The Evening Star

We left at dawn after loading Bobby’s 24 foot Mako with my fishing gear.  He had a boat, a little tackle, some fish sense, and less experience.   I had all the tackle in the world, too much fish sense, and no boat.  The day was blustery but seemed to be warming calmer; the bay side water was wind-blown a milky aqua green.

Bobby pointed out bird life to his three son-in-laws as we sped south toward Snake Creek. Bobby spent many years as Chief administrator for the US Fish & Wildlife service.  He’d learned a great deal about the different species of birds and fish and took a more scientific approach to fishing than most of the adventure seekers and adrenaline junkies who I wound up mating for.

I felt a little awkward aboard the boat with Bobby and his three son-in-laws for no other reason than that I knew Bobby as a man’s man.  He’s the kind of man who’d ask a future son-in-law if he was sure he knew what he was getting into before he got into it.  But I didn’t want to assume too much and I didn’t know how Bobby felt about each of his daughter’s husbands except that he called them by name.  I called them, “the boys”.

Bobby is a loner. He moved to the Keys to fish.  Now and then he brings his friends to town but mostly he’s accustomed to hearing his own voice. If you go against what he believes or you screw up, he tells you how he feels in a voice that suggests he doesn’t care if you drop dead on the spot.  When Bobby is happy with you his praise is equally as real.  A good fisherman, Bobby is, but I wondered how any of his boys would take it if he got fired up and spoke to them in his drop dead voice.  The boys were Vianni from Miami, Terry from Vero Beach, and Casey from someplace in Virginia.

They all looked like miniature Bobby’s.  They were strong and thick boned.  They each had a little too many ballast stones hanging over their belts.  And their faces told of hard work and devotion.

Bobby told me Vianni was an offshore sailboat racer with a great deal of experience on the water and that, although Terry and Casey liked fishing the ocean, they worked too hard to get out much.  They all looked glad to be with Bobby on his boat in the early morning and that began to ease my discomfort and set up the luck of the coming day.

I’m a morning person but rarely make small talk on a boat traveling fast in the morning.  I did take the time to explain how to use the two different kinds of reels, and that when the fish are on that I sometimes give orders like a drill sergeant but that all I’m doing is trying to get the job done, and, most importantly, that if I barked at them to do something a different way they shouldn’t take it to heart.

We stopped at Crocker reef and caught a dozen Speedo mackerel.  They don’t always come to the back of the boat but soon a large school of the small fast, gray-backed, silver-sided fish had collected at the chum bag.  Bobby is in his early seventies.  A big man, at six-foot two and two-twenty, he was too big to stand beside us and help catch the Speedo’s that were collected at the stern of the boat.

He sat in his captain’s chair and drifted his bait back and caught two or three baits on his own, claiming he was doing it better and faster than the rest of us at the stern.  Catching the baits on the light tackle got to be fun but I could see that the live well was getting full and wouldn’t hold many more Speedos’.  I nodded to Bobby and he said, “Let’s go fishing!”  And he fired up the 225 Yamaha.

Bobby does not drive his boat, “The Loose Moose” slowly unless we’re trolling live baits.  The west wind had flattened out the sea and the Gulf Stream swells were far apart.  It was up one gradual hill of water and down the gentle slope into the next swell, the hull of the “Loose Moose” slapping once over each peak. There was a rhythm to the journey that infused you with a feeling of tranquility and made us grin at each other with the calmness of the ocean, the beauty of the day.   Soon we could see other boats trolling through the rips that form around the Islamorada Hump.

We did not fool around when we got there, trolling small feathers and eels briefly for tuna and such with no luck.  Bobby wanted the boys to fight something big and I suggested we try deep drops for amberjack, grouper, snapper, or shark.

The current at “the hump” was honking. (Honking to me means that when you’re idling or anchored that you can see the current pull at the back of the boat like it’s trying to rip off the motor) Running the big Yamaha at 20,000 Rpm’s we barely moved forward against it.  You could see where the stream piled up against the underwater mountain and pushed up in a rip about fifty meters across and a quarter-mile long.

