deep sea fishing
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I went fishing with my father-in-law today. We caught about a dozen fish, maybe more, including a good-sized "white tilefish" and a similarly-sized grouper. The former took an entire hour to clean! But the biggest surprise for me was that I caught a shark. It "hit" very strangely, feeling for all the world like I'd snagged driftwood (which I don't think exists at depths of 80m in the sea?) but when I gave the line a jerk it jerked back. Then the real fight began and didn't stop. There are not a lot of ray-finned fish that will fight you the whole way out of the water column, they're soft bodies are usually too damaged from the change in water pressure. But this thing did, which deepened the mystery. It was only when it became visible that my FIL's friend, our guide and pilot, exclaimed "Sa-me!" and I looked down to see a sand-colored shark about 80cm long. It was built like a reef-shark, which I suppose means it's in the requiem* class of shark. As I was wondering what we'd do, it thrashed enough that it broke a hook (some 1.5mm thick steel) and was gone. I asked Hosoda-san, our pilot, and he said that the shark would be unharmed by the change in water pressure. Woohoo!
So, despite it being so cold when we left the harbor that the boat's small wind-screen froze over, I wound up with a sunburn and was wearing only a few layers when we came back into port. I've cleaned about two thirds of the fish so far, with five remaining. My hands are all scratched and the skin is a mess. I'll have to order some fishing gloves from a country where people are my size.
*I love that we took "requin" from French and somehow merged that with an existing word.
[ edit 2022.01.10 - photos! ]
