The Founding Fish (32 page)
Authors: John McPhee
Going into the tarpon's swim bladder, Willy removes a thick,
spongy cord that resembles lung tissue. “These fish come up to the surface and gulp air,” he comments. “It's because of this special tissue in the swim bladder. In the Florida Keys, tarpon come up, breathe air, and eat what tourists feed them.”
spongy cord that resembles lung tissue. “These fish come up to the surface and gulp air,” he comments. “It's because of this special tissue in the swim bladder. In the Florida Keys, tarpon come up, breathe air, and eat what tourists feed them.”
With a wire brush, he scrubs the cavity of the tarpon along the bottom of the backbone, locus of the kidneys. You could knit a wool sweater with two tarpon ribs. Not long ago, Willy was diving in the Cayman Islands, and he went into a natural tunnel in a reef. The tunnel was full of tarpon. Hundreds of tarpon. “They are not skittish,” he says. “They are so peaceful. They let you swim around them.” Much like caribou.
A
lbert Reynolds, a Mobile stockbroker who is a former chairman of the rodeo, takes me out to the action in his twenty-two-foot single-engine Grady-White. Through early-morning air too thick to be haze, too thin to be fog, we go to the western tip of Dauphin Island and then run south about seven miles. Suddenly, in the cottony seascape, looms a great standing structure, more than two hundred yards long, in three parts joined by long aerial footbridges. Rising through fifty-seven feet of water and continuing on up ten stories, the Triple Rig, as the fishermen call it, is Chevron 864MO, largest of the numerous platforms that collectively produce a hundred million dollars' worth of natural gas in this area of the Gulf each year. Broad and squarish, the central structure resembles an oil refinery, with Erector-set skeletal girders. Three pipes come up beneath it, because it is the center of three radial wells. Its highest point is a long, cranelike tilted arm, whose upper end is abloom with orange flame. A safety device, it is known on the rig as “the flare.” Signs wherever you look say “Danger Poison Gas H
2
S.” The tower at one end supports a three-story house, the crew's quarters. The tower at the other end accommodates a
fourth well. Under the connecting footbridges are passages of open water, where boats can go through the platform. Eight boats are fishing here. A couple are tied to the structure. Most are trolling. Like shuttles going back and forth in a loom, ours and the other trolling boats woof the Triple Rig. The oil and gas platforms of the Gulf have the same effect as artificial reefs. In a softbottomed environment unappealing to invertebrates, they offer hard surfaces for the likes of barnacles and clams, which in turn attract reef fish and transient species. Out of sight of land, out in the marine wild, one of the best places to go fishing is under the Chevron flare.
lbert Reynolds, a Mobile stockbroker who is a former chairman of the rodeo, takes me out to the action in his twenty-two-foot single-engine Grady-White. Through early-morning air too thick to be haze, too thin to be fog, we go to the western tip of Dauphin Island and then run south about seven miles. Suddenly, in the cottony seascape, looms a great standing structure, more than two hundred yards long, in three parts joined by long aerial footbridges. Rising through fifty-seven feet of water and continuing on up ten stories, the Triple Rig, as the fishermen call it, is Chevron 864MO, largest of the numerous platforms that collectively produce a hundred million dollars' worth of natural gas in this area of the Gulf each year. Broad and squarish, the central structure resembles an oil refinery, with Erector-set skeletal girders. Three pipes come up beneath it, because it is the center of three radial wells. Its highest point is a long, cranelike tilted arm, whose upper end is abloom with orange flame. A safety device, it is known on the rig as “the flare.” Signs wherever you look say “Danger Poison Gas H
2
S.” The tower at one end supports a three-story house, the crew's quarters. The tower at the other end accommodates a
fourth well. Under the connecting footbridges are passages of open water, where boats can go through the platform. Eight boats are fishing here. A couple are tied to the structure. Most are trolling. Like shuttles going back and forth in a loom, ours and the other trolling boats woof the Triple Rig. The oil and gas platforms of the Gulf have the same effect as artificial reefs. In a softbottomed environment unappealing to invertebrates, they offer hard surfaces for the likes of barnacles and clams, which in turn attract reef fish and transient species. Out of sight of land, out in the marine wild, one of the best places to go fishing is under the Chevron flare.
