Everything They Had (37 page)

twenty-five years ago I bought a house on Nantucket. I also bought half of a boat and began to fish for blues and stripers in the waters off our island. Blue fishing with light tackle is particularly exciting, and I started using spinning gear for the first time. My friends Dick Steadman (the other owner of the boat) and David Fine and I became part of a generation of Nantucket fishermen who used much lighter equipment in pursuit of blues than our predecessors had. Our friend Bill Pew, who owns a tackle shop there (and who is a leader in the light-tackle movement), estimates that in the past twenty years the test weight of the line has dropped from twenty-five-pound test to ten, eight and even six, and the weight of the rods has dropped accordingly.

My brother often came to visit me on Nantucket in the ensuing years. Our relationship, which had been exceptionally close when we were young (we were just twenty months apart, and my mother, for reasons that remain greatly puzzling to me, often dressed us as twins), had become quite difficult once we were grown.

Given the transient nature of our childhood—in the course of which we followed our father (before he was shipped overseas) to New York, Winsted, El Paso and Austin, Texas, among other places—we had become much more dependent on each other than most siblings. That closeness and friendship began to unravel later in our lives. There was too much knowledge, too much heat and too little space between us. We felt a rising sense of competition as we grew into middle age—especially after my brother, a doctor, announced in mid-career that he intended to be a writer as well—and in our later years we became edgier and edgier with each other.

But it was during that period that he came to Nantucket each summer, and by far our best times together were spent on the water. Fishing removed the tension of modern life and adulthood from our relationship and restored to us the far simpler moments of our boyhood. We once again became easy with each other, and we unconsciously measured the great good fortune of each day's bounty against all those years of barren fishing in Winsted. What we could not resolve as grown men we could at least put aside, by dint of going out on the water and becoming, momentarily, little boys again. Some fourteen years ago, a terrible tragedy took place: My brother was surprised in his home one night by a burglar and was shot and killed. When I was told, my mind immediately floated back to the endless image of the more than forty years we had spent together, often in strange and seemingly inhospitable settings. By far the best and happiest—and most enduring—of all my memories were those of us fishing together as boys and men.

A year ago, on the eve of my fifty-ninth birthday, I walked into Urban Angler, a marvelous store in New York City that sells only fly-fishing gear. I wandered around for an hour or so, just as I had in Rank's some fifty years earlier, knowing all the while exactly what I had come for. When I left I had spent some $1,500 for an outfit I could use in pursuit of sailfish. I had bought a twelve-weight rod, the standard for going after sails and tarpon, a modern graphite of great strength and flexibility and remarkable lightness. And it was the most money I had ever paid for a toy in my life. But I wasn't anxious about the money; I was anxious about taking a chance on something new, something I could easily fail at. No one likes to do that late in life, least of all someone who has been successful in his career. It is this fear of failure more than anything else, I think, that deters us from taking on our secret adventures as we get older.

For the kind of fishing I had dreamed about as a boy was now readily available to me. Travel had become infinitely less expensive; it was no longer a barrier between an angler and the great fishing waters of the hemisphere. With changing tax regulations, places that were once the exclusive haunts of the very rich—the distant lodges of the wealthy created to be shared only by pals or favored corporate customers—had become commercial retreats open to the public. Fly-fishing for saltwater big game had become an increasingly popular sport.

This did not mean I was ready to take a sailfish on a fly rod. I had nothing going for me save desire and my expensive new rig. Fly-fishing for sailfish, it should be noted, is very different from all other forms of the sport. In some ways it is more like trolling, since the actual cast is to a spot only about fifteen feet behind the boat. First, the captain trolls teasers—hookless lures to attract the fish; when a fish surfaces, the teasers are reeled in just fast enough to excite it and bring it ever closer to the boat. At the critical moment, these rigs are yanked from the water; the sailfish switches its attention to the fly and strikes.

That may sound easy, but it isn't. It does not account for the sheer disruptive madness when a fish so large comes so close to the boat and is about to hit so delicate a lure. It is very easy to blow it, and I had blown it several times on my last trip; to be honest, I had panicked. Each time, I jerked the fly too early or too late. I was not cool and loose the way those great fishermen in
Field & Stream
had always been.

So it was last April that I was on the dock at Quepos waiting to go out for my second shot. The fishing had been good, said our captain, Javier Chavarria, who seemed pleased that we wanted to fly-fish. To him it was clearly more exciting and more sporting than using the usual heavy trolling rigs.

On the first day, I fished like a donkey, managing to blow my first two strikes. On the second, I tried to set the hook by using the rod as instructed, yanking the line with my left hand. The sail threw the hook on the second jump. But I was getting there; for the first time, I sensed that my learning curve was improving. Meanwhile, my friend Gerry Krovatin, a young lawyer from New Jersey (who had been wary of coming with us because he was the least experienced fisherman in the group), took his turn, struck his first fish and boated it a half hour later.

The next morning, we had been enjoying two hours of leisurely talk on the boat when a big fish came up on the rigs very quickly. Once again there was an explosion of action and everyone ran to a station to handle the teasers while I prepared to cast. I tried to be cool and not to panic, to remember the requisite technique. The captain yanked the teaser out and the fish switched to my fly, took it, turned sideways and started to run. I hammered the line to set the hook so hard with my left hand—I had forgotten to wear a glove—that it cut my skin very deeply in two places. But I nailed the fish and the hook went in; then, as the fish made its first ferocious run, I slammed back on the rod to drive the hook in deeper. For the first time I felt sure I had done everything right. The fish ran about 150 yards and then it jumped.

