Temptation gnaws on your mind like a dog returning to an old bone. One moment you’re distracted and the next there’s that bone again…tickling your brain, telling you lies, perhaps drawing you into danger. Quality temptation is relentless. It’s so good you may as well get on with it so life can move ahead.
A siren song so sweet you forget about the rocks.
Many a fish is hooked out of envy. The jerk of the bait forces the fatal response of “I will have this and you will not.” And nothing good comes thereafter. In the late 1980’s I saw this while fishing for yellowtail snapper in the Florida Keys. The fish would go into a frenzy, competing for the chum, and soon a bare hook on the surface would suffice as bait.
The Keys were much less developed back in the ’80s and the reefs and fishery were much younger and uncompromised by the legions of people who were to come. Annual trips to The Dry Tortugas and Bahia Honda National Park allowed for camping on islands and spearfishing the local waters. Snorkeling led to scuba diving and– thru some divine work by The Universe– a few friends and I were soon crewing on a commercial fishing boat, long lining and spearfishing for two weeks at a clip.
Long lining involves setting hundreds of baited hooks on a cable that is two miles long, about 10,560 feet. You anchor the starting end and the captain slowly charts a course along the hidden mountains below, careful to not get it tangled in the reef, just floating next to it, hundreds of feet below.
The waves can be relentless in the dark of the night as you endlessly bait hooks, attach to the main line, escort the line off the back of the boat. One clumsy move could embed a large hook in you, drag you off the suicide deck, which looms like a frightening monster ready to take you down and return you a cold stiff lump.
In order to allow efficient operations, the stern or rear of the boat is completely open. You can run right off it, you can haul large fish onto it easily, and you can quietly slip off, bonk your head and never be seen again. That’s the suicide deck. It has a certain charm.
If you get hooked while long lining there will be no stopping you from going off the suicide deck. Then down, down, down you go as the boat reels out more line. There won’t be any way for someone to get to you quickly. The only hope is that you can cut the line ahead of you so you can surface. Our brief training made it clear that in the past, when someone got hooked, things did not turn out well. The danger made you diligent and focused as hell.
When we weren’t long lining we were scuba diving with 54” spear guns on reefs, under shrimp boats, and on rich terrain which held fish in the shadows of giant sea fan fronds and infrequent coral heads. We carried large metal loops which go thru the mouth and gill of the fish, allowing you to haul your harvest along with you as you cover terrain. They can become a bloody mess and are attractive to sharks. In the ocean it is good to have eyes in the back of your head.
Red grouper, various snapper species, hogfish, amber jack, small tuna, and many more different species were shot in abundance. If some lobster came easy, they would be nabbed up. It was a lot of fun. And the rewards were delicious as well as valuable. Black grouper were much desired, and were particularly elusive. They departed quickly once our presence was detected. Others let their curiosity get the best of them, their last sensation, the vibration from an unfamiliar mechanical click. Then lights out.
With passionate practice, and powerful hours of observation, you can get pretty good at lots of stuff. When spearfishing, there were just a few things to think about that work and make things manageable, give you a decent chance at success and might keep you from dying. The elegant beauty of purposeful simplicity is manifested profoundly when mammals test their amphibian potential. You are over your head, and out of your element from the moment you immerse yourself, foreign and non-viable without aid. You may be required to have poise you never imagined to untangle the mess you got yourself into, and rise again. So keeping it super simple ups your odds in crisis. Everything about your apparatus must be elemental and instinctively correct. Failure isn’t an option.
Normally when you go for a dive you start with a full tank. 3200 pounds of pressurized air on your back in a cylinder. Totally safe. Those tanks are actually very tough. When you get down to a certain amount remaining you plan your surface and get on the boat with little air left in the tank.
However, sometimes things don’t go as planned and you end up getting back on the boat early due to poor visibility, excessive predators, rip tides, rough seas and the like.