One boat, surprisingly, is Play 'N' Hookie. Where we are fishing earnestly for prizewinning kings, Steve McConnell has stopped off to fish for shark bait. He is fishing for bonitas to take to deeper water and drag past the noses of hammerheads. The symbiosis between oil or gas platforms and recreational fishing is personified in Steve McConnell. Half his time, he lives on a rig. He is an operator of oil rigs. Every other week, he leaves his home, in Mobile, to spend seven nights headquartered on Eugene Island 42, about fifteen miles from land, south of Morgan City, Louisiana, at the Atchafalaya Basin Sea Buoy. Frequently, he fishes from the rig, catching king mackerel, red snapper, dolphin. Employed by Sonatâa company that sells its crude oil to Shell, Chevron, Mobil, and Exxonâhe runs seven other rigs, too, across four hundred miles of the Gulf. Every day, he flies from rig to rig in a helicopter, and fishing rods are always aboard.
If you float a wooden plank, fish will be attracted to its shadow and shelter. You can fish productively near the plank. If you don't have a plank, try an oil rig. The public-relations benefits of rig fishing have not been lost on the energy companies. Chevron, in fact, has a “Rigs to Reefs” program, in which rigs that have ceased to produce oil or gas are disengaged from the seabed, toppled onto
their sides, and, in many cases, dragged to appropriate fishing sites.
their sides, and, in many cases, dragged to appropriate fishing sites.
Albert Reynolds has three lines out, thirty-pound-test, with stainless-steel leaders, and fishes them close to the boat, scarcely ten yards back. He outlines the thought processes that go on in king mackerels' brains: “Near the boat, they think they've got to get it and run. Way back there, they look it over and think something's wrong and go away.” As baitfish he is using blue runnersâfoot-long jacks locally known as hard tails. Gentle-mannered and quietly bemused, now in his upper sixties, Albert Reynolds has been fishing the rodeo forty-five years. He once took a second prize with a speckled trout but “can't remember when.” His boat is Shazam and his wife calls him Captain Marvel. He has been successful enough as an investor for this to qualify as a reference to his work. “You catch the right fish, you can make a lot of money,” he remarks about the rodeo. It may not be the All-American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs, and it's not the P.G.A. championship, but as fishing tournaments go it has attractive money. There's a prize worth thirty thousand dollars for most overall points, a five-thousand-dollar jackpot for the biggest king, and another hundred and twenty thousand dollars spread through the various categories. Rocky Marciano fished here.
Something hits a hard tail, and a reel zings. It is my turn to pick it up. The reel is rigged for right-handers, so I try turning it upside down, which makes Reynolds chuckle. It also doesn't work, and I fish right-handed. The thing on the line feels heavy. It is active in the water column. It is stronger than a bluefish. It feels like a big roe shad. As I hold up the rod tip toward the Chevron rig and the billowing flame, I pass the time, mentally, at an A.T.M. in New Jersey depositing the five thousand dollars. Nice fish. You can tell. You can feel it. Baby grand. And after eight or ten minutes it is out of the water and into Shazam. King mackerel. Forty-six inches long. Nineteen pounds, ten ounces.
I remember Willy Bemis saying about kings, “They're aggressive, torpedo-shape, fantastic animals. They're running very strong right now, fifty-pound size.” I have at least caught dinner.
A
ll afternoon at the judges' stand, fishermen arrive with long insulated white vinyl bags, like bulky ski bags zippered up for travel. These are king bags, so called, and the zippers open to reveal torpedo-shaped fantastic animals: a fifty-four-pound king, a sixty-one-pound king, a sixty-three-pound king. Robert Shipp, one of the judges, says, “The big kings are more than a hundred miles offshore. Fast boats go sixty miles an hour to get them. It is not uncommon for them to run a hundred and fifty miles to weigh 'em in.”
ll afternoon at the judges' stand, fishermen arrive with long insulated white vinyl bags, like bulky ski bags zippered up for travel. These are king bags, so called, and the zippers open to reveal torpedo-shaped fantastic animals: a fifty-four-pound king, a sixty-one-pound king, a sixty-three-pound king. Robert Shipp, one of the judges, says, “The big kings are more than a hundred miles offshore. Fast boats go sixty miles an hour to get them. It is not uncommon for them to run a hundred and fifty miles to weigh 'em in.”
