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  I was headed back offshore. I was headed to where I would struggle against entities larger than what hides behind a badge or legal jargon. I would face real, meaningful challenges in a world that—although unpredictable and unstable—makes sense to me. I was headed to a world I understand, where kidney stones are like hangnails. If it’s not life-threatening, it’s not worth mentioning. Sure, I would be back in beautiful Newfoundland to unload a trip of fish. But it would be on my own terms. Home is a feeling more than a residence. And I was headed there.

  CHAPTER 12

  Back to Business

  Darkness waded in cautiously and headed west. Hesitating waist-deep, then plunging into the murky chill, the diving night splashed light onto the opposite horizon, which swam like spawning salmon up the riverlike sky. The sun hatched as if it were a baby chick, pecking from within the shell until fully risen, yellow and warm, and as unsure as I was. Quite a grand entrance, I thought enviously. After all, the sun starts anew every day. This could well be my last chance. This was it. And I would make the most of it. There would be no more practice runs or dress rehearsals. If I couldn’t make a go of it this trip, starting today, swordfishing would become a dog-eared, stinking page torn from my life’s binding. I’d crumple it up, toss it over my shoulder, and go on. Suddenly in my mind’s eye, I dove and caught the paper ball before it hit the ground. Jesus! What was I thinking? I lovingly smoothed the page and tucked it close to my heart. It would be a hell of a lot easier to succeed.

  I had my own recipe for success, tested and time-proven. The main ingredient was work, plain and simple. I had always believed that a successful operation aboard a commercial boat would be the perfect business model for any enterprise. Not that I had experience in any other—my résumé is short: I fish and I write about fishing. But I do have a sense of corporate America, large and small, that leads me to say that commercial fishing is exactly like any other moneymaking endeavor. Every fisherman is an entrepreneur of sorts in his risk taking and initiatives. And, in the same vein, I suppose the members of my crew are freelancers, hired on for the trip or season. Of course, the captain is much like a middle manager, juggling pins between owner and underlings. All the worn-out, clichéd crap about business management—like teamwork and leadership—top the priority list aboard a boat. But it would be all the subtleties of leading and working together that would make the difference in this business venture. This team I had assembled had a certain synergy I was confident could overcome any of the usual challenges and obstacles that would come our way. Yes, it was time to get down to the business of fishing.

  A fitting symbol for my profession is the treble hook. Like Neptune’s trident, commercial fishing is a three-pronged entity. The most obvious aspect of the three is in the physical realm. The physical part was the easiest for me. It’s manual labor. It’s the part I had always felt best suited for. With persistence and determination, I had been able to bull my way through any physicality. Fighting the elements of time, tide, weather, mechanical problems, fatigue due to sleep deprivation, and the basic moves involved in the daily operation of setting, hauling, and handling fish could be explained or taught in a book accompanied by a DVD, if such material existed.

  Success on the physical level would not be possible without successfully meeting the second of the three elements—the psychological /emotional challenges. There are certain emotional facets inherent in going and staying offshore for extended periods, away from home and loved ones and the mainstream of life as the rest of the world sees it. I conquered those long ago but worried that my crew might struggle. The only cure for home-sickness is going home. And going home would not be on the agenda for some time. On the psychological side, the challenges are twofold: shipmates and competition. Although I can get along with just about anyone, I’ve worked with men who have tested that capacity. Occasionally there are two men aboard a boat who dislike each other with an intensity that leads to fistfights. My cure for that has always been to levy fines. The threat of losing pay has never failed to lengthen short tempers. I could foresee no problems among my present crew, leaving lots of room in my head for the contemplation of jousting with my counterparts captaining other vessels.

  Jockeying for position with a real strategy, holding that position once gained, and balancing ethics with competition could only be learned from experience. I could jockey with the best of them. I believed that the strategy for successful fishing hadn’t changed, as swordfish themselves hadn’t evolved noticeably during my ten-year sabbatical. Fishermen certainly hadn’t changed—everyone wants to catch the most, the fastest. There would be sandbagging and exaggerating. There would be out-and-out lies. I had heard and told my share. Finagling and manipulating were important in this business, as I assume they would be in any business, maritime or not. There is nothing malicious in this form of deceit. It’s expected. There are rules of engagement to be followed. For example, the first captain to drive stakes (so to speak) from a certain latitude and longitude to another latitude and longitude claims that berth, or span of ocean, in which to set his gear. He owns that berth until he gives it up. Ethical fishermen follow the unwritten rules. Simply stated, it’s first come, first served.

