Sea Stories

  Fishing’s funny. Sometimes you catch some, sometimes you don’t. Funnier still: It’s been my experience that real fishermen don’t give a rip either way.  It’s a pure joy to be fishing, whether they’re biting or not.

   I’ve often wondered why that is, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is this: It feels so damn good to be intimately engaged in a push-pull contest with something you can’t see – some mysterious leviathan – that the mere anticipation of doing so is almost as satisfying as actually doing it.

   Either that, or it’s just plain nice to be outdoors and putzing around near some water.

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   Recently, I had the good fortune of spending a half a day on a fishing charter with my son, two friends, and Captain G. We went reef trolling off the coast of Puerto Rico in Captain G’s groovy 26-foot panga. Four lines in the water, two running shallow, two running deep. The confident purr of twin 80-hp Yamahas, propelling us over some mild morning chop. Non-stop anticipation.
 
   Sad to say, we pretty much got skunked. My son snagged a cool-looking remora, early on, about as long as his arm – but that single fish was both the beginning and end of our action.
 
   “I call ‘em sneaker-heads,” declared Captain G, as he unhooked the remora and let it back into the water. He was referring to the unusual sucker pattern that’s found on top of a remora’s head, which proves handy for hitching rides on sharks and what-have-you. It really does look remarkably like a shoe print. Aside from that textured head patch, the rest of a remora is slim and slick, like an eel.  “Not much fight in sneaker-heads, on account of how they’re built. They’re set up for slip-streamin’. But, I do remember a time when a sneaker-head damn near broke my best rod in two . . .”
 
   And, thus began Captain G’s stream-of-consciousness, a near-uninterrupted flow of some of the most interesting and entertaining stories I’ve had ears on in quite a while. Around three solid hours’ worth. Being a sucker for a good story, I was immediately hooked, and the fishless fishing trip suddenly morphed into something else altogether.
 
   Below are a few of the zingers, which I’ve taken the liberty of naming/titling and conveying in Captain G’s own, first-person reckoning. Enjoy!

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Battle of the Bulge
But, I do remember a time when a sneaker-head damn near broke my best rod in two . . . sure enough. He was a little guy – way smaller than the one you just caught, buddy. Anyway, I knew he was on the line ‘cause I saw him take a top-water jig. Anyway, I was reelin’ him in, and it was the usual sort of thing – not much pullin', ‘cause he was so slippery and all. And then, all of a sudden, I felt him dive down and start pullin' like a real bastard. S’cuse, my language there. Anyway, he was pullin' like a sunuvabitch, and I couldn’t figure out where he was getting his strength from, for the life of me. Well, I kept workin’ on ‘em and workin’ on ‘em, but I could see it was startin’ to strain my rod and reel. He had this rod – this one, right here – just about bent in two, if you can imagine such a thing. No foolin’. I was just about to cut him loose – I mean why risk it all for a little old sneaker-head, after all, right? – and suddenly everything went slack. Either he was coming straight up on me, or he was gone. So, I started reelin’er in like crazy, fast as I could, and then I saw him. That little scamp had latched himself onto a huge sea turtle – I swear the shell on that sunuvabitch was this big! Now, a sea turtle can bend a rod, let me tell you!

UFO Sightings – Part 1
We sure have been seein’ a lot of those Tic Tac UFOs, lately. You know the ones that zip around and change directions really quick, way quicker than they ought to? Way quicker than anything the military’s got, I can tell you that! Anyway, these are the ones that are oval-shaped like Tic Tacs. The candy, I mean. And they're all through here. Lately, most of ‘em are day-time sightings, and most of ‘em are either coming up from underwater or plunging down into the water from pretty far up. They don’t make much of a splash. On account of their shape, I guess. And they don’t slow down any before they hit the water, either. Just swooosh, and they're in, just like that.
 