Shipp, an ichthyologist at the University of South Alabama, is the author of “Dr. Bob Shipp's Guide to Fishes of the Gulf of Mexico.” Long before he became an official of the tournament, he came to Dauphin Island every summer to teach his marine-vertebrate course at the academic sea lab. The immemorial judge of the tournament was Roy Martin, mayor of Panama City Beach, Florida. Over time, as prizes grew larger, and decisions with them, the mayoralty of Panama City Beach became an insufficient qualification for the rodeo bench. There came a great question: Is this a very small blue marlin or a very large white marlin? Roy Martin took the fifth. The tournament's underwriting bankers asked Bob Shipp if he would become assistant judge. Sure, he said. A student of the population biology of fishes, he was interested in the tournament for the fish. A question even more controversial soon arose as well: Is this a young king mackerel or a Spanish mackerel? Spanish mackerel have spots, and so do young kings, which resemble mature Spanish mackerel. This was all sort of academic until the jackpot prize for the biggest Spanish mackerel approached and then surpassed a couple of thousand dollars. Shippâgray hair, equanimous mustache, handsome as a tenorâwas addressed one
day by a fisherman he describes as having “one or two teeth, breath of beer and garlic, and bloodshot eyes.” The fisherman laid a fish before Shipp and said, “That beauty is a Spanish mackerel.”
day by a fisherman he describes as having “one or two teeth, breath of beer and garlic, and bloodshot eyes.” The fisherman laid a fish before Shipp and said, “That beauty is a Spanish mackerel.”
Shipp said, “I'm sorry. It's a small king.”
The fisherman said, “I've got Dr. Bob Shipp's book in my boat. I'll get it and show you.”
One of the rodeo's prize categories is Most Unusual. It illuminates the tournament, because a fish of any size can win it. A fish four inches long can be honored beside a tarpon. The winner is determined by what Shipp calls “unofficial subjective calibration.” Shipp picks the winner.
The Most Unusual category was introduced in the nineteen-eighties. Tony Stuardi, a marlin fisherman, caught on early. He went so far out in the Gulfâat least a hundred milesâthat he laid up overnight. Most Unusual, he thought as he lay there, rising on the swells, and he got up and baited two bream hooksâordinary small hooks of the sort more accustomed to dangling in a pondâand dropped them on a long line over the side. He was dropping them into DeSoto Canyonâtwo thousand feet of water, off the edge of the continental shelf. He caught a six-inch fanged mackerelet. By anyone's calibration, it was a clear winner. The next year, Stuardi came in with something equally odd, and Shipp again awarded him the prize. Then he told Stuardi that in years to come Stuardi could show up with anything from an oilfish to a bearded puffer but he was not going to win.
The blacktail moray lives so obscurely in deep water that it was not even described taxonomically until 1980, when it was known from only twenty-five specimens found in the world. Since then, however, six blacktail morays have appeared in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, three of them this year. Shipp no longer thinks them unusual. Subjectively, they haven't got a prayer. He looks for “something never entered before, and if it's a legitimate catch we'll move it up to the top of the list.” Three-two-one on his present list
are Wendy Kennedy's short-fin mako shark, Don Henderson's smooth dogfish, and David Simms's blunt-nose jackâa fish that Shipp has never seen anywhere.
are Wendy Kennedy's short-fin mako shark, Don Henderson's smooth dogfish, and David Simms's blunt-nose jackâa fish that Shipp has never seen anywhere.
The geographical boundaries of the tournament were established after a competitor fished off Costa Rica and flew to Dauphin Island with the catch. Money may not have been the whole motivation. It is not always simple to fathom what makes a fisherman cheat. Why did Marcus Antonius, the Triumvir, cause dead lunkers to be draped on his hook so he could lift them from the water in the presence of Cleopatra? For the prestige? Did he actually think so little of her? According to Plutarch, she sent a servant swimming under Antony's boat with a dried, salted fish from the Black Sea. The servant put it on Antony's hook. When Antony pulled up the fish, he was drenched by all present with derisive laughter. “Imperator,” she said, “you had better give up your rod.”
The late Roy Martin, when he was the rodeo's judge, opened the stomach of a fish scoring high on the tournament scale. A chunk of lead fell out. That was not an isolated moment. Over the years, enough lead has been discovered in rodeo stomachs to suggest a new link in the food chain.
