fillets, dipped them in egg and beer, and rolled them in seasoned flour. The boys pushed the chairs to the stove and watched the muscles that had powered their quarry around the docks sizzle and brown in a skillet of hot olive oil. Then we sat with a mound of small fillets, each one brilliant white and warm inside, feasting with green salad and tall glasses of milk. Their pride was self-evident. The boys were feeding us.

"Mama," Jack said. "We caught these."

"Yes, Jack," Suzanne said. "And you will catch many more."

The Old Student

I marveled at their progress. Once Willie's passport arrived at the embassy in Helsinki, I returned to Russia for work and to pick up our son's visa. When I turned up in Finland again in August, the boys wanted to fish.

They had come a long way in a few weeks. One afternoon on the dock, as Mick and I headed to the comfort station, I looked back and saw Jack, who was watching the rods alone, dash left, bend, pick up a rod, and swing back.

When we returned, he stood quietly, tending our three rods, staring at three bobbers. I pretended not to know. "How's it going?" I asked.

"I caught a fish," he said.

"Really?" I said. "What kind?"

"A perch. It's in the basket."

"Where's your line?"

"I put a worm on and put it back."

His bobber floated 30 feet from the dock.

The lessons had stuck. Jack was already a fisherman. He had caught a fish, unhooked it, lifted the heavy wire fish basket from the water, hand over hand with the rope, and put in his catch-by himself. Then he rebaited and cast the line back. There were things in that sequence I had not yet taught him.

That night, after the last fillets were put up, the fishing tackle stowed, and the boys had showered and gone to bed, I sat in the kitchen, sipping a beer. It was about 11 P.M. Jack padded into the room in his pajamas, carrying a spool of 6-pound-test. He had twisted its tag end into kinks. He had watched me tying clinch knots, Uni knots, and the Palomar. He handed me the spool, determination on his face. He wanted to know how. "Can I have a knot-tying class?" he said.

The New Student

Late one evening, I slipped Willie into a harness that held him at my chest and grabbed a spinning rod that rested across two nails on the wall. He was 7 weeks old. We had his passport and visa now. Soon we'd head back to Moscow.

We stepped outside. His tiny hands were balled to fists against my shirt. I hummed to keep him still. We stopped on the docks between the Polaris, a tug painted red, and the Suppan II, a dinner vessel that looked as if it might have plied the Mississippi a hundred years ago. The water was deeper here, and fish often suspended near the hulls. My rod dangled a small tin jig, a wafer-thin version of what Norwegians use for cod. I ran my thumb and index finger along the monofilament strand, checking for abrasions, then pulled steadily on the line. "The knot's okay," I said.

Willie watched everything and nothing, mesmerized. I ran the hook across my fingernail-sharp enough to catch.

Out flipped the jig. It hit the water with a plop like a dime tossed into a wishing pool. I watched it juke right, drop, and disappear. Four perch rushed the place where it passed, dorsal fins high. Then they dove. The line went limp. I knew what that meant: One had caught up with it. I snapped the rod back. It bent and stayed down. The fish made a few thumps as I reeled it toward the surface and swung it onto the dock.

"Look," I said. "Perch."

Willie's expression was unchanged. The fish meant nothing to him. I turned the hook out and dropped the fish into the basket.

When we left at 11 P.M., I was carrying a basket of 28 perch and Willie was asleep. I passed through the yard, climbed the creaking steps, dropped the fish into the sink, washed my hands, and placed the baby beside his mother.

The filleting began. It was a task so familiar that my age seemed to fall away. I was no longer a father of four. I was a child again, like my sons and daughter asleep in the other room. My sun-darkened hands worked automatically. My mind seemed empty, lost in the monotony of plenty, as if I were sorting fruit, as if time had stopped when I first started passing blades through fish more than three decades ago. Slice by slice, perch by perch, a ritual in a string of uncountable fish-cleaning sessions that blend together as one.

The Last Lesson

Two days before we were to leave, Suzanne made an early dinner and packed a bag of snacks. It was mid August. The first chill of autumn was in the air. By this time Jack and Mick had caught a few hundred perch, and we had packed away meat for winter meals. I hoped now for a graduation exercise. Our landlord, Robert, had given us permission to use his 14-foot boat. The three of us would try to catch a pike.

I had studied the chart, bought a pack of steel leaders, and explained the need for them to the boys. On one rod I snapped on a spoon; on the other a white plug with a red head. I cut the speed about a mile from the harbor and hung the plug over the side, working the throttle until it had just the right wobble. I cast it onto the surface beside the trailing wake and left the bail open. Coils of line left the spool as the boat pulled away. I closed the bail and handed the rod to Jack. "Hold the tip out," I said. "And hold on tight."

Jack flexed his body as if he expected to be yanked over the side. Then I cast out the spoon and handed the second rod to Mick. He nodded.

"A pike!" Mick shouted. Sure enough his rod was bouncing. He handed it to me, excited. The fish stopped fighting immediately. I reeled it close: a big perch.

We trolled on.

Anticipation drained out of the trip during the passing of an hour, and the boys rummaged in the cooler and found the snacks.

"Pay attention," I said. Too long without a strike-they were unconvinced.