The trick was to get far enough upstream of the rips so that you had time to drop your bait to the fish before you ran over the hump and dropped off into deep water.  The hump rises up to about 270 feet at the peak before sloping off into five hundred feet of water at the base.  The big bottom fish collect on top of and just behind the peak waiting for bait fish.  Amberjack congregate by the thousands on offshore humps to breed.

“A little further.  C’mon.  A little more.” I urged Bobby.

“You must be joking.  That’s far enough.  Put it down.” Bobby said.

“By the time it’s down we’ll be past the fish if we start here.  Believe me.  It doesn’t hurt to be too far upstream.”

We had run a hundred yards upstream of the rips that marked the leading edge of the hump. You can never be too far if your drift is right. I wanted to be at least three hundred yards.

Bobby put the engine in gear and ran another fifty yards.

“Put ‘em down now, Davey.  If we ever get to where you want the day will be gone.”

I opened the live well and took out a thrumming Speedo and threaded the circle hook through his upper lip and let him out the length of the ten foot leader behind the boat and then went to the reel and brought back the drag lever on the Penn International 50 T dropping  the 12 ounce sliding barrel sinker so that the bait wouldn’t twist up the line on the way down.  The current was strong and I allowed the line to go off the open spool with little to no thumb on the spool.  The bait grew smaller and smaller as it dropped down into the agate blue stream.

We were through the rip and over the flat of the hump before you could drink a cold beer fast and I didn’t know weather I’d let out too much line or not enough.  I stopped the bait with my thumb and waited, hoping it leveled out, and drifted naturally, through the balled up amberjack I could see on the fish finder.

We were off the back of the hump getting into deeper fishless waters but I didn’t say anything yet, hoping.  And then the line began to draw out under my thumb and I allowed it to go out evenly before I threw the drag forward and handed the pole to Vianni.

“Reel in fast and when you feel him set the hook.  Now! Reel, Reel!  Reel!” I said. “ He’s a long way down and there’s stretch and bow in the line and reel up tight and set the hook again! Again!  Yeah buddy! You set him good.” I said.

Vianni reeled in, set the hook, and the tuna stick bowed – and he was pulled backwards into the stern of the boat, line spinning steadily off the reel.

“What a fish.  Whoa!  What kind of fish could it be that takes line like that?”  Vianni managed to grunt out between grimaces.

“Could be a big tuna.  Could be a big grouper.  Not likely it’s a marlin but there’s a chance.  A shark or a wahoo would have cut the mono unless you lip hooked them.  Probably a big old amberjack,” I said, winking at Bob Stevens.

Bobby winked back.

A big amberjack is a right of passage for many first time offshore Key’s fishermen. The amberjack is the fish where many visitors to the Keys learn how hard it is to fight a big fish out of the depths.   Once you’ve caught one you rarely want to catch another. Catching amberjack is the kind of fight most people would call work.  And then, once you’ve bested the beast you’ve got to clean it.  The belly is usually all full of worms and they are often tough and bland when cooked. They are, however, very good smoked.

After about five minutes of line going out Vianni had held on long enough to stop the fish.

“Pump up and reel down.  Pump up and reel down,” I instructed.

Vianni set to it, pumping up and reeling down, the pole bending, the rod butt digging into his belly.  I took out one of the rod belts and wrapped it around his belly and cinched it tight and he grinned and thanked me once he’d centered the rod butt into the belt. Vianni, by his own admission, had never caught a big fish.  He was already sweating heavily and his temples were bright red with pressure as though he’d been holding his breath.

“Take it easy and use the rod.  They’re built to tire fish.  You’re not.”

“He’s built to drink beer and eat peanuts,” Bobby cracked.

Terry and Casey laughed.

“What are you two laughing at?” Bobby snapped.

