For a mink-eyed-mink with barely two pence to rub together, I've found myself in the company of some pretty rich, successful and occasionally famous people in the past few years. To my pleasant surprise, the majority of them haven't been bastards, either – in fact, some of them have actually been Quite Nice.
Inevitably though, working with so many people, especially moneyed types, has to churn up some shitbags. And lo and behold! Here are some at Our Unnamed Fishing Destination (OUFD, pronounced “ooft”). OUFD is a specialist fishing lodge on the Pacific coast of A Central American Country. We are here for work, to earn a bit of money, save some more money, and generally help to promote the joint. As usual with an arrangement like this, there should be no losers.
But before we even got here, OUFD was telling us how much we should be tipping the staff. It began as a mistake – and we should have known that more bother would be on the way.
It started yesterday when we found ourselves getting off a bus, which according to the press pack was just a few miles away from OUFD. In reality, it was more like 40, around a peninsula – a $90 taxi ride away, or $50 by boat. OUFD refused to send their own, so a local fisherman got lucky.
However, despite being quite genuinely furious with the whole thing, the ride through mangroves proved to be lots of fun. Then, just as we felt our moods brightening, we met OUFD's owner.
Before we'd even finished the handshake, I could tell he didn't really want us there. Their failure to pick us up was our fault: why hadn't we said we were at the border with Another Central American Country earlier? Why didn't we have a rental car?
Again we tried to put it all to the back of our minds. This was free accommodation, which on my own scale of excellence, was probably worth about three stars. There was air conditioning, cable TV and free shampoo. There were mosquitoes too, but, truth be told, we'd not stayed in anything so plush since Brunei, way back in October last year. We were made to feel like assholes at dinner too, but kept our cool and thought about what was to come the next day.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
It's 1991 and I am shivering on the deck of a small fishing boat that's bobbing around in the Firth of Clyde. We are knee deep in mackerel, fish so stupid they are hooked by nothing more than fluorescent tape; fish so weak that even I, an eight-year-old, can pull up three at a time on the line.
My father and brother are on board too, all of us merrily murdering the morning away, catching more mackerel than my mother will know what to do with, and even one or two rare cod.
We don't need to cast the line, we simply drop it overboard, wait for the familiar tug, haul up the unfortunate fish, then quickly try to brain it before it thrashes around too much. It's all terribly predictable, but free of cynicism and full of blood lust, it keeps we children entertained for hours.
My father drops his line into the cold water for the hundredth time to bring up his hundredth mackerel when suddenly the line becomes impossibly heavy. The tension is unreal, he has to quickly adjust his footing. There's something down there... The fight with the leviathan is brief: dad makes a little progress and it stays on for about 30 seconds before snapping the line and disappearing. Perhaps it was a conger eel, perhaps it was a harbour seal or - as my brother and I prefer to think - perhaps it was Nessie on a rare sojourn south.
In the intervening years of (occasionally) fishing in Scottish waters, that was by far the most dramatic thing that ever happened to me. For the most part, my time was spent in drizzle, timidly impaling translucent worms on hooks that had no more chance of catching fish than the worms did of growing hands and freeing themselves.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
All of which now seems like a world away as we bounce across the sparkling waves of the Pacific Ocean, heading 20 miles into the big blue. We've been going for an hour, and have already been fishing once. I didn't tell The Captain that in catching a nine inch blue runner earlier I was probably beating my personal best. The small fish, along with about seven of its kin and a handful of herring, is only on board to be used as live bait for something much bigger.
Wee Mo spots some commotion on the horizon. A large pod of spinner dolphins are hurling themselves from the water in apparent glee. To my genuine astonishment, they're even more acrobatic than their cousins in the Philippines.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
The Captain moves the boat ahead of the crowd and gives me instructions while threading a line through the eye-sockets of one of the blue runners. The wee thing barely seems to bat an eyelid (assuming it had eyelids and we didn't disable them), still full of life as I drop it into the water and let the line out. Between the little fish trying to flee and the lead weight, the line makes steady progress, before suddenly speeding up.
“There you go, you've got a fish on there,” says The Captain casually, flicking my reel to Strike. I move to lift the rod, but can't because the line is snagged.
“Move round to the bow of the boat,” he says, not realising the mistake. Meanwhile, the line just gets heavier. I want to cry out, to point out the error – I seem to have hooked a car. Then the car starts its engine and starts to drive away.