We trolled around an island and turned south along the channel, zigging over its edge and then zagging over weed flats to its west. The Suppan II was heading out. It chugged down the channel. Dinner guests stood at its rail and waved. We had become scenery.
Jack's rod lunged hard. "Dad!" he shouted and tried to reel, but the fish was too heavy. He handed the rod to me. The fish came in thrashing, tried to dive under the boat, and then yielded, exhausted, and allowed itself to be led, mouth open, into the net.

"A pike!" Mick shouted. "A pike!"

I lifted it onto the boat. On the Suppan II, where the skipper had idled to watch, they were cheering.

I looked down at this creature in the net, white spots on pine green, its mouth gripping the balsa plug. It was only a 5-pound fish. But I understood what it meant. "We caught a pike!" Mick shouted. "A pike! A pike!"

A few minutes later the boat rose on plane in the golden light. We were headed back to the dock. Our season was over, and with it the first lessons of their fishing lives. The boys' short hair whipped about their foreheads as the boat skimmed along. None of us spoke. We were fishing partners now.

The History of the Kalashnikov

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 19:00:00 -0500

The designer ofthe most successful rifle ever made sat at a table in a quiet corner of theKremlin. He was nearly 86 years old, but he retained the upright posture of thegeneral he is. His pale blue gaze was firm and clear.

Virtually everyonein the world has seen the firearm that bears his name, the AK-47. AK stands for"the automatic by Kalashnikov," the one-time Red Army sergeant whocreated its prototype at the opening of the Cold War. The number signifies1947, the year the Soviet army accepted the prototype for mass production. Withits short barrel, stock stained a brownish orange, and distinctive banana clip,the AK-47 and its derivatives long ago transcended their medium. They are notmerely the world's most widely recognized firearms. They are among the world'smost widely recognized things.

Now nearly 60years and perhaps 100 million rifles later, Mikhail Kalashnikov is both ageneral in semiretirement and Moscow's unofficial firearms ambassador to theworld. He agreed to share with FIELD & STREAM his observations as adesigner and as a lifelong student of firearms, and to discuss his experiencesas a hunter and shooter.

On this day alimited-edition series of decorative daggers had been released for public sale,each bearing Kalashnikov's signature and the unmistakable silhouette of therifles he designed. The daggers, each of which would be offered for pricesrunning into the thousands of dollars, seemed to have been created as much toboost profits for the Russian firm that makes them as to salute the general.And so when a craftsman presented him with the first dagger in the series, Gen.Kalashnikov seemed to recognize the incongruity of it all. He abruptly reachedinto the decorative box, withdrew the diamond-studded weapon, and thrust andswung it a few times through the air. It was a reminder of just what a daggerdoes.

The gesture wasplayful, but its message was implicit: Tools are supposed to be used. Thingsare only as good as they work.

Of the many thingsthat the name Kalashnikov has come to symbolize, for better or for worse, oneis undeniable: functionality. Kalashnikov's series of rifles, now ubiquitous,achieved global circulation in part because of two reasons central to theirdesign. They are simple to use. And they almost never fail. In an industryoften enamored with the new, his rifles remain riffs on simplicity. They haveundergone only modest modifications in more than five decades.

Things are only asgood as they work. This is Kalashnikov, man and gun. "Some people think asimple weapon means that it is a slapdash job," he says. "They arewrong. To make something simple is a thousand times more difficult than to makesomething complex."

I have met withthe general several times in the last two years, visiting him at his dacha andin Izhevsk, a formerly secret city tucked deep in the forests of the Ural rangewhere Kalashnikov rifles are made, and now here at the Kremlin. He is a smalland spry man, with an often beguiling mix of Russian hospitality and militaryformality.

He is also a massof paradoxes. He mixes nostalgia for the Soviet Union with an appreciation thathis once-closed world has been opened. He is gentle and unfailingly polite butalso impassioned and eager to refute his critics. He seems to wear the worldlightly, but after spending years helping to arm the Soviet army and havingseen his firearms end up in the hands of terrorists, he admits to ponderingquestions of the soul.

His mind islargely decided. He designed firearms, he said, to defend the rodina—themotherland. When he set out to fulfill that task, parts of his homeland wereunder Nazi occupation. He does not rue his choices. "I am a gunsmith,"he wrote in his 1997 memoir. "That explains everything."

A Gun Born ofNecessity

Born in 1919, twoyears after the Bolshevik Revolution brought the Communists to power, he livedhis early years in poverty on the Altai steppe, one of 19 children his motherbore in a peasant home. The privations of Russian rural life in the early 20thcentury were such that of those 19 children only eight would survive. And thehardships of the steppe were soon exacerbated by the state-ordered miseries tocome. Stalin sought to bring the peasants under the socialist yoke, seizingtheir land, crops, and livestock and forcing them onto collectivized farms.

The Kalashnikovfamily would not be spared. Before Kalashnikov was a teenager, his family wasblacklisted and shipped to Siberia, where his father died trying to scratch outa living in a new land. The young Mikhail eventually fled exile and took up anillegal life in Kazakhstan—a daring move and a secret he would hide fordecades.

By the timeKalashnikov reached conscription age and entered the Red Army, the Sovietpolice state had reduced his country to near paralytic terror. But the rise ofAdolf Hitler and the threat of German invasion served as a unifying force for anation that had turned on itself. With war approaching, Kalashnikov thrived inthe army, finding in this social leveler a sense of purpose and an outlet forhis energies. It was at this point that he showed the first hints of his designsense. The fugitive farm boy, with little formal training, invented asuccessful tachometer that could be installed in his unit's tanks.