Japanese Know-how
My buddy, Sam, runs a deep-sea charter out of Panama. The Pacific side. That's the world’s best fishing down there, hands down. We like to compare notes. The fishing’s been kinda slowing down around here over the past coupl’a years, I gotta be honest. All the good fishing around here is moving up into the Carolinas, as far as I can tell. They say it’s because the water temperatures are on the rise, but that’s not my take on it. The warmer the better, as far as fishing goes. It’s because of all the crap in the water. Not just the stuff you can see, like big rafts of plastic and Styrofoam, either. It’s the stuff you can’t see that's the real problem. It’s all the fertilizer run-off. It’s making these huge algae blooms all throughout the Gulf Stream, starving out the plankton and bait fish and such. What a mess. So, I’m asking my buddy, Sam, about the scene down there in Panama, and he said the fishing’s on the slide down there, too. I asked him if he’s seeing all the crud in the water down there too, and he told me, yeah, there’s some of that down there. It's everywhere. But the real problem for him is that Panama sold off its off-shore fishing rights to Japan a few years back. You see, I’ll be the first to admit that the Japanese build the best motors, the best boats – heck, the best electronics equipment, too. Best in the world. Man, they’re good. And, well, if you hand over a piece of water to the Japanese, it turns out they’re really, really good at fishing too. It’s like a whole technical operation with them. They send up these spotter planes, and they have computer simulations and all sorts of technology. They’ll target an area, and then their giant net-trawlers will come in in droves and scoop out every living creature for hundreds of miles. Probably thousands. If you want to totally destroy a piece of water, give the Japanese a go at it. They’re just after tuna, pretty much. Most everything else that they net gets killed and dumped – and that’s causing tons of problems too, ‘cause of all that bio-waste. I hear the Japanese even have some sort of special deal that allows ‘em to kill 37 whales every year for so-called scientific research. I don’t use air quotes. But it makes me want to. Research! You can bet all those whales somehow end up in the Tokyo fish market. Yep, you can bet on that, alright.
 
UFO Sightings – Part 2
My wife saw one of those big ones last year. One of those huge triangle jobs with the blue lights around the whole thing. This was night time, and it was hovering about 500 feet off shore. Pretty close in. She figured it was about that same distance above the water, too. Anyway, she’s watching this thing and it’s not doing anything but just hovering, so she’s wondering if she ought’a go inside and get our telescope. We have a nice setup for star-gazing and looking at planets and whatnot. You’ll be able to see Jupiter real clear tonight, by the way. Anyway, just as she’s about to turn away, she sees a blacked-out helicopter heading out to intercept this thing, so she stays put to see what would happen, see? Well, this helicopter flew all the way from one end of this thing to the other – my wife could see the helicopter’s tiny body block out the blue lights as it moved along, and she figured it took at least two minutes to fly from one end to the other. This thing was massive. Then, about the same time as the chopper gets over to the right end of the thing, the whole shebang tilted up on it’s side, to where she could see the whole triangle of it, and then . . . zap-o! It shot straight up and away, as fast as she’s ever seen anything move, straight up into outer space.
 
White Rabbit Hunting – Part 1
There’s a lot of racism down here, but it’s not what you think. Go over to the D.R. – the Dominican Republic – and the most popular sport over there is white rabbit hunting. That’s where snipers will hide out up in the hills next to golf courses and try to shoot the white guys down on the greens. It's best to get ‘em while they’re mid-swing or mid-putt. There's a whole points system. Needless to say, I don’t get over there too much. I wouldn’t go golfing anyway. Golf’s never been my definition of fun, even without the snipers. I prefer being out here fishing. The big blue is my green. Most of the blacks in the DR are of direct African descent, so they have no tolerance for white faces, and I can’t really blame ‘em, thinkin’ about all the terrible things happening over there. My buddy, Keller, was over there in his sailboat, end of last summer, anchored in this beautiful little bay for a week or so. He heard about how a catamaran with South African registration made the mistake of anchoring there. These two white guys anchored this beautiful catamaran there. They were swimmers, snorkelers. Probably a coupl’a gays. They weren’t even coming to shore for anything – they were just out there for a couple of days to enjoy the waters. And that’s just it – They’re out there in this bay frolicking, splashing around all leisurely and affluent and all – and all the while they’ve got this giant South African billboard announcing where they're from, see? – which is their boat, I mean. That’s no good. Anyway, they’d be out there swimming and snorkeling every day, and then some white rabbit hunters finally took a coupl’a shots at them from the shore somewhere. They didn’t get hit. But, you better believe, these guys pulled up anchor and got out'a there in a hurry after they got shot at. And guess what they found? Get this: Somebody had tied a dead horse to their anchor chain. There wasn’t much left of it, all eaten up by sharks, see? Bullets were the least of these guys’ worries while they were out there splashing around. That’s what you can expect in the D.R.
 
