I used to love doing things with my father. He was a big guy…six feet four…two hundred and twenty pounds…and “bald as a cue ball” as he used to say. He worked very hard all day during the week, so when I got to spend time with him on the weekends, it was important.
When I was eight years old, we moved to south Florida, and after some searching, my parents purchased a home on the water. Although the lot was a small one, as waterfront lots tend to be down here, the house had something wonderful…a dock. The dock was not a large one…only sixteen feet wide and just as long, but it was SO COOL for a little boy from New Jersey. One day, not long after we moved in, my father stopped at Reef Bait and Tackle on his way home from work. He purchased two “entry level” rod and reel sets, and some line, hooks, sinkers, and so on. Everything we’d need to fish from our new dock. And that very weekend, first thing Saturday morning, we started fishing. It was great fun. We caught a few little fish, which we very carefully threw back, and we even caught a couple of larger ones…Mangrove Snappers…which my mother fried up in butter and fresh ground pepper for breakfast. They were delicious. And I was as “hooked” as those snappers were. I found that I LOVED to fish.
I continued to fish with my father whenever I could. And as I got older, I started to fish alone. I had to…my father died young. And I discovered something else about fishing. It allows your mind to wander. It’s quiet most of the time when you fish alone, and very meditative if you allow it to be. And every time I fished alone, I thought about my father. That was nice. The more I fished the more my technique improved, and I started to try different kinds of fishing (plugs, fly fishing, ultra-light tackle, etc.). I liked them all. I learned to catch my own bait, tie my own leaders, sharpen my hooks with a clever little device made expressly for that purpose, and repair my rods and reels myself, with advice from an elderly gentleman who worked part-time at the tackle shop. He could fix anything, using the odd bits of hardware that he kept in hundreds of tiny, unlabeled drawers in a cabinet that covered the entire back wall. The place smelled of bait and chum and sweat and salt water, and sometimes I hung around there just for fun.
As I got older I fished as much as I could, but my time was now occupied by other endeavors. School, girls, cars and so many other things…all beckoning, vying for the few available waking hours. And when I went to work, my time was still very limited. but since I worked for the state, my weekends were, for the most part, my own. So I still managed to fish…not as often as I had in the past, but I still managed. And I developed a preference for one type of fishing.
The water behind my house is brackish, and so it favors two types of large game fish…the Tarpon and the Snook. With lots of advice from the grizzled, beer-soaked old timers that frequented the tackle shop, I learned how to fish for them, and I caught more than my share. I tried eating Snook, which most people seem to enjoy, and I didn’t like it. No one eats Tarpon. The Snook that I caught on a regular basis weighed up to thirty-five pounds, and the Tarpon, sometimes over one hundred. When I landed a big one, sometimes after a lengthy fight, I would climb down into the water, gently unhook the fish, measure it so as to calculate its weight, and release it. If it was particularly large, I would photograph it first. It was a lot of fun…at the time.
And then several years ago, I hooked the largest Tarpon of my life…well over one hundred pounds, and longer than my wife is tall. I fought it for nearly two hours, marveling at the powerful jumps that lifted it entirely clear of the water while it shook its massive head trying to be rid of my hook. No wonder the Tarpon is called the “Silver King.” Finally it was exhausted, as was I, and I brought it to the side of the dock. It was beautiful. I jumped into the water as I had so many times before, and unhooked the fish. It was too tired to swim away. I stayed in the water and “walked” it for longer than I had actually fought it, passing the water over its gills to try to revive it. I couldn’t, and it died in my arms. I felt awful. I had killed this beautiful creature for my entertainment, like the cruelest bullfight, only without the ceremonial trappings. I vowed then and there that this would not happen again. The only way to be sure was to stop fishing altogether, so that’s what I did.
I think of that one particular fish every time I look in the water from my little dock. No matter how beautiful the view, and no matter how much sea life I see, the sadness of that pointless killing to this day overwhelms me, although I know that it probably shouldn’t. I still eat fish fairly often, although I try to consume farmed species as much as possible. The Tilapia and the Salmon and the other farmed fish aren’t bad at all, particularly fried up in butter and fresh ground pepper.
Time is relentless. The Reef Bait and Tackle shop has been closed for many years, and the building that it used to occupy is now part of a drug rehabilitation facility. The elderly gentleman who could fix anything is long gone. I still miss my father, and I think of him every day. And I don’t go fishing anymore.