Germany invadedthe Soviet Union in June 1941. Kalashnikov, by then a sergeant, was injuredwithin months when a shell stopped his T-34 tank and sent shrapnel through hisshoulder. As Soviet history tells it, while Sgt. Kalashnikov recuperated, hebegan tinkering with infantry weapons, eventually setting his mind on designinga lightweight automatic assault rifle that would expel the better-armed Nazisfrom Russian soil.

Soviet infantryfought World War II with two basic small arms: one was the badly outdatedMosin-Nagant Model 1891 bolt-action rifle. The other was the PPSh series ofsubmachine guns, reliable arms that were effective but only at short range.Something better was needed, and that something was in the hands of the NaziWehrmacht.

It was called theMP44 Sturmgewehr (assault rifle), and it could fire in full or semiautomaticmode. Chambered for a revolutionary new cartridge, a short 7.92mm round thatwas less powerful than a full-size rifle cartridge, yet far more powerful thanthe pistol cartridges for which submachine guns were chambered, the Sturmgewehrmade a deep impression on the Soviets who faced it.

Borrowing,Brilliantly

"I worked forour soldiers," Kalashnikov said. "I knew that our soldiers did notstudy in academies. What they needed had to be simple and reliable."

His first rifle,made in a Kazakh rail yard while he was on convalescent leave, was flawed. Butthe fact that he had made it without advanced training or specialized tools,and on his own initiative, so impressed the Soviet officers who examined itthat Kalashnikov was transferred to a military design bureau.

As Kalashnikovworked, the Wehrmacht crested, withdrew, and collapsed. When the war ended, theRed Army sponsored a contest among firearms designers to create a new line ofrifles that would fire the 7.62x39, a "short rifle" round that wassimilar to the German cartridge. Kalashnikov was credited with developing therifle that won, the AK-47, which became the standard infantry rifle for theSoviet army.

What Kalashnikov'sdesign team did was not only to invent but to borrow and improve, oftenbrilliantly. As is common in firearms evolution, the automatic Kalashnikovbears distinct traces of previous infantry weapons. From the Sturmgewehr MP44,the AK-47 assumed its silhouette: pistol grip; short barrel; high front sight;and long, slightly curved magazine. Also as with the MP44, the weapon's gastube, which operates the action, is located above the barrel. This helps keeprecoil in a straight line and reduces the rifle's climb during automaticfire.

Its bore andchamber were chrome-lined (as had been done with the Japanese Arisaka rifle).This reduces corrosion when the rifle is not cleaned. The action and triggermechanism owe much to the American M1 Garand rifle. One element that made therecombination so successful was the spareness with which it was done. Therewere few parts in this weapon, and very few moving parts. And they were allsimple, strong, and relatively easy to assemble.

Kalashnikov alsobuilt considerable "slop" into the gun. Its tolerances, by Americandesign standards, were huge. As Kalashnikov explains:

"Mr. Tokarev[Fedor V. Tokarev, a noted Soviet arms designer] used to say that all partsshould be put together as tightly as possible, so that not a fleck of dustcould get in between. I, on the contrary, was always saying that it must bedesigned so that even a handful of sand wouldn't stop the mechanismworking."

And it won't. Norwill mud, dust, rust, ice, powder fouling, and neglect—it makes no difference.The AK almost always keeps on firing.

Soviet designersnever bought into the concept of precision fire for the average infantryman,and so the AK-47 is inaccurate by our standards, and the low velocity of itscartridge (2300 fps) limits its effective range to 300 yards or less. Butwithin those limits, it is remarkably effective. As it happens, almost allcombat occurs within these ranges, making the Kalashnikov a tool that isactually matched to its task and not to chalkboard standards that rarely existin use.

The UniversalRifle

No one knows forcertain how many Kalashnikovs exist, but one point is beyond dispute: They arethe most abundant firearms on earth. Since the Red Army accepted the AK-47prototype, licensed variants of that design have been made in at least 19countries, including Poland, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt,China, Russia, Romania, and Iraq. Knockoff versions, or weapons incorporatingmain elements of the Kalashnikov operating systems, were developed in Finland,South Africa, Israel, and Sweden. A single comparison provides a sense of thescope of the Kalashnikov's spread. The second most abundant rifle on earth isthe American M16; roughly 8 or 10 million have been made. Serious estimates putthe number of Kalashnikovs and its derivatives as high as 100 million.

This vastcirculation has given rise to one of the enduring myths about the general—thathe has not enjoyed any material reward for the product made in his name. It'strue that he did not become a wealthy man, but he himself rejects wealth as theonly measure:

"I am toldsometimes, 'If you had lived in the West, you would have been a millionairelong ago.' Well, they value everything in that green stuff. But there are othervalues. Why don't they see these values?"

He went on to listsome of them: two museums built in his honor, 30 years in the Supreme Soviet, ahuge bronze bust in the hometown from which his family was once exiled. Most ofall he seems to value his reputation for selfless labor, a Soviet ideal hestill holds dear.

