Man Trip (7 page)

I looked at him. “A fish could kill you? I mean, if it’s not a shark?”

“Marlin are the most violent creatures in the sea,
worse
than sharks. They eat and attack, eat and attack. That’s their life.”

“Attack what?”

“Whatever, wherever, however. Fish. Floating logs. Sometimes swimmers and even boats.”

Boats!

“I’ve seen one that weighed in at over sixteen hundred pounds. This was in 1984, a while back. The boat that brought it in was the
Black Bart
, skippered by a guy named Bart Miller. That fish was seventeen feet long! So big they had to drag it back to the harbor behind the boat. No way they could get it aboard.”

Baja Bill winked. “No one got hurt bringing that one in, but more than a few boats around
here have scars where marlin have rammed their bills into them.”

Whoa! Then I grinned. “You’re just making this up, right?”

“No, no! I’ve heard of marlin charging up and leaping right into the boat!”

“Uh …”

I looked toward the island. It was a long swim back.

Baja Bill leaned close. “One time when I was ’bout your age, I went fishing with my dad. It was right after a hurricane blew through the islands, and there was a lot of debris in the water. The ocean was still choppy. We were way outside the harbor,
way
out, when we saw something coming toward us in the rolling swells.”

“Another boat?”

“Couldn’t tell what it was, just this huge
thing
barreling toward us. It made white water
as it moved, so we knew it wasn’t just something floating, like a log. It was
alive
.”

“Ho,” I whispered.

“We had to get out of the way, because it was going to ram us. So my dad gunned the engines. Soon we could see what it was—a giant, angry sperm whale, heading like a submarine to who knows where. But here’s the thing: that’s when I learned how dangerous a marlin can be.”

“But it was a whale.”

Baja Bill nodded. “Sure was, and when it passed us we discovered why it was so angry.” Baja Bill sat back and looked at me. His eyes widened. “Stuck in its side were not one but
two
marlins. Rammed their bills right into that whale and couldn’t get out. They were dead, and that sperm whale was raging mad.”

I gaped at him.

“My guess is they went nuts and attacked the whale for being in their territory.”

Baja Bill looked gravely out over the ocean. “So you see, Calvin, you can never let your guard down when you’re dealing with a marlin.”

“If you do, you could die,” I said.

“If you do, you could die.”

W
e headed north along the coast, trolling five lines behind the boat. By then it was around ten o’clock. The sun was clear up over the mountains, and it turned the ocean sparkling blue.

Baja Bill had his back to the wheel and was
studying the wake behind the boat. Whatever was out there, I sure couldn’t see it.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“Just watching the action of my lures. See the ones way back there, how they jump in and out of the water?”

I squinted. “Not really.”

“Keep watching. You’ll see them.”

Ledward poked his head up to the flying bridge. “Is Bill filling your head with tall tales?”

“You should hear this one about a whale that—”

Ledward put up his hands and laughed. “No, no, not that old one he made up about the sperm whale with the marlins stuck in it?”

I looked at Baja Bill. “It’s not true?”

“Of course it’s true,” Baja Bill said. “Don’t listen to him. What does he know? He’s a farmer, not a fisherman.”

Ledward nodded. “True.”

“On the sea, things can happen that you don’t expect,” Baja Bill went on. “Every day
you can get something wild and crazy, or you can just get a long lazy boat ride. You never can tell. That’s the thrill of it.”

He looked up and eased the boat in closer to shore. “Let’s take a serious pass along that undersea shelf I was showing you,” he said, tapping the depth finder. “Maybe we can snag an ono.”

“Do they attack boats, too?”

“Nah. They’re small, not like marlins.”

I watched the wake, looking for the lures. All I saw was a bunch of bubbles and white water. After a while I went down on deck and sat in the fighting chair.

The sun was warm, the engines hummed, and the ocean was as smooth as glass. I sure wished my friends could have been there. It kind of surprised me that I hadn’t really thought much about them. All I’d been thinking about was what was happening that minute. I was—

Zzzzzzzzzz! Zzzzzzzzzz!

One of the fishing rods bowed out over the
water. Something had hit a lure. The reel screamed.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

Baja Bill brought the engines to an idle and scrambled down from the flying bridge, Ledward right behind him. The boat rocked in its own wake, exhaust gurgling out the pipes.

Baja Bill grabbed the screaming rod and yanked it out of its chrome holder. “Calvin! Get ready! This one is yours!”

I fell into the fighting chair.

Baja Bill worked the wailing rod over to me and stood it in the rod holder between my legs on the chair. “Hold it here, and here,” he said, and showed me how to pull and reel in the line.

I gripped the rod with my left hand and grabbed the
reel handle with my right. I tried to pull the rod back. Whoa! Whatever fish we’d hooked was as strong as a goat!

I pulled back and reeled line in when I bent forward.

Back and forth, inch by inch, bend and reel.

I gritted my teeth and puffed out my cheeks.

Ledward put his hand on my shoulder. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

It took ten minutes to get the fish up to the boat. I could see it flashing silver and blue under the surface. It was long, the biggest fish I’d ever seen!

When the leader rose up out of the water, Baja Bill grabbed it with a gloved hand. The leader was made of wire and was attached to the lure. “This leader is wire because fish have sharp teeth!” he said.

Ledward slapped me on the back. “You just caught yourself an ono, Calvin.”

I stayed in the chair, stretching to see what the fish looked like.

Baja Bill peered over the gunnel holding
the gaff, a huge steel hook on a pole. He reached over the side and hooked the splashing fish. It thumped the side of the boat. Baja Bill knocked it out with a wooden mallet, then dragged it aboard.

It was wet and shiny and long and silvery with blue stripes. It had about a hundred small, sharp-looking teeth. Good thing the leader was wire.

Baja Bill stuck his hand in its gills and held it up. It was almost as tall as me!
“This,”
he said, “is a nice catch. My guess is it’s around forty pounds, and for an ono, that’s a big fish.”

Ledward opened the fish box built into the deck, and Baja Bill lowered the ono into it. Ledward tore open a bag of ice and spread the ice over the fish.

I couldn’t believe I’d just caught it. “He was strong,” I said, holding the rod with trembling hands.

Baja Bill grinned. “But you were stronger.”