Denizens of the Deep Read online

  Our armed-to-the-teeth guests caught four or five amberjack apiece before they gave up, exhausted. Toward the end, they had such weary arms and shoulders they were using their knees to help pump the rods. These amberjack ran from forty to seventy pounds. It made for a nice day, and in the days that followed the knife-toting gentlemen stopped going down to the sea with their arsenals. In fact, for one whole day, they didn’t fish at all; they stayed in bed; somehow, their muscles wouldn’t work.

  The wahoo, a member of the mackerel family, a fish with a silly name, is one whose silliness ends right there. Striped like a tiger in light and dark blues that fade as he dies, and given a tiger’s bounding speed, the wahoo has sharp teeth, power, hits anything that trolls if he’s in the mood, and can be found—though rarely, in most waters—almost any place that’s offshore and tropical or subtropical. For a racy, surface fight, he is recommended strongly. Behind my desk is a picture of my daughter and beside her in the picture is a wahoo notably taller, as it hangs from the rack, than she is. Karen is five feet, three and a half. The wahoo’s near six feet. It weighed seventy-odd pounds and it took Karen, who is experienced in such matters, more than half an hour on marlin tackle to get her wahoo connected with a gaff. Never, as they say in Philadelphia, underestimate the power of a woman. Or a wahoo.

  During the Second World War our Government sent to its troops the world over pocket-sized editions of myriads of books by American authors. Among the titles were three collections of fishing tales written by this scribe. As a result, I received thousands of letters from young Americans who were fishing in all sorts of waters. Some fished because they were hungry for meat. Of these, some fished not with hooks and lines but hand grenades and materials intended for demolition. One lad, however, sent me some snapshots of an enormous wahoo caught in the remote Pacific. And this sailor, whose accompanying letter insisted that wahoo of more than two hundred pounds had been lost by him, owing to the lightness of available gear, convinced me. In my files I have his map of reefs, off a certain island, inhabited by the giant wahoo and I am carefully keeping the document against the day when it’s barely possible I might find my way to the area. A two-hundred-pound wahoo would be worth traveling toward!

  Of course, a two-hundred-pound fish can hardly be called a “middleweight.” But that’s another enchantment of this classification of fishes. In the reaches of the seven seas, the size of fish of one species will vary. You may be hunting for a kind of which a giant would weigh fifty pounds—only to hit into a super-giant (astronomical terms being not inappropriate here) touching a hundred. And most fish have relatives, close cousins, that run bigger than they do. There’s that warsaw grouper we catch by special means off Miami, for instance, that can weigh four hundred pounds or more. I’ve even heard tell, for instance, of five-hundred-pound sailfish in the Indian Ocean, someplace—though there’s nearly always a big jump between what you hear told—and what the scales finally say.

  Here, there or elsewhere, probably twenty sorts of fish are called “kingfish.” One king, the king mackerel, is widely sought off Florida. A game, but not savage, fish, the “king” of Florida waters travels as a rule in schools, immense schools—he is fished commercially as well as for sport. Many so-called sportsmen, however, fish for kings less for fine angling than for quantity—using feathers or spoons, heavy sinkers, and a heavy-wire trolling line. Such gear, by taking the bait down deep, admittedly attracts far more kings than do surface baits—and kings are worth catching just to eat. Whoever denies this either doesn’t like fish or doesn’t know how to cook. Such gear, however, destroys the combat as a sport and kingfish, even on fairly light tackle, are modest fighters. As if to make up for that, however, they do have one trick so fantastic that it must be seen to be appreciated.

  I’ll never forget my first sight of the spectacle. We were trolling down along the Florida Keys towards Islamorada, years back. Something—something silver and white and biggish—came out of the sea and started climbing like a jet plane. Afterward, I insisted it went as high as the outriggers—and they were about twenty-five feet tall. Perhaps it only went twenty feet up. Anyhow, the sky was that blue blaze of light familiar in the region and the thing flew up so fast I was sure, for a split second, it was some sort of bird that had been under water until our boat passed by. However, the upward curve became a parabola and what I then perceived to be a fish came down, with incredible accuracy considering the jump, squarely on the bait. “King,” the skipper murmured, as the fish vanished beneath the surface, the outrigger line fell, and I tried to change shock into sensible, fast action. Kings can do that—the king mackerel of the region—and I would bet on them even against tarpon in a seagoing track meet, as high jumpers. And kings can do it the other way around, as I was to see for myself, years later, off Miami. They can come up directly under a trolled surface bait, grab it on the rise, and then soar into the sky in a breath-taking leap, carrying line and bait in their jaws and actually hooking themselves in lofty mid-air!