A KALASH IN YOURFUTURE? These days the path of the Russian firearms industry that is entwined with hisname is less clear. With the Soviet Union long past and the remnants of itsfirearms industry struggling, Izhmash, the factory in Izhevsk where Gen.Kalashnikov worked, is now partially privatized. Although it seems likely tocontinue providing rifles domestically, its future as an internationalheavyweight is uncertain, in part because it must compete with its previoussuccess. (Markets are already flooded with its durable guns, making it cheapertoday to buy a batch of excess AKMs, the successor to the AK-47, in a bazaaralong the Pakistan border than to purchase a similar quantity fromRosoboronexport, the Russian arms trading agency.)

In recent years,Izhmash has tried a new approach to complement its past: manufacturing andmarketing sporting firearms based on the Kalashnikov design system, includingshotguns that it markets to upland bird and waterfowl hunters. It also makesbolt-action rifles for hunters and biathletes, all with solid wooden stocksreplacing the laminated plywood furniture of the familiar military line. Thesesporting arms—including the Saiga semiautomatic shotgun and the Saigasemiautomatic rifles—have found a market in Russia and have started to turn upin the United States.

The generalexpects that they will succeed, although it is too early to tell. "I thinkwith time American hunters shall hunt with guns designed by the man sitting infront of you," he told me. Such a notion would have been unimaginable notso many years ago. And the guns may not take. But when the general speaks, hedoes so with the knowledge that for half a century, everywhere Kalashnikovshave gone, they have found their followers and made their mark.

Anatomy of anAK-47

THIS IS ACROSS-SECTION OF AN AK-47 ADAPTED FOR MECHANIZED INFANTRY BY REPLACING THE WOODBUTTSTOCK WITH A PIVOTING METAL ONE.

Receiver The receiver and bolt have plenty of play in them, as do all the movingparts.

Fire Selector The rifle adjusts for semi- or full-auto fire via this selector lever on theright side of the receiver.

Magazine One of the trademarks of the Kalashnikov is the reddish plastic magazine. Itholds 30 rounds.

Gas Cylinder Its placement above the barrel lowers the line of recoil and makes the riflemore manageable.

Barrel The small powder charge of the 7.62x39 cartridge allows the use of ashort(16.34-inch) barrel.

Q + A WITHKALASHNIKOV

Given hisexperience at the center of the largest firearms enterprise on earth, F&Sasked Gen. Kalashnikov to discuss a variety of topics. Here is a selection ofhis answers, a window into his world.

On the differencesbetween a sporting and military rifle. A sportsman, unlike a soldier, does not have to run, jump, crawl, throw thegun, dive in the water, and so forth. Sporting guns are handled with more care.Also, the quality of the bore of a sporting gun is higher to ensure betteraccuracy. The weight of a sport gun is not of great importance. Some sportrifles are very heavy, hard to lift, but the accuracy is perfect. But for asoldier weight is very important. He has to carry so much himself, all hisammunition and so on.

On what he seeksin a sporting rifle. A hunting weapon should also work in any condition: when it is raining,snowing, when it is cold. The animal will not forgive your mistake if yourcarbine misfires or if the animal is wounded. So the hunting weapon must be asreliable as the military weapon.

On the differencebetween Russian and American sporting arms. They are very similar because approaches to sport shooting are similar all overthe world. I don't find any significant difference.

On the type ofhunting he prefers. The kind of hunting you choose depends on your age. There was a time when Iliked hunting waterfowl and upland fowl, hare, and big, hoofed animals. But oneneeds stamina to hunt this kind of game. To get a hare you must really run andjump a lot. At my age I cannot do it anymore. Or take a wood grouse. It is noteasy to hunt grouse at my age: You need good hearing because you can move onlywhen the dog bells. When it stops belling, you must stop moving. Now I have"professional deafness," and I only scare the bird.

These days I huntonce a year for big game, the moose. I go with a team of hunters. We've workedtogether and known each other for a long time. I tell you what: I am alwaysupset if we kill the game from the first attempt in a first drive. I would liketo stay in the forest longer to extend the communion with nature. And when westay there long, make two, three, four, up to five drives, it is moreinteresting, there is something to talk about afterward, let alone thecommunication with other hunters, communion with the forest and nature.

On teaching, orimproving, marksmanship. Lecturing on the subject is of no use. Of course, it is necessary to know basicrules, but only shooting helps to get the feel of it. One should get accustomedto the sound of a shot. Even trigger pulling needs practicing, especially ifthe hunter is not accustomed to the sound and is all tense expecting it.Shooting and more shooting! This is my answer to this question.

On what to expectof new firearm design. Firearms development will depend on the appearance of a new cartridge. It isthe common practice here and in the United States and any other country. We doour work on the basis of a new cartridge. When a new type of ammunition isdeveloped, we start working on a new model. We designers are the second stageof the process: first the cartridge, then it is our turn.

On whether smallarms design is a mature field. Small arms were first to appear and will be last to die.

For a huntingstory Kalashnikov shared with the author, go tofieldandstream.com/kalashnikov

[See Caption Above.]

The Father of 100 Million Rifles

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 04:25:00 -0500

The designer of the most successful rifle ever made sat at a table in a quiet corner of the Kremlin. He was nearly 86 years old, but he retained the upright posture of the general he is. His pale blue gaze was firm and clear.