Which- leaves you with partial tanks. The kind of tanks that gnaw at you, telling you that you don’t need that much air. You’re an expert now, a machine, an indomitable force of nature. The kind of guy who can hold his breathe for three minutes laying on the ocean floor, silently waiting to kill.
Black grouper had been so close I could sense them, a misty vision, a shadow that dipped out of sight in a blink and made you wonder what was real. Was there one last opportunity? Waste not the partial tank!!!!! Use all your conditioning. Don’t dive too deep. Not fatally deep. Just like on the edge of danger, insanity deep. Say 55 ft or thereabouts. Just over your head really. That’s not too much rope.
If you aspire to murder fish by number, the one , two, three is- disappear, be patient, and know your range. You have one bullet.
Disappear- every bubble is a red flag, it’s a smoking gun. So don’t breathe. Hit the down button on your buoyancy compensator and float just off the ocean floor, facing uptide.
And just relax… rebreathe in your mouth a bit, zone out. It’s in these moments your sensory management shifts. A whole new array of options opens up and your stream of consciousness deploys into new tasks. You feel the water running along your body and you fall into line with the current. You realize the horizon line where the canopy of growth meets clear water and all above it can be detected. You drop down making a judgement call on the ratio of seeing and being seen.
And then it happens. Your pattern recognition detects an anomaly. The movement that you are feeling as tidal is contradicted by a supratidal invertebrate. Something moves, outside of the tides power band.
And the camouflage fails.
Now you are ready to proceed.
With flutters from your fins, you move into the tide. The fish, as you- are efficiently nose into the tide, letting the water glide by and keeping senses open to catching a meal in the slip stream.
You are not there to efficiently minimize energy use. You are there to use a burst of energy to capture an objective source of protein. And so you move uptide.
You move from natural cover to natural cover, shifting your lines, elusive and non patterned. Movement in the ocean is as sound is to the air. The pulse thru the liquid is akin to the vibrations thru the air. So to be unheard you must move slowly and dully, in such small increments they are meaningless.
If you can see forever, it is meaningless. What is within your range is your world. My range with a tethered spear is about 12-14 feet. Then the velocity and retrieval cordage simply run out. At close range you can blow right thru a large groupers head. At the end of your rope you may stun the fish and had better get on it, get your knife out and pith the spinal cord before it takes you on a ride, entangles you- whatever.
When I got in the water on this dive, we had traveled to a stretch of relatively flat bottom, which was not a reef, not open sandy bottom, but a tufted mix of the two at 55 feet on average. The visibility was at 45 feet or so which means you can see but not too far. Perhaps an advantage for the aggressor.
I found a tank with about 800 pounds of pressure and figured if I was cool it would give me about 20 minutes of bottom time before it petered out. Maybe fifteen. Gotta watch those gauges and such that are there to insure you don’t die!
I dove alone. Generally not what you do, but we were at the end of the trip and relatively speaking this was a no brainer dive. The bone and the dog return.
When I dipped in and descended the tide felt good. Manageable- and so I dropped down and down until with a puff of air into my BC- I was just off the bottom, slowly flippering my way uptide.
When you are moving uptide you are using the cover that is there to mask your vibrations, your breath, and your physical presence. You may know the pulse of your advance movement by watching the smaller fish. If you move ahead 1 meter and they move one meter, they know well you are on their ass. And everything else gets the message- predator at 6 o’clock.
This trains your mind. Now all the relevance of your observations are flowing in this moment, and then, at the limit of range, something moves. What you thought was an extension of a rock or coral is now moving with mechanical purpose. No longer a fibrous, patterned, passive element,… a tank comes out of cover… and shows throttle.
The black grouper I bumped was large by my experience, which was zero. 35 pounds, who knew… it was compelling as hell.
It moved.
I moved.
It tacked a little and shot me a half eye.
I blocked my senses and attempted to go into a coma.
I became poised, examined my range and knew if there was a moment, it was soon or it was gone.