Neighbor Hood
Around here, all the neighborhoods are run by minor crime lords and angels. You gotta be on the right side of the fence of it all. You’d be crazy to buy a house in Puerto Rico – as a gringo, I mean. My wife and I, we’re renters. It’ll be different when we get up to the States. We’ll take the plunge up there, buy a place probably. When we first were moving into the place we’re in now – oh, I guess it’s been about three years now – my wife says to me, “Rats. I left my cell phone in the car.” We looked at each other, and we both knew immediately. We’d been inside the house for around an hour, unpacking boxes, and the car had been parked out front the whole time, with that damn iPhone laying in the front seat for the whole world to see. Sure enough, we go out there and the window’s smashed, and her phone's long gone. It was a new one too. Live and learn. Anyway, a coupl’a days later, I’m out on the boat, and my wife’s home alone, when there’s this loud banging on the front door. We’ve got one of those little peek-a-boo sliders on the door, so my wife goes up, takes a look, and here’s this big, muscle-y dude with full sleeve tats and neck tats and a ton of piercings and a bald head and whatnot, and he’s smiling and holding up my wife’s phone and wiggling it, in a real taunting kind of way. So, my wife’s thinking “Oh shit – this thug’s gonna try to sell me my own phone back,” right? Well, if you knew my wife, you’d know that she was more pissed than scared, and she was just about to mouth off, when he slips the phone to my wife, through the hatch, giving it back to her. Then he tells her that he knows the two punks that stole her phone, and that he took care of them, and that we’re not going to have any trouble like that anymore. That guy’s Mateo. He’s the angel in our hood. If you’re in good with him, everything’s cool, if you know what I mean.
 
UFO Sightings – Part 3
I had a Navy pilot in my boat about a year ago. Him and two of his buddies. He was a helicopter pilot. Man, we really got into some mahis that day! Anyway, he was telling me about how he was doing a recovery on one of those recoverable target things. You heard of those? It’s like a missile they use for practice, and after it burns up all its fuel, they can go retrieve it because it just splashes down and floats until they come get it. So, he’s out fetching this thing. What he does is hover over this thing in his chopper, and they send a frogman down a cable to where he’s sitting right on top of it, straddling it. The frogman has to hook up a harness or some such thing, and then he gives ‘em the thumbs up, and they haul'em up out of the water. So, anyway, this frogman’s down there and he starts to panic. He starts flapping his arms around to abort the pickup and all. And it’s then that this pilot, and his co-pilot, and the guy operating the winch see this massive dark shape coming up from the depths, right up under the missile. Well they start cranking the frogman the hell up out of there, and when he’s about halfway back up to the chopper, they all see this big black ring start to appear in the water, surrounding the recoverable missile. Then they watch as all the water drains out of the middle of the ring, so it looks like the missile is sitting a big emptied-out swimming pool or somethin’. Except all painted black. Then this door snaps closed over the top of the thing, gobbling up their missile, and the whole contraption sinks back down to the depths. Apparently, the frogman got kind of messed up from the whole experience – you know, PTSD or whatever – and they gave him a desk job after that.
 
 
White Rabbit Hunting – Part 2
Used to be, my wife and I ran a little motel here on the island. It was just a six-unit place, but it was nice and tidy and it was right on the water, and we loved it. My wife, especially. That’s her cup of tea. It really is. Well, we had this Puerto Rican housekeeper, Isabel, and she was really great – for the first year, anyway. Then stuff started going missing. First it was just a few towels, here and there. And then I remember it was a coupl’a small things and a painting from one of the rooms. And then it was a DVD player. Well, we thought: Oh shit. The thing is, you have to be really careful if you’re a white person and you fire a native person here on Puerto Rico. You really have to have all your ducks in a row, cause the courts are rigged, and they’re almost always going to side with the islanders. So, we talked to a lawyer, and he said document, document, document. You also have to give out at least three written warnings, and follow this specific recipe, and that kind of thing. Well, anyway, we finally caught Isabel on-camera lifting some stuff, and we thought, OK, we’ve got her now, dead to rights! No such luck. We fired her, and then she turned right around and took us to court, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t rake us over the coals. We lost everything. I lost my boat I had at that time. We lost the motel. And then here’s the real rub: Isabel went and bought our motel! She took it over! Her brother and her! She used her settlement payoff to buy it! How about that for a rub? Hey, after that, we’ve just been maintaining a super low profile, man. That’s the best way to be here in the islands. Just real chill, you know what I mean? You really don’t wanna own property here, that’s for sure. We rent a place, and then we’ll just jump to another rental if it doesn’t work out. My wife works remotely for an outfit out of Florida now, and I’ve got my boat here running fishing charters, which is as simple as it gets. Nobody’s getting this boat from me, that’s for damn sure – I’ve got that worked out with Mateo – the neighborhood guy I told you about. We’ll probably only stick around this crazy island for another coupl’a years, and then move up to the Carolinas somewhere, maybe start a B&B. Here’s a doozey: Not long after it was all said and done, Hurricane Irma blew through here and nailed that little motel, reduced it to rubble. I heard that Isabel and her brother didn’t have any insurance on it, either. The ocean’s always been a friend to me. The Great Equalizer, if you know what I mean.
 