Virtually everyone in the world has seen the firearm that bears his name, the AK-47. AK stands for "the automatic by Kalashnikov," the one-time Red Army sergeant who created its prototype at the opening of the Cold War. The number signifies 1947, the year the Soviet army accepted the prototype for mass production. With its short barrel, stock stained a brownish orange, and distinctive banana clip, the AK-47 and its derivatives long ago transcended their medium. They are not merely the world's most widely recognized firearms. They are among the world's most widely recognized things.

Now nearly 60 years and perhaps 100 million rifles later, Mikhail Kalashnikov is both a general in semiretirement and Moscow's unofficial firearms ambassador to the world. He agreed to share with FIELD & STREAM his observations as a designer and as a lifelong student of firearms, and to discuss his experiences as a hunter and shooter.

On this day a limited-edition series of decorative daggers had been released for public sale, each bearing Kalashnikov's signature and the unmistakable silhouette of the rifles he designed. The daggers, each of which would be offered for prices running into the thousands of dollars, seemed to have been created as much to boost profits for the Russian firm that makes them as to salute the general. And so when a craftsman presented him with the first dagger in the series, Gen. Kalashnikov seemed to recognize the incongruity of it all. He abruptly reached into the decorative box, withdrew the diamond-studded weapon, and thrust and swung it a few times through the air. It was a reminder of just what a dagger does.

The gesture was playful, but its message was implicit: Tools are supposed to be used. Things are only as good as they work.

Of the many things that the name Kalashnikov has come to symbolize, for better or for worse, one is undeniable: functionality. Kalashnikov's series of rifles, now ubiquitous, achieved global circulation in part because of two reasons central to their design. They are simple to use. And they almost never fail. In an industry often enamored with the new, his rifles remain riffs on simplicity. They have undergone only modest modifications in more than five decades.

Things are only as good as they work. This is Kalashnikov, man and gun. "Some people think a simple weapon means that it is a slapdash job," he says. "They are wrong. To make something simple is a thousand times more difficult than to make something complex."

I have met with the general several times in the last two years, visiting him at his dacha and in Izhevsk, a formerly secret city tucked deep in the forests of the Ural range where Kalashnikov rifles are made, and now here at the Kremlin. He is a small and spry man, with an often beguiling mix of Russian hospitality and military formality.

He is also a mass of paradoxes. He mixes nostalgia for the Soviet Union with an appreciation that his once-closed world has been opened. He is gentle and unfailingly polite but also impassioned and eager to refute his critics. He seems to wear the world lightly, but after spending years helping to arm the Soviet army and having seen his firearms end up in the hands of terrorists, he admits to pondering questions of the soul.

His mind is largely decided. He designed firearms, he said, to defend the rodina--the motherland. When he set out to fulfill that task, parts of his homeland were under Nazi occupation. He does not rue his choices. "I am a gunsmith," he wrote in his 1997 memoir. "That explains everything." [NEXT "A Gun Born of Necessity"]

A Gun Born of Necessity
Born in 1919, two years after the Bolshevik Revolion brought the Communists to power, he lived his early years in poverty on the Altai steppe, one of 19 children his mother bore in a peasant home. The privations of Russian rural life in the early 20th century were such that of those 19 children only eight would survive. And the hardships of the steppe were soon exacerbated by the state-ordered miseries to come. Stalin sought to bring the peasants under the socialist yoke, seizing their land, crops, and livestock and forcing them onto collectivized farms.

The Kalashnikov family would not be spared. Before Kalashnikov was a teenager, his family was blacklisted and shipped to Siberia, where his father died trying to scratch out a living in a new land. The young Mikhail eventually fled exile and took up an illegal life in Kazakhstan--a daring move and a secret he would hide for decades.

By the time Kalashnikov reached conscription age and entered the Red Army, the Soviet police state had reduced his country to near paralytic terror. But the rise of Adolf Hitler and the threat of German invasion served as a unifying force for a nation that had turned on itself. With war approaching, Kalashnikov thrived in the army, finding in this social leveler a sense of purpose and an outlet for his energies. It was at this point that he showed the first hints of his design sense. The fugitive farm boy, with little formal training, invented a successful tachometer that could be installed in his unit's tanks.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Kalashnikov, by then a sergeant, was injured within months when a shell stopped his T-34 tank and sent shrapnel through his shoulder. As Soviet history tells it, while Sgt. Kalashnikov recuperated, he began tinkering with infantry weapons, eventually setting his mind on designing a lightweight automatic assault rifle that would expel the better-armed Nazis from Russian soil.

Soviet infantry fought World War II with two basic small arms: one was the badly outdated Mosin-Nagant Model 1891 bolt-action rifle. The other was the PPSh series of submachine guns, reliable arms that were effective but only at short range. Something better was needed, and that something was in the hands of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

It was called the MP44 Sturmgewehr (assault rifle), and it could fire in full or semiautomatic mode. Chambered for a revolutionary new cartridge, a short 7.92mm round that was less powerful than a full-size rifle cartridge, yet far more powerful than the pistol cartridges for which submachine guns were chambered, the Sturmgewehr made a deep impression on the Soviets who faced it. [NEXT "Borrowing, Brilliantly"]

Borrowing, Brilliantly
"I worked for our soldiers," Kalashnikov said. "I knew that our soldiers did not study in academies. What they needed had to be simple and reliable."

His first rifle, made in a Kazakh rail yard while he was on convalescent leave, was flawed. But the fact that he had made it without advanced training or specialized tools, and on his own initiative, so impressed the Soviet officers who examined it that Kalashnikov was transferred to a military design bureau.