Vianni told Bobby what he thought Bobby should do with himself for razing him and went back to fighting the fish.

“Those other two shouldn’t laugh.  They haven’t had their turn at it.  Should they, Davie?”

I shrugged my sympathy toward Terry and Casey.

“Maybe they should get their rod belts on before they bruise their beer bellies.” Bobby added.

Terry and Casey grinned at themselves for a minute and then they dug into the storage box on the Loose Moose and put on fighting belts.

The fish, whatever it was, had run away from the hump using the current to take off line but just recently had turned and now swam into the current diagonally across the hump.

“Follow the angle of the line, Bobby” I said.

Bobby turned the Loose Moose into the current keeping the line off the starboard side.  He followed my hand signals till we got the speed right.  The line sliced quickly through the water into the current through the cross chop.  Vianni strained into the rod, knees pressed against the edge of the fish box.  He began to bring the fish up, pumping up and reeling down as we angled across the hump.  Charter boats and sportsmen on their deep drop drifts went by in front of us and in back.  As long as we kept the line of the fish straight up and down to the boat we’d be all right.

Vianni was having a good purge, his shirt soaked through with sweat and a small cut on his shin oozed blood.

“All your parts still working?” I asked him so that the others couldn’t hear.

Vianni nodded as if he didn’t want to waste any energy speaking.  I knew how he felt.  It was just Vianni and the fish.  My job was to help keep the boat straight and coach him when he needed it.

The seas around the hump were calm.   Another June day in January.  Frigate birds circled high, waiting for a surface bite.  All the boats were doing deep drops for bottom fish. Without the big fish on the line it would have been a great morning for a Bloody Mary and a bacon, egg, and tomato sandwich.

The big fish had run us to the eastern rip on the hump and, seeming to sense the boat, he flared out and away, sailed into the current and ran north again, the line pouring off the reel.

Vianni stared at the reel with the line going down on the spool and it seemed the blood in his face went with it.

“Whoa, fish!” Vianni said.

“Turn with him Bobby,” I called.

“Turn with him?  What do you think the Loose Moose is, a damn fish?” Bobby snapped, turning the wheel hard.

I could feel myself go red at the ears.  Bobby always stung me; at least once a trip.  I took another look around at the other bigger boats fishing the hump and then toward land that I could not see.  I took a few long deep breaths.

We followed the fish back with the current and Bob put the bow into the current and turned the Loose Moose stern-to the fish.  The cross chop pushed up over the stern and began to flood the deck and I had Bobby turn off the livewell pump and motor forward to drain the water out of the boat, line flooding off the reel and Vianni looking weary but unwilling to give up.

“Who am I fighting, the fish or you?”  Vianni asked.

“You’ve hooked a fish but you’re fighting the damn ocean,” Bobby said.

“You worry about the fish, Vianni.  Bobby and I will do the rest.” I told him.

Once we all got settled down and the fish had settled down himself into – a give a little up and take a little back – tug of war, I tightened up on the drag of the 50T.

“He’s yours or the sharks,” I told Vianni.  “If you don’t do it now they’re gonna get him for sure.  You’ve got to turn his head and keep him coming.”

“Easier said than done,” said Vianni.

“One of the greatest fisherman ever lived is a woman named Marsha Beerman.  She claims she can feel it when she’s turned the Marlin’s head and then she keeps working the fish with short fast strokes of the rod, down to the fish and up like you’re doing only quick, up and down so fast the fish doesn’t have a chance to breath.  Eventually the fish succumbs from oxygen depletion.”

“You think he’s got a Marlin?” Terry said.

“Not likely. But whatever he’s got, short fast strokes of the rod will beat him faster than  long slow ones every time.”

Soon I could see the big brown slab of a fish swirling up from the deep.

“I’ve got color, Bobby.” I called.

Terry and Casey came back to the stern to look down at the fish.

“What is it?  What is it?”  Vianni wanted to know.

“Big!”   Terry said.

“Looks like a grouper,” I said.  “Still too early to tell.”