There were fishermen who came in every year with entries of frozen red snappers. And a clergyman in the tournament brought to the scale an amberjack that weighed ninety pounds. It was full of frozen blue runnersâstuffed with frozen bait. In recent times, the tournament has acquired a Torrymeter, a machine that tests flesh to see if it has been frozen. “Electrodes pass current through a fish,” Shipp explains. “If cells have been ruptured by freezing or deterioration, the current is stronger. A computer chip translates it to a number.” The tournament has also introduced a polygraph. Competitors agree to its use when they buy their tickets. When the polygraph was first contemplated, a mailer was sent out asking if the competitors would approve. Eighty-five per cent said yes. In the first polygraph year, a winner failed the test miserably and was
disqualified. He sued the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, but soon withdrew the suit. In the summary words of Bob Shipp, “He was a lyin' sumbitch and they got him.”
disqualified. He sued the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, but soon withdrew the suit. In the summary words of Bob Shipp, “He was a lyin' sumbitch and they got him.”
A
s a Confederate cannon ends the tournament, spectators are ten deep straining to look into the fish bin. A woman leaning over a vermilion snapper is wearing a green bikini. Jingling in her navel on an extremely short gold chain is a green pendant scarab. She is not alone in her choice of wardrobe. All the way down the back wall of the bin are women leaning forward in bikinis, resting on the cinder block their soft-rayed pectoral fins. We have come here for purposes of comparative anatomy, and we're getting what we came for. I mean this as a compliment: these women are almost as good-looking as the fish. Before them on the ice are whitebone porgies, whitespotted soapfish, wahoos, black drums, gags, and snake eels. Striped burrfish. Gray triggerfish. Violet gobies. Rainbow runners. Bearded brotulas. Sailfish. Tarpon. Horse-eyed jacks. Literally, it's a ton of fish, and only a small fraction of all the competing fish not retained in the bin by the judges.
s a Confederate cannon ends the tournament, spectators are ten deep straining to look into the fish bin. A woman leaning over a vermilion snapper is wearing a green bikini. Jingling in her navel on an extremely short gold chain is a green pendant scarab. She is not alone in her choice of wardrobe. All the way down the back wall of the bin are women leaning forward in bikinis, resting on the cinder block their soft-rayed pectoral fins. We have come here for purposes of comparative anatomy, and we're getting what we came for. I mean this as a compliment: these women are almost as good-looking as the fish. Before them on the ice are whitebone porgies, whitespotted soapfish, wahoos, black drums, gags, and snake eels. Striped burrfish. Gray triggerfish. Violet gobies. Rainbow runners. Bearded brotulas. Sailfish. Tarpon. Horse-eyed jacks. Literally, it's a ton of fish, and only a small fraction of all the competing fish not retained in the bin by the judges.
The rodeo has been criticized for killing so many fish, which is, among other reasons, why Willy is particularly welcome here. The aura of research tends to mute criticism. One of my sons-in-law is the skipper of a trawler in the Bering Sea. He fishes for cod, for Alaska walleye pollock. Both in metric tons and in numbers of fish, he will often catch in a single pass, in five minutes, the equivalent of all the fish caught in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo.
Willy is now lecturing the crowd on pelvic and pectoral fins. He is actually in the bin himself, standing, in his sandals, among the fish on the ice, because he knows that spectators will soon be taking the fish, and he is keeping an eye on specimens he has chosen for the lab. Pectoral fins, which spread to either side just below and behind the head, are for steering and braking, he says. The
pelvic fins are anti-roll devices. Anti-roll devices on ships include stabilizers and flume tanks. Commercial fishing boats will extend their booms to both sides and lower into the water delta-shaped weights known as flopper-stoppers. Their flop-stopping ability may be considerable but cannot approach the efficacity of a pair of pelvic fins. Dorsal fins, in erection, supply some power and are helpful with anti-roll and steering, but more often they are social: they attract or repel other fish. The caudal finâthe tail finâis for power. Just as a tall, forked tail is for high speed, a squared tail is for easy going, moseying near the bottom.
pelvic fins are anti-roll devices. Anti-roll devices on ships include stabilizers and flume tanks. Commercial fishing boats will extend their booms to both sides and lower into the water delta-shaped weights known as flopper-stoppers. Their flop-stopping ability may be considerable but cannot approach the efficacity of a pair of pelvic fins. Dorsal fins, in erection, supply some power and are helpful with anti-roll and steering, but more often they are social: they attract or repel other fish. The caudal finâthe tail finâis for power. Just as a tall, forked tail is for high speed, a squared tail is for easy going, moseying near the bottom.
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