As Kalashnikov worked, the Wehrmacht crested, withdrew, and collapsed. When the war ended, the Red Army sponsored a contest among firearms designers to create a new line of rifles that would fire the 7.62x39, a "short rifle" round that was similar to the German cartridge. Kalashnikov was credited with developing the rifle that won, the AK-47, which became the standard infantry rifle for the Soviet army.

What Kalashnikov's design team did was not only to invent but to borrow and improve, often brilliantly. As is common in firearms evolution, the automatic Kalashnikov bears distinct traces of previous infantry weapons. From the Sturmgewehr MP44, the AK-47 assumed its silhouette: pistol grip; short barrel; high front sight; and long, slightly curved magazine. Also as with the MP44, the weapon's gas tube, which operates the action, is located above the barrel. This helps keep recoil in a straight line and reduces the rifle's climb during automatic fire.

Its bore and chamber were chrome-lined (as had been done with the Japanese Arisaka rifle). This reduces corrosion when the rifle is not cleaned. The action and trigger mechanism owe much to the American M1 Garand rifle. One element that made the recombination so successful was the spareness with which it was done. There were few parts in this weapon, and very few moving parts. And they were all simple, strong, and relatively easy to assemble.

Kalashnikov also built considerable "slop" into the gun. Its tolerances, by American design standards, were huge. As Kalashnikov explains:

"Mr. Tokarev (Fedor V. Tokarev, a noted Soviet arms designer) used to say that all parts should be put together as tightly as possible, so that not a fleck of dust could get in between. I, on the contrary, was always saying that it must be designed so that even a handful of sand wouldn't stop the mechanism working."

And it won't. Nor will mud, dust, rust, ice, powder fouling, and neglect--it makes no difference. The AK almost always keeps on firing.

Soviet designers never bought into the concept of precision fire for the average infantryman, and so the AK-47 is inaccurate by our standards, and the low velocity of its cartridge (2300 fps) limits its effective range to 300 yards or less. But within those limits, it is remarkably effective. As it happens, almost all combat occurs within these ranges, making the Kalashnikov a tool that is actually matched to its task and not to chalkboard standards that rarely exist in use. [NEXT "The Universal Rifle"]

The Universal Rifle
No one knows for certain how many Kalashnikovs exist, but one point is beyond dispute: They are the most abundant firearms on earth. Since the Red Army accepted the AK-47 prototype, licensed variants of that design have been made in at least 19 countries, including Poland, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, China, Russia, Romania, and Iraq. Knockoff versions, or weapons incorporating main elements of the Kalashnikov operating systems, were developed in Finland, South Africa, Israel, and Sweden. A single comparison provides a sense of the scope of the Kalashnikov's spread. The second most abundant rifle on earth is the American M16; roughly 8 or 10 million have been made. Serious estimates put the number of Kalashnikovs and its derivatives as high as 100 million.

This vast circulation has given rise to one of the enduring myths about the general--that he has not enjoyed any material reward for the product made in his name. It's true that he did not become a wealthy man, but he himself rejects wealth as the only measure:

"I am told sometimes, 'If youith the MP44, the weapon's gas tube, which operates the action, is located above the barrel. This helps keep recoil in a straight line and reduces the rifle's climb during automatic fire.

Its bore and chamber were chrome-lined (as had been done with the Japanese Arisaka rifle). This reduces corrosion when the rifle is not cleaned. The action and trigger mechanism owe much to the American M1 Garand rifle. One element that made the recombination so successful was the spareness with which it was done. There were few parts in this weapon, and very few moving parts. And they were all simple, strong, and relatively easy to assemble.

Kalashnikov also built considerable "slop" into the gun. Its tolerances, by American design standards, were huge. As Kalashnikov explains:

And it won't. Nor will mud, dust, rust, ice, powder fouling, and neglect--it makes no difference. The AK almost always keeps on firing.

Soviet designers never bought into the concept of precision fire for the average infantryman, and so the AK-47 is inaccurate by our standards, and the low velocity of its cartridge (2300 fps) limits its effective range to 300 yards or less. But within those limits, it is remarkably effective. As it happens, almost all combat occurs within these ranges, making the Kalashnikov a tool that is actually matched to its task and not to chalkboard standards that rarely exist in use. [NEXT "The Universal Rifle"]

"I am told sometimes, 'If you

Fishing for Dinosaurs

fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:20:00 -0400

They call it big lake, but that is not really its name. it has no official name. it is not even a lake. It is a trench filled with greenish-brown water in the east Texas forest, set between two prisons near the Trinity River. From the air it looks like an enormous chile pepper, long and thin, slightly crooked and a few hundred yards wide. Its secrets are bound to the Trinity's flow. When heavy rains fall, the river jumps its banks and swirls through the oak and pine, and fish ride with the rising water, swimming through timber and vine to the quietude of this place.

I had come here to see the converted and the fish that time forgot. It was noon on a Friday in late spring. The temperature had climbed with the sun. Big Lake exhaled the fresh smell of wet earth. Before me stood the converts, Curt Parker and Gary Satterfield, wandering the shore in ball caps, endlessly checking six neatly arranged rods they had baited with chunks of chopped drum and cast into the murk. Now and then something dimpled the surface out in the trench, a disturbance followed by swirls and glimpses of olive-green hide. Sometimes the swirls were as large as the wake left by a canoe.

