Fishing

The fishing trip was to start at 9am with us dropping the lobster nets on the way to the fishing spots.
This, of course, did not occur. Beach time worked its relaxations over and then though I woke at 8am and was ready by 9, 10 rolled around and David was still not back from the farm. So I went to breakfast; skipped the cheese and loved the bread. I do need to replace the calories I've not been getting from all the alcohol i've not been drinking during these days. The calories are lacking but so is the extreme activities (though an ocean swim for an hour is quite the workout...and I miss Shifty, the old bike, is sitting in Marietta feeling as ansty as I, no doubt.)
So I fill up with my second Ecuadorian breakfast and wonder why I am eating an out-of-schedule meal before getting on a small craft to sail the choppy seas for hours, but logic hasn't stopped me yet. The gang's all back and up and ready to start something, but instead of fishing, I watch them make breakfast. So much for the early start.

At the beach we help to roll the boat down to the sea on logs, rolling it over the pair until the back one spits out at our ankles, jumping it and stopping it with feet, then dragging it back up by the ropes tied into grooves cut into the logs on which we roll the boat. Each log rotation moves the boat 5 or 8 feet forwards with everyone pushing. But even I can see its merits over plowing sand with the hull.

Then the cowboys came; and their cows claimed that stretch of beach in a very convincing manner. My delicate sensibilities rejoiced that we had already gotten the boat into the water and didn't have to barefoot it across the cow trailings.
It ends up being seven of us in the 15' boat, along with piles of nets, cooler with ice for the fish and beer to lend critical mass necessary to keep the ice colder longer. Our backpacks were in mega-ziploc bags to waterproof the contents; I had not expected to be getting that wet.
After pushing the boat out deep enough to engage the motor, we busted through the breakers and that put us into bobbing across the yet-to-be waveswells, where every time the hull of the boat cut into the swell a thick foamage of seawater would sting my skin and soak my clothing. This plus the cloudy day's winds brought me to chilliness so when we stopped to drop the lobster nets nearby Shark Cove (I suppose lobsters would find a banquet under the mannerless, slob sharks)
I had to take my shirt off to dry my skin, which is when the sun came out to burn my sunburn. So I took a hint from the desert folk, while El Capitan took to Invisioning the sun. David was translating that the boat over there was oystering, and the tube over the side was an airhose that was connected to a pump on the boat that sent oxygen somehow to someone on the ocean floor who was stuffing them into bags. The real fishermen took to laying out lobster nets and this required slow motoring as the nets were untangled which, contrary to high speeds that continue a rhythm of breaking through every wave, let the swells have their way with us while moving horizontally across them, lending an up and down swaying to the side-to-side swelling and dropping. This multi-axis noodling of my inner ears led them to be downright uncooperative in providing my stomach with the proper coordinates for Down so it knew which way to push the breakfast. We stopped shortly thereafter and that settled things.

















(The fishermen in Shark's Cove!)