High Tech Spooks
There’s a lot of military stuff around these parts. There used to be a big Navy base on that island over there in the distance. It’s all shut down now. Islanders over there were getting sick, getting weird cancers and such. The typical sort of thing, so the Navy tucked tail and got out of there. But the damage was done. They’ve been trying to clean it up for a while now, and that’ll be going on for quite a while, I guess. I know a kid that’s making 29 bucks an hour doing cleanup. That’s real good money anywhere, but it’s mega money here. He might as well be royalty. ‘Course, you couldn’t pay me anything to mess around with that stuff. Heavy metals and that sort of thing. And worse. I had a guy on the boat about a month ago who contracts for Raytheon. It was him, his wife, and his old college football buddy and his wife. It was a lousy fishing day. The water and wind were perfect, just perfect – but they just weren’t biting for some reason. His football buddy was funny – He even played in the pros for a season, before he tore up his knee. I asked him what it was like playing pro football these days, ‘cause I know some guys from back in the day, before all the safety stuff licked in. He said there’s still tons of injuries, said he couldn’t even remember the whole second half of some of the games he played in. Crazy, right? Anyway, this Raytheon guy was telling me how there’s a radar beacon down off that island in the distance that’s tapped into the main power cable feeding the island. Apparently at full-tilt, that sucker can suck a third of all the juice going to whole the island. There’s two more of them, way out in the Atlantic somewhere, making this enormous triangle. The idea is that they can detect small boats like this one, small low-flying aircraft, and stuff you normally wouldn’t see on radar. It was funded with the War on Drugs money. But the real thing of it’s not to do with radar – it’s to do with directing this huge power zap that’ll knock out anything inside the triangle. I asked the guy if they could microwave all of us on this little boat, right now, if they wanted to. He got all quiet for a minute. I didn’t push it. Then his wife spoke up and said when he gets quiet like that, it means he’s not supposed to be talking about this stuff. He had a couple beers in him, and I felt kinda bad for asking him questions. I don't want him gettin' into trouble on account'a me.
 
Captaining
See that kid over there? That’s Pablo. He only 17. Just a kid. He’s out here on the water, most every day, rain or shine, even in the worst of it. That’s a 20-foot panga. Single engine. Just look at him go! That’s kid’s the best I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t have a pot to piss in, but he’s got that boat, and he knows how to run it, and he’s making a living. That crazy kid really needs a NOAA setup, like I’ve got here, though. Otherwise, the ocean’s gonna have its way with him, sooner or later. It’s not a matter of if, but when. You know what I mean? NOAA’s expensive – like 500 bucks. And then you’ve got to re-register it every year to keep it all up to date. But if I get tossed overboard, I’ve got the automatic ignition kill and this thingy here starts sending a distress signal to a satellite, right away. Like immediately. All you gotta do is keep some air in your lungs for ten minutes and the Coast Guard’s gonna be fishing you out. I keep telling Pablo he better get himself one, running that boat the way he does. I’ve been thinking about saving up to buy him one. It’ll be my parting gift to him after I sell my boat and move up north!

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   Yes siree, the fishing was for the dogs that day. But really: Who needs to be hassled with catching mahis or barracudas or remoras, when you can catch some stories like these?
 
– O.M. Kelsey