The Trinity's fish were here. They had grown very, very big.

After more than an hour of waiting, as the fish oil from the cut bait spread its slick under the surface, one of the reels began to click. Then another. The men lunged for the rods and held them while the line on each reel played out in a long, fast whir. Around them was an odd mix of heavy equipment: a long steel bar, leather gloves, a stretcherlike frame that looked as if it could cradle a beached dolphin, a buck scale that went to 300 pounds. "Here we go," Satterfield said, readying for the bedlam ahead.

Parker nodded, stepped back, and slammed upward on the rod; Satterfield did the same. Splashing began out in the trench. The men had driven hooks into a pair of fish that are among the largest fish-eating creatures in the United States, alligator gar, a massive and primeval fish, a rough contemporary of the Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Near the bank, Parker's alligator thrashed about. Satterfield's was running away. He couldn't stop it. Sweat beaded his brow. The fish bore down in a long, straight run, making his reel wind as if he had hooked something offshore.

"Somebody give me a glove!" he shouted. "I'm burning up my thumb!"

[NEXT "Story Continued.."] Of all the lesser-known animals in north america, none is more impressive than the alligator gar, a prehistoric predator that seems unbound by the normal constraints on freshwater fish. Built like an armored slab of telephone pole with a rounded tail, a triangular snout, and small, primitive eyes, it is the grandest representative of a family that reaches back to the Cretaceous, having a life span that can exceed 50 years and sometimes growing past 9 feet and 300 pounds.

Its mouth is a hinged maw of daggers, with teeth more than an inch long and arranged in double rows. It defies comparison.

Alligator gar occupy a resonant place in the psyche of American fisheries. Creatures that dodged whatever killed off the dinosaurs, savvy masters of the ambush, giants, they do not merely fascinate. They inspire loathing. Among anglers who prefer the familiar lines and habits of trout and bass, alligator gar often fulfill the role of villains. To their name is attributed a rap sheet of dark water crimes: ruining populations of gamefish, tearing apart nets, smashing small craft, preying upon man.

Though legends of attacks by them upon children and swimmers are deeply suspect, and the few studies that have been conducted of their diet suggest they forage far more on unwanted fish than on species sought for game, alligator gar remain among the perennially accused. Their real offense seems to be combining ugliness with great size, and for this they haveeen punished like few fish.

Over the years the species has been shot, snagged, speared, and electrocuted, often to vigorous cheering. FIELD & STREAM was once part of the pile-on, reporting the catch of a 78-inch fish in 1952 by noting that "another net-wrecking fish destroyer was removed from the White River." The attitude persists. To this day, when fishermen catch alligator gar by accident, they often leave them flopping on the bank or break their snouts and toss them back. Either way the result is the same. The gar die.

Absurdities cling to the alligator gar's name almost as persistently as scorn, and when it has not been pilloried it has been parodied-nicknamed "Cajun barracuda" or "Arkansas tuna" and described as reaching lengths of 20 feet, which would put it roughly in the weight class of a great white shark. And they are a mystery. For all the attention they have attracted, only a basic sketch of their life and habits is known: They can tolerate brackish water. They spawn in spring. They feed principally on fish but also on crustaceans, waterfowl, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. Their eggs are said to be poisonous. Their swim bladder is laced with a network of fine blood vessels, which allows it to double as a lung and explains why alligator gar often rise to the surface to gulp air.

And they are in decline. A century ago alligator gar occurred in much of the central basin of the United States, roaming the Mississippi into the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, reaching Illinois. Today, after decades of persecution and dam building, they are largely restricted to the Deep South. No one knows how many are left, and estimates are grim. "They've probably been extirpated from 60 or 70 percent of their range," says Kerry Graves, manager of the Tishomingo National Fish Hatchery in Oklahoma, which has been trying to cultivate the species in captivity. Like everyone who has spent time around alligator gar, Graves has his stories. One is about what sometimes happens to gar surfacing on the Red River, where Graves caught his brood stock. "People sit on the cliff and shoot them with rifles," he says. "On sight."

How then, did two men become devoted to them? What would these men know?

[NEXT "Story Continued.."] We arrived at Big Lake in the morning, passing by one of the prisons, turning onto a dirt track, driving past a mucky woodlot and a row of deer hunters' cabins, and at last coming to the shore. There is a small band of dedicated gar fishermen in this country, and during the winter, on a referral from the Gar Anglers' Sporting Society, one of the groups that celebrate gar on the Internet, I had tracked down Parker and Satterfield. The summer before they had come across the bottled-up population of the big gar and had planned on fishing them in the spring, once the temperature rose and the fish began to move. They were in the rare position of considering whether to start a business guiding for alligator gar.

Now the water was warming, and Parker and Satterfield were unloading gear, producing 6-foot 6-inch saltwater baitcasting rods, all very stout. Satterfield tightened down a big reel spooled with 50-pound mono, passed the line through the guides and then through a 3-ounce egg sinker, and tied it off on a 3-foot leader made from galvanized braided wire. The wire tested at 2,000 pounds. Its end was crimped around a 5/0 treble hook sharpened so fine that when I ran it across my fingernail, it grabbed.