Looking down into the blue water the fish had, at first, looked mottled brown, same as a grouper.  The closer it got the more it looked like a grouper.

“The problem with fighting the fish is you’re the last one to see it,” I told Vianni.

“What is it?  What is it?”  Vianni asked.

“I still think it’s a grouper but I’ve been wrong before.”

“You can say that again,” Bobby said.

All of us laughed, Vianni included.

“And a good thing I have,” I added.

“Amen to that,” Bobby said.

Sure enough, the fish, when it came into full view, was an amberjack of about fifty pounds.  For a while I swear I thought there were other amberjack shadowing the hooked fish that merged into one huge amberjack before it vanished but I wasn’t about to say anything.

When the lead hit the rod tip I leadered the amberjack hand over hand the last ten feet and hooked the gaff through his lower lip so as not to hurt him if they chose to release him.

I pulled him over the transom and he lay there gasping.  He flapped his tail once.

The belly of an amberjack is a mottled yellow-white that darkens into a light brown along the shoulder.  His mouth has a sneer to it like a Jack of Diamonds and is not as wide as a grouper.  The amberjack sports a greenish-brown two-fingered mask above the eyes with a tinge of iridescence that doesn’t appear to have any natural function like the white flash of a deer or rabbit’s tail or the camouflage plumage of a ptarmigan.

“What do you want to do with it Bobby?”  I asked.

“What are my choices?”

“Kill it and smoke it.  Let it go.  Or kill it and use it for shark bait.”

“They’re not good eating?” Casey said.

“Some people eat them but they’re usually full of worms.”

“Why are these commercial boys catching them day in and day out?”

“The get 80 cents a pound for the plug. I’ve heard they process the fish and sell it to fast-food joints.”

“How do they get rid of the worms?”

“If they smoke it for you at the Fish House in Key Largo they take tweezers and pull them out.  At the fast food joints the worm’s protein, too.” I said.

“You aren’t gonna let that fish go.  He’ll float like a lobster buoy,” Bobby said.

“Not if you bleed the air out of his bladder,” I said.

“Bullshit,” said Bobby

“What bull?  You take a long thin blade and you puncture the air bladder and put him back in the water, and off he swims.”

“You stick a hole in any fish and it will kill him.  He’ll get some disease or he’ll be weakened and something else will eat him.  It’s the way of nature.”

“You mean to tell me that all those sailfish we release swim off and die?’

“After seventeen years directing PHD’s how to run experiments I guarantee you it kills more than you think.  The answer is moratoriums when necessary,” said Bobby.

“So we kill it and smoke it,” I said.

Bob Stevens nodded toward the fish box.

“Who’s next, Davie?”  Bobby asked.

“First we get the boat in position,” I said pointing to the calm water that preceded the big rip at the top of the hump.

While Bobby ran the boat hard into the current to get back into position for another deep drop, Vianni, and Casey, and Terry stared at the fifty pound fish on the deck.  Vianni stretched out his arms and tried to pull out the drag on the 50T to see how tight it had been for the last part of the fight.

To me a fish always looks smaller after the fight has left him and I felt disheartened by Bobby’s knowledge but knew he wasn’t all right. When you released a fish he had the chance to fight again and that’s better than no chance at all.

We made two more deep drops after I put the first fish on ice and we caught two more fish about the same size as the first and iced them as well.

The third fish was Casey’s fish and he pooped out bad toward the end.  We all could see color wavering deep in the clear water at the back of the Loose Moose.  But Casey was spent.  His arms were trembling.  And then I saw a larger gray shape come in close and circle the amberjack.

“A shark.  You see that shark?  No.  You can’t Casey.  But I can and if you don’t work that fish up fast your fish is gonna be shark bait and you may have a lot longer fight than the one you have now.  Pump up and reel down.  Short quick strokes.  Turn him and keep him coming.  You can do it.  Never let the line go slack. Yeah man, go!”