My lungs were blowing up and I was hyperventilating into my mouth as I lost control and tried to kick a spasm in my chest, longing for air… fail… and the fishes head turned to look. There was that unfamiliar mechanical click and then lights partially out.
The shot was spot on. Right behind the eye to the brain stem. But it was at the end of the paracord tether and had just embedded itself into the fish’s head. A small pillow of white flesh enshrouded the penetration. The expanders on the spear head had deployed and pushed the soft flesh outwards. I knew right away I had to get on this fish and finish it manually.
I abandoned the gun and worked my way up the line feverishly and was soon on the fish. In a practiced move I pulled my diving knife out of it’s quick release scabbard and shifted it in my hand into plunge position… and then…
The grouper woke up in a fight or flight chemistry that only experience can teach you. The will to live and escape is big medicine. And so this grouper went beast and shook itself out of my grasp, off the spearhead, and went to the nearest place of cover.
Under a brain coral. Brain coral are nomads that pop up and flourish in unique little spots. Perhaps, they are like the mushrooms of the ocean… reflecting some great network in a most fruitful location. They are often cavitated underneath. They stand on tendrils and arches, firm geometry that supports their weird growing head.
The grouper shot under the nearest one.
I swam the distance to get to it and then, something happened.
Perhaps the subconscioius mind, maybe the intrinsic mind,….I don’t know- but I kinda woke up. I checked my gauges, 400 lbs of pressure left.
No biggie. Based on my total lack of experience I now make a life and death prognostication, a flippant extrapolation… I Have time to get this fish and emergency surface. Bomb it for the top.
It’s under the brain coral. I have no time to reload. So I take my spear, lodge myself face into the coral head, and lunge with all I had into the fish with my spear.
And I gored it the middle, a high odds body shot.
It went nuts. The bottom of the ocean came up and blinded me like a blizzard.
The fish was on the spear but I knew it was just poked into.
And then I heard an unfamiliar mechanical vibration and I knew, I had breathed my last breathe.
The sickening wheeze of the respirator told the tale of the tape which was “you are outta rope and you’re gonna die.” I dare not exhale and hope for another breath.
Everything you do from this moment forward must be based on this last breath you have I realized.
So what are your dreams….to get this fish and surface.
So I hugged this brain coral, reach down underneath, and found the groupers mouth.
I slid my hand into it as it woundedly gasped.. and I grabbed its gill plate.
I pulled it out of its cave, my fist through its’ gills, swam backwards and kicked upwards…now fighting the compulsion to try and breathe water, my brain screaming, lungs exploding, heart at full tilt…
Now a really cool thing happens.
Atmospheric pressure. As I drifted up I became more buoyant because of the gas in my BC. Normally you would slowly let air out as you rose but I was blacking out. So the vest just got bigger and bigger and rocketed me to the surface, the relief valve going off! My lungs did the same, I was forced to exhale. I exploded onto the surface and was amazed to find myself there. I had no concept of how deep I was, where the surface was. The first few breathes were like none other and my bodies longing for oxygen, the desire to get air was amazing. It came just in time. 5 seconds more might have been too much. Always good to live to tell the story.
Low and behold, I had a big black grouper eating my forearm and thankfully was not too far from the boat. The blood dripping from my arm told me that this big fish had some serious teeth and I most likely had a bunch of razor like cuts in my arm. Sharks would be arriving shortly. The little reef sharks are everywhere and it doesn’t take much to attract them. It is always exciting to climb onto the boat and know that for one moment they can attack your legs.
I got on board and was overwhelmed by emotion, I slammed the fish to the deck and let out a celebratory war cry. For a moment I felt deeply alive in a new way. The light of life had not been snuffed out. It had only shimmered in the waves. There was a great gratitude and peace there to be had.
The grouper yielded giant filets that were enjoyed with friends on special occasions. Occasions treasured more, knowing that life is fragile, and we walk a fine line. The memories are greater still, and will last as long as the stories are told. Stories that have lessons in them. Stories that gnaw on your brain.