  In the middleweight classification, too, go all the jacks besides amberjack. Crevallé jack, horse-eye jack, almaco jack and many more. These are cousins of the pompano, and a couple of pompano should be on the list also: the African, which has streaming dorsal fins—no one knows why—and the permit, a pompano about whom somebody should write a book.

  The jack is not a leaping fish, as can be noted from the description already given of the amberjack in action. But he and all his relatives are fast and busy. How fast? Here is the perennial angling question. This much I can say. Jacks live well when impounded in salt-water ponds made by fencing in a bit of ocean with wire, rocks or whatnot. Years back, in Key West, there used to be such a pond, inhabited by jacks, barracuda, groupers and the like. These fish were reasonably “tame” and, at mealtime, would come up in mixed schools to the shore, waiting for food. The food consisted of hunks of cut-up fish and a chunk the size of a table-tennis ball would be pitched with great velocity. It was perhaps fifty feet across the pond and the jacks, seeing a man bracing himself to throw, would turn about and face out, like runners waiting for a starting gun. I have seen baseball players throw chunks of meat as hard as they could across that pond. But I have never seen the meat hit the water when there wasn’t a jack underneath, waiting—a crevallé jack that had covered the same distance a bit faster than the man could throw. How fast this is, in the case of a chunk of meat, I don’t know. But mighty fast—especially when you consider the fish had a standing start, and was obliged, furthermore, to take note of the direction of the throw by looking up through a foot or more of water at a small object zooming through the air. Thirty miles an hour would be very conservative.

  This kind of speed, attached to rod and reel, in the person of a fish weighing ten or twenty pounds or less or even more, provides extremely interesting combat. Jacks, like groupers, are very wise in using rough coral architecture and snags, such as fallen logs, to discomfit anglers. They are also abundant, in wide areas. Crevallés and horse-eyes inhabit inshore areas as a rule and may be taken from beaches, rowboats, docks, or by wading on the flats. They will hit top-water plugs so hard that only rugged ones last long—the others fall apart. They can be taken on ordinary casting tackle. But the man who goes after them without a thumbstall (or a few layers of adhesive wound round his thumb) will be in trouble. Thus, the initial run of an eight-pound horse-eye jack I took in Bimini the first day I tried for them gave me such a bad turn that I couldn’t use that thumb for a couple of weeks.

  However—and here’s an invaluable tip for bait casters who are salt-water tyros—if you haven’t a thumbstall and your casting reel begins to heat up your thumb, the thing to do to save yourself a blister is to plunge rod, reel, hand and all into the water. This provides automatic, instant cooling. Besides, the reel handles, whizzing in the sea, are slowed down—an effect which provides considerable drag and lets you ease up with the overheated thumb. This I learned while tarpon fishing with a casting outfit—after I’d had the s
omber experience with horse-eyes.

  Amberjack usually hang around coral reefs where the water’s from twenty to upward of a hundred feet deep. Crevallés and horse-eyes are inshore jacks. The permit, a relative, is also a shallow-water denizen. A flattish, wide fish with a bluish dorsal fin like a scimitar, a fish that feeds like a bonefish—i.e., by nosing along in a dozen inches of salt water, hunting for crabs and the like, with his dorsal or tail often showing—the permit runs up to at least forty pounds. There are plenty of anglers who will swear he is the fastest, toughest thing in fins, pound for pound and, as I hinted, he’s worth going after. In some areas permit are fairly abundant. They are generally taken by using bait—crabs and such—presented by a cast after stalking (for a feeding permit can be seen a long way off). The cast is followed by a breathless wait while the blue dorsal and paddling tail approach the spot where the bait lies.