Casey heard the word shark and it was as if he was swimming to get out of the water the way he pumped that fish into the boat.

The boys all cheered when I pulled the last AJ over the stern.  They patted each other.  Bobby winked at me for getting them each onto a fish.

“Anybody want to catch another?”  I asked but got no answers.

“What’s next, Davie?”  Bobby asked.

I looked around and thought a minute.  The radio had told of a slow kingfish bite in on the reef.

“A day like this maybe we’ll find a few dolphin offshore,” I said.  “We can try that for a while and if we strike out finding a fish for dinner we can run into the reef and work the rest of these Speedo’s for a kingfish.”

“Sounds good to me, Davie.”  Bobby said.

Bobby was happy now and he throttled up the Loose Moose and headed for deeper water.  We talked together under the engine’s roar and agreed to run fast to deeper water searching for signs of fish.  I rigged four poles with baits:  ballyhoo and poppers on the outriggers and ballyhoo with sea witches on the flat lines.  The objective was to run fast till we found fish and then to not get greedy but to take enough for Bobby’s clan to eat dinner and then head back to the dock.

During January we were the only boat to leave the hump looking for Dolphin.  I have never liked to fish near other fishermen and in that Bobby  is less of a loner than I am for he will fish where the fish are even if that means fishing “on top of” other fishermen.  Ninety percent of the fish are in ten percent of the water and the professional captains that run the charter boats day in and day out know where the fish will be: is the code Bobby follows while looking for fish.

I go another way.  I say that ninety percent of the fishermen look in the same ten percent of the water for fish because they have found them there before.  It doesn’t matter that the fish were small or that they only caught one.  What matters is that they caught one small fish more than once.  Too many times I’ve found marlin and dolphin and wahoo and tuna on color changes and weed lines that have only formed in the stream for a little while.  So a June day in January makes me want to go out searching for that color change where the two hundred pound wahoo waits.  Don’t laugh.  I’ll bet my last egg sinker there’s one out there, that size or bigger.

After a while with Bobby running the Loose Moose at thirty knots we couldn’t see the boats on the hump anymore.  For me it was an eerie feeling, all that violent expanse of water between land and us.  And Bobby – whoa Bobby – the father of three girls shuttling their husbands at high-speed offshore in search of fish or some experience that would enable them to bond above and beyond the words of a preacher and a family’s needs.

I wanted that experience to be a fish for dinner.  It didn’t matter who caught it or where, or what fish, except that I knew that it wasn’t going to be amberjack.

At eight hundred feet on the depth finder we were 16 plus miles from Snake Creek and we hadn’t seen a board or a bird or even a small inflated puffer fish.  We hadn’t stopped once to put the lines in.

“Want to turn and troll back toward the hump, Bobby, or should we run back in and work the edge of the reef for a kingfish or a grouper.”

“I believe we’ll troll back for a while and then run,” said Bobby.

As Bobby made his wide turn to port I saw a big boat offshore to the northeast.  I kept my eye on it as Bobby made a wide turn that had his boys gripping the gunwales.  The big boat seemed to be making circles as if trolling through debris or working a school of fish, and, as it was the only boat in sight, I mentioned it to Bobby, pointing the way.

“Yeah, man, Davie!  That boy’s on a school of dolphin.  Today is our lucky day,” said Bobby.

The boat was a beamy, old, and slow, fly-bridge sport fisherman that looked like it had made many trips to the islands and had probably been used to smuggle people or drugs more than once.  The hull had yellowed with age and the outriggers were pinned tight against her top-heavy flying bridge and not winged out as I would have thought they would be for her to be working fish.

I did not think she looked to be working fish.  She might have arrived at this spot on the chart for a rendezvous with another boat, for a drug or human cargo pickup, or the captain, if he was as old as his hull, could simply be dead at the wheel. She was turning in circles.

“I’m not so sure he’s on fish,” I said to Bobby.

“The hell he isn’t” came Bobby’s reply.