The line unravels further, forced out despite being locked. Stumbling, panicking, I try to steady myself by sitting back into a half-crouched position. There is an apocalyptic amount of swearing. “Round to the front,” I'm told again, but it feels like gravity has been amplified.
After five minutes I'm sure I won't be able to last. Words of defeat start to form in my brain and I get ready to ask for the line to be cut. The Captain realises I've had enough and mercifully doles out a belt to root the pole. Later it occurs to me that he deliberately sent me to battle unprepared – this was my Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The apparel stops me stabbing myself in the gut, but doesn't ease the weight. Another minute or two later and I'm gently guided to a chair on the bow of the boat and The Captain attaches a harness, making me a strained link in a chain between the boat and My Enemy.
Just before I left the mainland, OUFD's asshole owner had told me: “Real men stand up,” metaphorically grabbing his crotch and opening a beer with his forehead. He's the sort of guy who's main line of chat is belittling others with zero self-deprecation. It's impossible to tell when he's joking and when he means to be genuinely abusive. I doubt even he can tell the difference any more.
Anyway, as I park my arse, I instead think of Ernest Shackleton's quip: “Better to be a live donkey than a dead lion.”
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Sitting down affords me a chance to breathe and to try and mop the torrent of sweat from my brow, while also noticing just how much Wee Mo is laughing at my misfortune. This scene plays out for another twenty minutes or so, me and My Enemy both tiring in the morning sun. I'm told to reel in as much line as I can between waves, rather than stick to a fair fight and, another ten minutes later, they say there's a flash of sliver somewhere near the surface.
The Captain leans over the side and drives a hook through the fish's head to get him on board. Wee Mo takes a picture. I collapse back into the chair and look at My Enemy.
At almost four foot long, the yellowfin tuna bleeds like a hog and kicks like a mule. It's weighs somewhere in the region of 70lbs (five stone) and, wounds and all, still fancies a fight. Even when The Captain has dragged it into a death bag, disembowelled it and replaced its innards with ice, it's thrashing around so much that it sounds like a helicopter taking off. William Wallace went quieter than this.
“That's tuna fishing,” says The Captain, triumphant.
“There's quite a lot of blood,” I pant.
“Well, better to have a messy boat than a clean one.”
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
There's barely a chance to recover from the ordeal before I'm told to put the line back in. This time, a brilliant gold and green dorado leaps from the water, my hook in its mouth. It puts up plenty of fight too, but compared its rottweiler predecessor, it comes in fairly easily, shimmering different colours as we bring it on board.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Wee Mo passes me a well-earned beer from the cooler, after which I try to take some pictures of the ever joyful dolphins. Unfortunately my biceps, such as they are, have gone into spasm and I can barely raise the camera.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Later in the day, I catch another tuna*, which nearly kills me again, and have a sailfish infuriatingly slip the hook having taken the bait. Just before getting back to OUFD, I also catch and release a roosterfish (with a cyberpunk mohawk for a dorsal fin), which I actually can stand up to land.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
That night, a boisterous group of Californian surfers, also staying at the lodge, enjoy our catch as we all sit down for sashimi and tuna steaks. A couple of the older ones like to talk about money; the youngsters describe most things as “sick” or “insane.” They also construct complete sentences out of single words: “Right? RIGHT? Right.” They unanimously talk too loud.
But still, if you can learn to ignore the weird speech patterns and somehow turn them down from an 11 to a steady seven, then they're a pretty good bunch. Plus, being American and prone to hyperbole and falsehood, they also make a big show of literally toasting my skills as a fisherman, something that annoys the asshole boss no end.
It's nonsense, of course – I simply did what I was told and held on for a dear life. But that doesn't mean I don't like it; I raise my glass with my working arm and smile.
*The next day, against all odds and the laws of physics, Wee Mo landed her own tuna, a 80lb monster that nearly tore her arms out like nursery trees from loose soil. But somehow she held on and wore it down, before The Captain eventually hauled it on board. The bloody bastard spat out the bait on landing, like an apology that had come far too late. It was a heroic, hideous ordeal and, depending on who you listen to, it may have been the biggest fish we caught on both trips. Best of all, if she held it at the right angle, it looked a bit like a tuna bra.