The sail is a majestic fish. There is something both thrilling and terrifying about the power of that first run; skilled technicians have spent years trying to develop a reel that will not burn with the heat caused by a speeding fish. For the novice, it is a brand-new world. The first run is an introduction, both thrilling and terrifying, to a great fish. The angler feels the shrinkage of his own power and mastery even as he feels the quantum increase in the power of the fish.

It ran and then it soared, a jump that was about as definitive a statement on the desire for freedom as I have ever seen. It flashed silver in the sun, shaking wildly, and then it jumped again. I held my breath, but this time the hook held. There was yet another run and a series of jumps, all of them equally regal. I was torn by the combination of my awe at what the fish was doing and my certainty that somehow the hook would be thrown. For all fishermen there are special moments, and for me there are these: the first legal-size bass I caught in Highland Lake, with my father smiling approvingly; the nineteen-pound bluefish I once took off Nantucket with six-pound tackle; the first bluefish my daughter caught on her own; and finally this moment, a good-sized sailfish solidly hooked on a fly rod, breaking the surface again and again.

The fish jumped, I was told later, eight times. The fight lasted about thirty minutes and would have been an hour if the captain hadn't used the boat to close in. The fish, Captain Chavarria said as we released it, weighed about ninety pounds. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. My arms were tired as they never had been from any other kind of fishing. My left hand bled badly. It was a glorious moment.

In a way, it was not that much about skill (I lost the next two fish I hooked, both after long runs and several jumps). It was more about will and determination, the willingness to try something late in my late life even though I might fail at first. It was also about the preference of catching one sailfish on a fly rod instead of six or seven or eight of them on a heavier trolling rig. I had been right in trusting my instincts and sensing that this sport, which put so slight a rod against so powerful a fish, would touch something deep in me that had been waiting there all those years.

We had gone out early to catch the live bait, our boats hitting the water by 6:30
A.M.
We spent the first twenty-five minutes catching the bait, casting for small fish on the surface, stockpiling them, so to speak, and keeping them alive in small tanks on the boat in order to use them as bait for the larger fish. Catching the bait is great fun in itself, with a feeding frenzy on the surface, as the skipjack and bonito corral tiny minnows and drive them to the surface of the water, and the birds swirl around them overhead. We use the birds as a marker to find the skipjack and bonito we will need for bait. In this case the fish that are the hunters will be caught and immediately used for bait for the giant fish we now seek. On this particular morning it took only about twenty minutes to load up with bait. This was the second day of our fishing trip on the Pacific coast of Panama, and the first day had not gone all that well for me: the good news was that I had caught one sailfish; the bad news was that a relatively small yellowfin tuna, a brute of a fish, had smashed the spinning rod I had just bought for this trip—a rod that, compared to the ones I used fishing off Nantucket, had seemed much too heavy when I bought it but had lasted for only one fish. That did not bother me too much—what I really wanted on this trip was my first marlin, and if a small tuna could smash the new rod, I had cause to fear what a giant marlin might do. Thus, I gladly switched over to the rods supplied by the lodge.

It was a clear, beautiful day: by early morning the sun was out, the sunscreen was being slathered on, and we had a brilliant backdrop as we worked about a mile or so off the Panama shoreline. There is a sense, on a day like this, of simplifying everything in your life. I have fished all my life. My father shared his love of it with me when I was a little boy; he died when I was young, and it remains one of the rare things we were able to do together. There were special days in the period when we lived in Winsted, Connecticut, when we would fish Twin Lakes, fifteen miles away, instead of Highland Lake, the local lake, which were particularly treasured. Twin Lakes not only meant far better fishing, it meant that my brother and I could catch fish like grown-ups; that is, it meant that we could use live bait (minnows) instead of worms. That love of being on the water has always remained with me: the one way I know that I can leave behind the rest of the baggage of my life. I think of it as being a form of therapy. It is on the water where I am most serene, and I am a fervent believer in the ancient fisherman's motto, “Allah does not subtract from the allotted time of man the hours spent fishing.” Because of that, I have over the last six or seven years tended to make one trip each winter to a fishing resort like this, usually in the Caribbean, sometimes in South America, usually accompanied by four or five friends. We tend to be fishing connected; that is, we have all fished together back in the States—usually in Nantucket, where I have a home—and more often than not of an age (now in our 60s), although we have in the last year or two tried to bring in some younger friends. Though fishing is at the core of the trip, and we all fish hard, it is also true that these trips are the only all-male things that any of us do. None of us belongs to an all-male social club, and none goes to an all-male poker night. So there is something old-fashioned about it, and the conversation, particularly for men who are in general loath to reveal their inner feelings, is often surprisingly intimate, particularly as the week progresses, and we become increasingly candid with each other. My wife tells me that this is the male version of what she and her friends do every year when they go off to a spa. Certainly these trips are more about friendship than they are about catching giant fish. We have done this in a number of places: fished for peacock bass in Venezuela, for sailfish on a fly rod on one coast of Costa Rica and tarpon on light spinning tackle on its other coast, and, of course, for bonefish in the Bahamas. This is our second time in Panama.

On this, the second day, we had been fishing for only about forty minutes when the strike came. We fish two to a boat, and we rotate turns, trying to be as fair as possible as to what constitutes an at-bat, so that no one gets shortchanged. On this day I am fishing with Pete Van Horn, a Texas businessman, and I am up when the fish moves on the bait. “Marlin,” said the captain as the fish approached, and he whispered the word, as if not daring to speak too loudly for fear of driving the fish away. When a marlin strikes, you are supposed to let it take the bait and run until the fish turns the bait in its mouth. Only then do you try to nail the fish. So I watched nervously as the fish ran with the line, endlessly, it seemed to me at first, and then finally on the appointed signal from the captain I drove the rod hard and set the hook.