Bobby set the bow of the Loose Moose on the circling boat in the distance and pushed his throttle as far forward as it would go.  Everything in the Loose Moose was rattling as we covered the mile or so between us and the boat that seemed to be working fish.  I kept checking my rods to make sure they hadn’t come loose in the rod holders.

We had come to within about two hundred yards and I asked Bobby to slow the Loose Moose so that I could arrange my lure spread and so that we could position ourselves to troll through the school of fish or past the debris, depending on what we discovered when we came in range to see.  As Bobby slowed I set my spread and when I finally looked up I found the other boat heading right for us.  There was no sign of life on the fly bridge and I could not see through the tinted windshield.

The gap between the two boats closed rapidly with Bobby pushing a wake, trolling at high-speed to get in position for the fish.  We hadn’t located the fish yet.  We moved into the path of the big boat’s circle so that we could troll right behind her lines as she passed.  I don’t like passing within five miles of another boat’s fish but because it was Bobby and his boys I got set for success.

She was named the “Evening Star” and I knew this because she suddenly stopped circling and began to come straight at us.  Bobby seemed frozen, looking off over the horizon as if his geometry was too good to be questioned.  He was waiting for the call of “Fish on” and nothing could distract him from that vision.

“Bobby!” I called out.  “Hey Bobby.”

The sound of the other boat’s diesels should have been his clue but he was in his own world – somewhere over the horizon – chasing flocks of birds over schools of huge fish with no other boats in sight.

The Evening Star had closed the distance toward the Loose Moose faster than I liked.  If she kept her current course and speed she would run up over the engine and split the Loose Moose in two.  I reached over Bobby’s shoulder and turned the wheel to port to veer around the now oncoming vessel.

As we turned to port so did the Evening Star, and she seemed to pick up speed.

“What’s he trying to do?” I asked Bob.

“Trying to keep us off his school,” Bobby said with a little fire in his voice.

“Or his bales,” said Casey.

“I don’t think so,” I said, wishing I had my stainless shotgun handy.  Sometimes offshore fishing in the Keys is no different from driving I95.

“What?” Bobby said.

I reached over again and hit the throttle this time and pulled the wheel even further to port, trying to avoid the boat that seemed to follow our every move so that we continued to be locked in on a collision course no matter how hard I pulled the wheel over to port or how fast we trolled away.

I looked back at my rods for a second, hoping he was looking at fish behind us.  No such luck.

I found Bobby looking back at our rods.  The Evening Star was almost on us.

“Throttle Bobby!  Hit it hard.  He’s going to hit us!” I yelled.

I reached forward again and pushed the throttle down as hard as I could with no leverage and managed only to push it into a dead zone.  The boat came down upon us.

“Speed! Bobby!  We need speed!” I yelled.

But Bobby had frozen at the helm. I looked up and the reason became clear.  The boat had turned enough for us to see up onto the flying bridge.

On the bench seat beneath the wheel, a buck naked couple was copulating.  She was broad-shouldered, with heavy young breasts, and shoulder length blond hair.  As the boat turned further we could see the slope and bounce of her wonderful breasts and narrow splayed hips.  She was exquisitely beautiful the way she rode him.  We could not see him, but we were close enough, for a second, to feel her pleasure through the heat in the motion of her breasts.  We all fell in love with her instantly.

None of us could move or talk. Bobby snapped out of it first, throwing the throttle of the Loose Moose down so that the engine raced into gear.  The young woman heard our engine and looked up at us with a look of coy surprise, at the same time covering one of her breasts with a hand.  She stood up from him and then the boat turned away on its auto pilot. We lost them from view for a second.

He rose up naked above the windshield and seemed to be fumbling with the controls of his boat.  He was tall and tan and lithe, with a head full of curly brownish blond locks. I could not see his face and didn’t want to see any more than I already had.

“Your wives would tell you, you have qualities and abilities that boy will never imagine,” Bobby said.