Then we got to drop our lines. The second or third time I let mine drift to the bottom I got a great tug and slowly brought up a sharkish looking creature the length of my forearm. El Capitan is laughing "You caught a shark," and i'm thinking, now they're Really gonna be after me, and David is saying, its a Manta Ray, or some kinda ray, and the fishermen are taking it off the hook and its being really not happy, until they drop it into the sea and its gone looking for something other than shrimp on a hook. Being somewhere in the hundreds of Nautical Feet (that's measured with sea legs) from shore, the swelling waters kept the boat at a continual bob, which wasn't unpleasant. The real fun occurred when a wave broke that far out and we had to throw ourselves onto the wave-side of the boat so it wouldn't flip.
The only thing caught over the next few hours were those waves, though we did routinely lose our bait to nibblers and bottom dragging. We passed the grande cerveza around the boat and each got a few swigs per beer. Every other bottle or so we'd wind up the lines and motor over to another spot to try our luck, because the skill was getting us nowhere. This meant getting wet for 5 or 10 minutes and not quite drying out over the half hour of catching nothing again. This made for a dermally painful routine. A few casts into nothing-yet El Capitan hollers "Oh! Whup. Here we got something now." The line he's tugging on is taut and David is laughing, "that's no fish, its a rock."
"But its pulling back." The rod was in an arc towards the water. "That's the current pulling the boat away." He starts telling the fishermen 'he's got a rock' in spanish and everyone's laughing, because we are exposed to all the elements under this noonday sun, ocean wind and saltwater, the beer is successfully keeping the ice ready for any fish we might catch and the anchor's made for catching rocks, not shrimpbait. Without oyster-walking there is no telling what he had on that line out at Shark's Cove, but the line popped free, the bait was gone and it was suggested we motor on out of this current where the fish find it harder to feed in the faster waters.
Its around this time in the afternoon when the cold spray sun temperature differentiations all over my skin have sunk deep enough to meet the beer throwing a party in my stomach where i've feared to put but a few crackers into but for fear of the continual sway of this small boat. As we were first motoring out David asked us gringos if we got seasick. El Capitan talked a picture of the three-dimensional gyrating a small airplane swims thru and what level of more disconcerting it is compared to the ocean's rocking. All I can say is "we'll find out. Never been in a boat in the ocean for any real length of time."
Breakfast steadily became a retroactively worse idea as the day rocked by. When the swaying infiltrated my digestive tract giving the sensation of movement to part of my body I should not feel move, I would first take a technique from the Fold and close my eyes to concentrate my balance into my limbs in contact with the boat so that the whole of the rocking sensation would be dispersed into the hardness and lifting away of the wood seat, the moisture and pressure when swayed into one hand's support or the other or the intertwined twists of gravity swerving my spine at many intervals up and down it where my crown is being tied to my base with cables of energetically lubed inter-reactions i've been winding each morning around my breath.
If that didn't suffice and the swimming of my insides persisted i'd move into a focusing technique i've been augmenting in my juggling practice [more on this later]. Picking a spot on the horizon and laying all my attentions into viewing it. Pretty much the opposite of the previous technique, but the Mindfold has me pivoting around sight these days. Between the distraction of feeling into, and focusing away from, my gut worked to keep my fluids rolling in the right direction.
As we swung around another cove with no fish and only two bottles of beer in the cooler, we came upon the fishingest boat i've ever sidled decks with. It was about 50' with large sails and anchored in the cove's lapping shallows. It had 6 or 8 hand-dug canoeish boats laying crosswise across the deck walls with the central one still holding a man hardened by 10,000 days on the open ocean who was manipulating the intricacies of fishing line amongst a variety of slicing, grappling and yanking devices stained into rust with the salts and bloods. Maybe it was the salts soaking into my skin or the sun's deep heat in my blood, but my eyes were drawn and tunnelled to this man who could crack pescidian spines with those worn out hands whose wrinkles of prunage didn't need his eyes to guide the lines thru the metal's rings. The fishing lines mended themselves thru his hands.
David was chattering across my headtop to the most literate-looking (is that a wrong statement? [i've opened the blog so anyone can comment this is a great chance!]) man on the vessel and I couldn't follow it between my mind's magnetism to the hard fellow's simplicity and ducking the canoe tips overhanging their boat's walls while trying to keep hold of one to assist our rudderman in hovering our craft within the boat's orbit so the dialogue that I had completely lost the line of could continue. But I picked it up again pretty quickly as a ring of fish was handed across to our boat and numbers were being tossed through the air. I was asked if I had any cash, small bills on me. I lied, "nope, didn't bring any money with me on a fishing trip." Why did we pay for to rent (that's how my mind shortcuts spanish, not conjugating, infinitive is such a great concept) for to rent this boat to fish, if we are only to purchase freshly caught, extremely large meatful fish?
It takes all the sealegs El Capitan has to get to his ziploced pack and dig out his wallet, to find he had broken the $10 into lesser bills and so David had to pry off a couple of fish from the ring to hand the fish back with the cash and a bottle of our beer. But our cooler needed the room, I rationalized, and we drank the last bottle on our way to the next batch of fishless waters.
"Okay, I got something this time,"
"Another rock?" David asks just to get a laugh out of the crew, but we can see the line is bobbing and weaving with a life of its own and he gives it a tug to set the hook into fishflesh. After a minute of reeling against the zigzagging line he pulls out a fish the size of, well, smaller than a breadbox; but it was of an edible variety so it was unhooked and tossed on the boat deck to suffocate to death while flopping around for water and spritzing its torn gills' blood around.
El Capitan says to me, without looking at his vanquishing foe, "Now I remember...when we used to go fishing we always threw them back."
The last thing reeled up from the depths was on a straight line simply unwound from a spool with a hook and bait, no rod or reel, by one of the crew. It was a puffer fish, the kind that pushed Homer so far as to listen to the Bible; as they were dehooking it it puffed and bloated making the flaccid skin pouches that dangled from its body into points growing in some pie-based ratio with its belly. To avoid the spines the crewman had to grab it by its eyesockets pressing the balls into the poofy head to gain purchase and yank the hook from what might be its 'lip' or 'cheek.' It got tossed back.
The sun had been behind the clouds for the last while which gave my lobstering skin respite but kept the moist chill sinking into my bones so it was delicious to call it a day.
As we were using the log system to roll the boat up the beach, David returned from taking the rods and tackle back to the house and killed my landlubbing with the words "the cistern is empty. We are out of water until tomorrow." The warm shower I had held onto through all those gallons of cold oceanspray sank away from me into the depths of imagination. It was replaced by the sobering cold water of a neighbors outdoor rinser.