The pair worked with the practiced care of the crew on a shark boat, knowing that their tackle had to be just right and their equipment at the ready if they were going to beat big fish in close. As Satterfield prepared the rods, Parker put the rod holders on the bank, then reached into the cooler and lifted the bait-a freshwater drum, which he cut into wallet-size chunks, skin and fins on. He slid a few greasy pieces onto the treble and gave the first rod back to Satterfield, who sampled its weight, inhaled, exhaled, inhaled again, and then abruptly swung his shoulders back as he crow-hopped toward the water. The rod snapped forward, and the bait soared out and fell to the surface with a hearty splash, an experience about like shot-putting with a line attached.

Soon the rest of their methodology emerged. Each rod took its place in a numbered holder. Heavy work gloves were set on the bank nearby. After depositing the baits in a fan-shaped array in front of the boat ramp, Satterfield carefully arranged the large cradle he had designed and built, spreading it in the shallows beneath the spot where he hoped to beach one of Big Lake's beasts. Beside it he placed a long piece of rebar, bent at its end: the hook punch. He strung the buck scale to a shoreside tree and hung from it a rope. Then he contented himself to wait.

Parker and Satterfield did not start out this way. The two men work together at the nearby Coca-Cola plant and had fished together during the last few years. But it was almost always for bass. And Satterfield, who had lived his entire life in east Texas, already had his outdoor habits: small-game hunting, deer hunting in these same woods, bass, crappies. But fishing for alligator gar? Well, he was busy doing what he already loved.

It all changed on the Fourth of July in 2003, when Parker was visiting a friend in Waco who showed him some heavy tackle and suggested that they drive over to the Brazos River and try for alligator gar. Parker was incredulous. "I thought, 'Gar fishing? I'm a bass fisherman.'" But as he looked over the heavy tackle his friend offered him, he understood that alligator gar were enormous. Soon he was wading chest-deep in the Brazos, casting a big chunk of dead fish.

[NEXT "Story Continued.."] An hour or so later something lifted the bait. Parker let the fish run and slammed back. The rod bent hard. The fish didn't move. "It was like setting the hook into a brick wall," he recalled. Then it started to run, almost yanking the rod from his hands and stripping off about 80 yards before he could slow it down. Several minutes later, the alligator gar swam through the shallows, glimpsed Parker, and kicked off in an explosion of frothy water. It swam all the way across the river again. After 15 minutes of tug-of-war, Parker slid the big thing up on the bank. It was 6 feet long, green, mottled in a timeless camouflage, and very toothy. Six feet! His conversion had begun.

Back at work Parker's mind would sometimes drift. Where else can I catch alligator gar? He told the story of the 6-footer to Satterfield, who picked up on the enthusiasm and said he knew of a trench on deer-lease land where his cousin Wayne had shot a huge alligator gar with an arrow a few years ago. The trench had a nickname: Big Lake.

A season of experimrod back to Satterfield, who sampled its weight, inhaled, exhaled, inhaled again, and then abruptly swung his shoulders back as he crow-hopped toward the water. The rod snapped forward, and the bait soared out and fell to the surface with a hearty splash, an experience about like shot-putting with a line attached.

Soon the rest of their methodology emerged. Each rod took its place in a numbered holder. Heavy work gloves were set on the bank nearby. After depositing the baits in a fan-shaped array in front of the boat ramp, Satterfield carefully arranged the large cradle he had designed and built, spreading it in the shallows beneath the spot where he hoped to beach one of Big Lake's beasts. Beside it he placed a long piece of rebar, bent at its end: the hook punch. He strung the buck scale to a shoreside tree and hung from it a rope. Then he contented himself to wait.

Parker and Satterfield did not start out this way. The two men work together at the nearby Coca-Cola plant and had fished together during the last few years. But it was almost always for bass. And Satterfield, who had lived his entire life in east Texas, already had his outdoor habits: small-game hunting, deer hunting in these same woods, bass, crappies. But fishing for alligator gar? Well, he was busy doing what he already loved.

It all changed on the Fourth of July in 2003, when Parker was visiting a friend in Waco who showed him some heavy tackle and suggested that they drive over to the Brazos River and try for alligator gar. Parker was incredulous. "I thought, 'Gar fishing? I'm a bass fisherman.'" But as he looked over the heavy tackle his friend offered him, he understood that alligator gar were enormous. Soon he was wading chest-deep in the Brazos, casting a big chunk of dead fish.

[NEXT "Story Continued.."] An hour or so later something lifted the bait. Parker let the fish run and slammed back. The rod bent hard. The fish didn't move. "It was like setting the hook into a brick wall," he recalled. Then it started to run, almost yanking the rod from his hands and stripping off about 80 yards before he could slow it down. Several minutes later, the alligator gar swam through the shallows, glimpsed Parker, and kicked off in an explosion of frothy water. It swam all the way across the river again. After 15 minutes of tug-of-war, Parker slid the big thing up on the bank. It was 6 feet long, green, mottled in a timeless camouflage, and very toothy. Six feet! His conversion had begun.

Back at work Parker's mind would sometimes drift. Where else can I catch alligator gar? He told the story of the 6-footer to Satterfield, who picked up on the enthusiasm and said he knew of a trench on deer-lease land where his cousin Wayne had shot a huge alligator gar with an arrow a few years ago. The trench had a nickname: Big Lake.

A season of experim