The Evening Star turned enough so that we could see her climbing down the ladder from the fly bridge to the deck. We watched her make her way carefully but quickly down the ladder.  She had not even bothered to wrap a towel.  She stopped at the bottom of the stainless ladder.  She turned toward us, giving us the most wonderful frontal view.  And then she took one hand and spread it out superficially between her breasts, as if she could cover them with such a small thing, and with the other she covered her vagina. She smiled knowingly at us.  And then she turned and took one long bouncy stride down from the gunwale and disappeared into the cabin.

From that distance it seemed to me she was too well-built to be on such an old boat and I considered she was probably either having an affair or truly in love with the guy.  Then it hit me, Evening Star – Venus.  It was probably her damn boat.

By then the guy had the ship back but instead of turning away from us, he accelerated, as if trying to find out how we had come to disturb him in the middle of a fishless ocean.  He shook a well tanned arm and fist at us in anger. And I could feel his frustration.

“Should we show him our appreciation,” I said to Bobby’s boys.

They didn’t need the question and we all moved together as one to the stern and gave him a standing ovation.

He rose up out of his chair as if to expose himself above the console on the flying bridge of the Evening Star.  He clasped his hands together over one shoulder and shook them and then he did the same thing over the other shoulder, and then he bowed sideways, saluted us smartly, sat down and turned his boat out of our prop wash and away from our view.

I reeled the rods in at full speed as Bobby made for the reef. Casey, Terry, and Vianni all helped reel.  After the rods were stored we shook our heads at each other in disbelief.

“That was quite something, Bobby.”

“You don’t see that every day, Davie.”  Bobby said.

“She was too good-looking for that boat.”  Vianni said.

“That’s why he chased us.  Wanted to make sure he didn’t know us.”

“There wasn’t one fishing rod on the whole goddamn boat,” Bobby said.

“I’ll never tell the name of that boat to anyone,” Terry said.

“Save it for a rainy day with your grandson’s,” I said.

“Watch it, Davie,” Bobby said, his bad boys breaking grins.

We came in to the reef off Tavernier.  The stream had pushed us north.  There-again I re-rigged the lines and we slow-trolled the rest of the Speedo’s and lost two fish before catching a ten pound kingfish.

“A perfect day on the water, Davie.  Let’s head for the barn,” Bobby said once I’d gaffed the fish into the boat.

We made for Tavernier creek at about thirty-five knots. The storm came out of the North-West fast.  You could see the rain advancing and behind it there was lightning. It was fast turning into a violent storm.

Vianni wanted to punch through the storm but there was a lot of wind building the seas up to slow us down and then there was the lightning. The storm moved fast and you could smell ozone in the air and then the wind picked up bringing vertical stinging drops of rain.

I put all the rods on the deck and took the outriggers down and stored them as well. At Vianni’s request we worked at punching through the storm but it was a bigger cell than I wanted to fool with three young fathers on board. When we were all wet and cold with the wind and rain, I convinced Bobby to steer to the southwest for Snake Creek.

“Looks tight enough and mean enough to run in for shelter.  Maybe we can run home behind it,” I told them.

We rode the trough south four miles to Snake Creek.  We encountered some snotty crosswind but no more rain or lightening.  By the time we’d run through the creek and into the bay the storm had blown offshore. We were as quiet on the way back up the bayside as we had been on the way out in the morning, everyone looking out ahead of the Loose Moose, staring into personal visions over the horizon; only now they were not of fish.

Bobby ran the Loose Moose fast toward home. The light was remarkably clear in the storm-fresh air as we sped up the bayside. I closed my eyes and heard nothing but the roar of the old 225 two stroke on the Loose Moose running pure.  I opened my eyes to no evening star, no green flash, no mermaids glimmering in the bow spray, and no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But I promise you, and this is no fish story, that if you can focus through the pure roar of the single 2-stroke running hard on the Loose Moose while you stare out over the far horizon that you can just about see heaven.

Go Bobby, go!

The End