  On the most rudimentary level, he with the most fish wins the competition. But he with the most fish does not always make the most money. There’s real strategy involved in hitting the market with fish at the right time to receive the highest price, and that competition brings with it another layer of deceit. It serves the paycheck well to land fish when the rest of the fleet is still fishing or steaming, even if it means cutting your trip short to get the big price. Of course, we also compete for price with imports from Canada, Chile, Spain, and several other places whose fishermen are not held to the same standards of conservation that U.S. swordfishermen are. Nothing cuts deeper than the news that Canada has just dumped fish on your market after you’ve left the fishing grounds and lost your berth to another boat while trying to slink away and beat the fleet to the dock.

  The third prong in this business of fishing is more obscure. It’s difficult to articulate, but I think of it as conquering “the fishing ocean” as opposed to the physical ocean. The fishing ocean is never a level playing field but is at least consistent in its unpredictability. Sure, I can calculate drift and find thermoclines. I can place gear in water that birds seem to like and that color and temperature indicate fish will, too. But the fishing ocean is less explicit. It can be, in its most profound moments, esoteric to the point of being devious. All the physical signs can be heart-poundingly perfect, sirens luring me to set gear only to find nobody home. I suspect that success on this level, however vague, would be considered having “business sense” or some innate ability. There is no Fishing Made Easy course that can teach this part. Either you have it or you don’t. I used to have it. But I did always wonder if I really had some gift or whether my success was more of an ability to compensate for the lack of it with sheer work ethic. Whichever the case, I understood my business of fishing and was ready to engage.

  I knew from experience that success today aboard the Seahawk hinged on our ability to conduct business simultaneously and seamlessly in these three aspects. We would face skirmishes on all fronts, each of which would call for its own kind of intensity and expertise to overcome. If I think of myself as the CEO, my success will be facilitated by my ability to get the most from my employees. In my experience the way to do that was to lead by example. Commanding a crew is more about inspiring them to diligence and competence than it is about actual commanding. Merely barking orders doesn’t achieve desired results for me. I work with my crew. They do not work for me. Respect is earned and cannot be demanded. Competition is fierce. Desire had been thwarted until now. When heart and soul went in, something would come out. Ethics would be tested.

  As we neared the grounds, sparsely populated by the remainders of the dwindling fleet, I wondered if my nautical education would serve me as well now as earlier. Had I missed some l
esson critical to success? I’d been a student of the business of being on the ocean all my life. My classroom had been tidal pools, clam flats, and the decks and bridges of boats. I had completed incidental courses in meteorology, oceanography, marine biology, navigation, mechanics, psychology, sociology, religion, and some very hard lessons in economics. Sure, my education was ongoing. I just hoped the Grand Banks curriculum hadn’t changed.

  Any apprehension I felt about competing on the water was displaced with the comfort of knowing that I had the ability to define my own standard for winning. Like the commercial fishing business itself, success within it was also threefold. The completion of a trip “from dock to dock,” as we say, regardless of fish caught and hence money made, is a successful trip. Simply getting off the dock and back to it in one piece is often not so simple. Seamanship, or a captain’s seaworthiness, is a combination of equal parts experience and common sense. I had to believe that I possessed bigger portions of both at the age of forty-seven than I had at thirty-eight. A second dimension of success, and the yardstick held by most people, would be to measure the success of any given trip by how full the hold is and not so much by the bottom line, as we have no control over the price of fish. Third, there’s my old standby, the one that never fails—the feeling of fulfillment that comes when life and livelihood join forces in work you love.

  The wind was blowing out of the east, and the sea had built to a steep chop. The Seahawk pounded through, rather than riding up and over the waves, sending rivers of green water along either side of the deck that spread and poured out of the scuppers and off the stern like spilled milk from a tilted table. Our progress to the grounds had slowed accordingly, and it was now apparent that setting gear this evening was questionable. Not fishing was the epitome of the anticlimax. Just one more delay. Everything was all prepped and set up to go. The crew was waiting for the word to get some bait out of the freezer. The GPS now indicated that at our present speed we would arrive at the general area where the five swordboats currently working on trips were situated at 11:00 P.M. That was not too late to set if we were dialed in on a spot and had been fishing it. But I would need some time to do the usual scoping out and lining up with the other guys, so I could get into the best spot without actually encroaching on someone else’s hard-earned turf. By the time we had pounded our way to within striking distance, it had become clear that none of the other boats were setting gear, due to the weather conditions and the forecast for the following morning. Paradoxically, this bit of news caused an instant and palpable rush of excitement in me.