  The African pompano—a permit and jack relation—is usually caught over fairly deep reefs and sometimes in the edge of the Gulf Stream—on baits being trolled for sailfish and the like. He is a hard-fighting fish that has, like the permit, a curious habit of turning on his side in the water to get the utmost out of himself. And this pompano is artistically dramatic. His dorsal fin is elongated in “streamers,” a half dozen of which may trail a couple of feet behind. Nobody knows for sure their function. But a good guess would be this: Even though you might be a thirty-pound fish, you would find the ocean a perilous place to live with far bigger fishes forever trying to sneak up from the rear and make a meal of you; if, however, you were trailing streamers behind you, they might act as a warning-device; any huge fish, stretching his jaws and closing in to devour you, would first touch the streamers—at which point, without bothering to look around, you could open the throttle to full speed and take evasive action. I suspect the African pompano is one of the few fish to be provided with rear-end antennae.

  The almaco is a deepwater jack, caught rather rarely. There are many other pompano relatives and jacks taken the world around. One such, for instance, gave me what might have been my one good chance at immortality. I was reef fishing along the picturesque islets north of Cat Cay one morning when I hung what I deemed to be a small jack, as indeed it was—an eight-to-ten-pounder. When I boated it, however, I noted at once that it was not like any jack known to me. It was fatter, chubbier, or stubbier. Besides which, it was violet—all over. A very beautiful thing to see. The skipper, mate and native boys on board had never in their fishful lives seen one before. We put it tenderly on ice. We went in for lunch. After lunch, I went to the icebox to prepare the specimen for a fast air trip to Miami where Al Pfleuger, the famed taxidermist, would identify it if that could be done, and, if not, mount it and preserve the skeleton. Unfortunately, while I had my lunch, some island boys, searching for a lunch for themselves, found the fish, filleted it, threw the carcass overboard, fried the meat and ate it. Inasmuch as I have never since heard of a purple or violet-colored jack, I possibly missed having my name preserved forever in some such Latin form as Pompano indigoiensis Wylieae.

  That’s the thing about sea fishing. You never know. You may be “after” a special kind of fish with the bait and angling method designed for it, specifically—and catch twelve other kinds but never the one you were seeking. Or you may be trying to get a fish of a certain size, approximately, and hang its grandfather instead. That happens with monotonous frequency in the case of tarpon. Several outdoor magazines have published full reports of tarpon—and since they run way over two hundred pounds they are not exactly “middleweights.” But men with bait-casting rods—and fly-casting rods, too!—search out regions where the tarpon are in scale. In my opinion, fishing provides nothing closer to four-alarm fires than the uproar afforded by ten or thirty or fifty pounds of tarpon in one piece, attached to light tackle. However, the man who flings out plugs in the hope of hooking such tarpon can—and often does—experience the calamity of having his bait taken by a tarpon pushing a couple of hundred pounds. With a mere hundred yards of twelve-pound test line, the bird in that predicament can only sit, while his thumb heats (and perhaps the tarpon’s leaps drench him with buckets of water), until the fish meanders off, breaking the line.

  Readers will note my mention of barracuda—certainly a Grade A game fish for the middleweight division. ’Cudas leap, bulldog, sound, make fast surface runs and generally behave—on light tackle—like a poor man’s marlin. But you will remember I reported on the breed fully in an earlier chapter. Suffice to say here that ’cudas are fascinating to fish for, good to eat, and may be found in tropical and semitropical waters anywhere and everywhere—lying close inshore like pike (which are distant relatives), or roaming the great Gulf Stream where bottom lies five hundred fathoms down.

  Some small sharks should be classified as middleweights, also—particularly little black-tips—often taken on light gear in such vast regions as the Bay of Florida. But, again, I have previously expounded on sharks in these pages.

  Besides the fishes I have already mentioned as middle-weights, there are hundreds more. Literally. There is, for example, the so-called “school tuna”—a fish running (generally) from twenty-five pounds up to seventy-five—which is the object of summer-pursuit by fleets of charterboats in New Jersey, on Long Island, and elsewhere. This tuna is neither more nor less than a young bluefin—the childhood form of the giant “horse mackerel,” a physically perfect chip off the old block, with the same power, stubbornness, tendency to sound, and excess of energy.

  The first really definite impression I made on the girl who is now my wife was achieved by means of the school tuna. She and a friend and I were spending a day at the sport when the friend and I hung a double-header—his first school tuna, incidentally. We got them to the boat at the same time, after a half hour of walloping battle. His was gaffed—mine got away. I was delighted that he’d caught one—and not in the least miffed by missing, since I’d taken hundreds and lost even more. The lady who is now Mrs. Wylie, however, mistook my mixture of enthusiasm and nonchalance for extreme sportsmanship and, as she later confessed, admired it greatly! The gent who caught the fish has never before or since registered a more abundant, whooping form of delight—even though he’s very good at registering emotion, being Paul Douglas, then a radio announcer and now a star of the stage and the movies.

  In Florida waters we have a cousin of this tuna, an albacore, a fish usually running around the ten-to-fifteen-pound mark, prized for his battling heart and even more for his flavor—when boiled and cooled—in salad. In the Pacific there are yet other albacores, as edible, as given to fighting. Moreover, what I would call an albacore, in certain areas, is called a bonito.

  There is a fish called the snook, too. Snooks like shallow water, hollows under stumps, weed-thick coves, and other such places as pike inhabit. Snooks, indeed, with barracudas, are distant relatives of the pike-pickerel-muskie tribe. I like to use the snook to help a fresh-water angler, a fly caster or bait caster, make the transition to ocean fishing. His gear will be familiar to him. He will not find a great difference between casting his plug at the water alongside a fallen pine tree or the open water amongst lily pads and casting up to a tangle of mangrove roots or into a blue pothole surrounded by shallow water in which red seaweed grows. The snook will hit like a pike and fight like one—with special emphasis on a genius for fouling up the line on snags.

  Where snook are scarce, there may be redfish. These are also called red drum, drum, channel bass, and sixteen other names. As fighters they are mediocre, but since they reach well over twenty pounds, their weight adds problems of an interesting nature to, say, the fly-fisherman. Like bonefish and permit, they may be spotted from afar, feeding along shoal waters—and stalked. They can be “flushed” or scared away—like bonefish and permit, too—but not so easily. A flushed redfish, for instance, will often start feeding again soon, quite near, and may be stalked anew. It is quite interesting, not to say palsy-making, to fish the way you often hunt—spotti
ng the game first, taking dead aim, bulleting out a plug, and then—just where the fun of hunting ends, to have the biggest fun of fishing still in store!

  It isn’t possible to make this sportsman’s log all-inclusive: There aren’t pages enough to contain the full log of the middleweights. What has preceded is a mere sampling, a kind of indication of fishes which fall in this fabulous class. I haven’t mentioned the other drums, the celebrated striped bass (about which books have been written), or a fish that baffles and excites anglers from Cuba to Chesapeake Bay—the crabeater, or cobia. Honorable mention certainly should go to the mackerels—Spanish and cero. Several of the snappers would qualify—indeed, I’ve seen one that had weighed more than a hundred pounds—stuffed and hanging in the old Key Largo Club, where it was proudly placed by the man who took it, the late Tom Frasure, a Florida guide who had his greatest pleasure angling for the middleweights and who was a demon snapper-catcher.

  Roosterfish should be on the list—and hogfish. Perhaps blackfish qualify. The smaller, inshore members of the jewfish family belong here, though their sires and dams, running to many hundred of pounds, rate a different listing. Some anglers would add devilfish, by which I mean squid, taken occasionally off Chile on rod and reel by angler-pioneers who don’t mind wild seas, night fishing, tentacles wrapping around their necks, ink squirted in their faces and the hideous spectacle of mass cannibalism in the rough, luminous water. But this will suffice, I trust, to convince the angler who, up to now, has felt marine fishing is a matter of long days of trolling which may or may not wind up with a monster caught, that such is not the case necessarily. With sailfish baits flickering from outriggers and lines trolling straight back, with a cruiser or even an outboard guided in broad scallops around the Gulf Stream edge, you may, to be sure, raise sails. But you may, instead, raise and hang a dozen other sorts of fish—and when the day ends, you may well have forgotten that, all the while, it was sailfish you were seeking, not kings and mackerel, ’cudas, groupers, amberjack, dolphin, bonito, wahoos, and the like. You will go back again for sails, of course; but you won’t count that day lost, believe me.