  “Hey, Arch!” I yelled down the stairs. “Get the guys up! Thaw enough bait for eight hundred hooks!” Archie responded quickly and enthusiastically. As long as nobody else was fishing, I wouldn’t worry about where I set. I’d steam to the best berth and at least get a night’s fishing in while the competition sat it out. I wouldn’t tell anyone that we were setting until the gear was in the water. If I announced now that I intended to set, it would force everyone to fish. Nobody wanted to look like a wimp. And, more important, nobody wanted to put out the welcome mat at the front door of his piece of water. The weather wasn’t that bad, I justified. Even though there were few boats in the area, they had narrowed down the zone to fish by trial and error and were somewhat jammed up around where the Gulf Stream makes a bend from north to east. This corner of the stream where the current changes direction ninety degrees was always my favorite spot to fish, as it was nearly always the most productive. The other captains would be sound asleep and resting up for tomorrow night by the time I began my set. No sense waking anyone up. I now had a golden opportunity to slip into the highliners’ berth. This was not a new trick by any means. In fact, I had learned about it from the receiving end.

  As we continued to thrash about in the ever-increasing waves, our pace now at a virtual crawl, I remembered that frustrating business lesson with not-so-fond feelings. I was captain of the Gloria Dawn at the time, my first boat, and was in the midst of what was becoming a prolonged trip northeast of the Flemish Cap (another twenty-four hours to seaward than our present position). Fifteen sets into what my crew and I had been enduring in the way of weather—bad enough to provide us with a real physical beating, making everything more difficult than usual yet not bad enough to warrant a night off—I finally relented and decided to keep the gear aboard due to a prediction of worsening conditions. The fishing hadn’t been spectacular. In fact, we were in the process of setting a perfect example of grinding away and hoping for improvement, or at least high prices for what we were catching. We had enough bait and fuel for another four sets, and the moon was on the rise. Nothing but benefit could come from a night off at this point. We all needed a night’s sleep. The moon needed to grow. The weather needed to straighten out. And the fish needed to get hungry.

  There were at least forty boats strung along the break from the west side of the tail of the Grand Banks, around the southern tip, and up the east side all the way to well east of my position at about midfleet. My berth had not been producing anything more than what the others were reporting, but I was aware of the potential of this particular spot. When the fishing turned on, this would be the best of it, and we could very well put a slammer trip aboard in a couple of nights. As I now recalled, about half the boats made the same decision that night, with the other half fishing to keep tabs on what was what. The next night we’d switch. It was a real concerted effort and coordinated agreement to increase everyone’s productivity while sparing valuable bait and fuel during this period of slow fishing. It’s a known fact that fishermen always cooperate and work together for the good of all when the fishing is lousy. When the fish are biting, it’s every man for himself.

  I slept soundly that night so many years ago aboard the Gloria Dawn. It was the first time I’d had more than a short nap in two weeks. I woke before daylight with the realization that the weatherman had been wrong. The wind had dropped out, and I instantly regretted being included in the nonfishing half of the fleet. When I entered the wheelhouse to take over the watch just before dawn, I could see the lights of another vessel off in the distance. I cranked the radar to a range that showed the boat at eight miles from me. I hadn’t seen another vessel since we’d begun fishing this trip, as we were all setting end to end and no one had been inside or outside my forty-mile slot. I grabbed the VHF’s microphone and hailed the boat eight miles southwest of me. The reply was immediate. “Hello, Linda! It’s Captain Tommy on the Miss Leslie.”

  Oh, no, I thought. Tommy was the clown of the fleet in his total ineptitude. Nobody wanted to fish near Tommy. I knew I had to drive him away by whatever means it took. Tommy was a complete menace. He once set forty miles, hook for hook, right on top of another man’s gear, and his boat broke down before they had the mess straightened out, forcing the other captain to haul both strings and take the idiot under tow. Tommy just always screwed things up. Stupid like a fox, he always pretended not to understand where he was or where he needed to not be, and he had always been suspected of hauling other people’s gear and stealing fish. Tommy was famous for doing whatever he wanted, where he wanted, regardless of whom he was stepping on, then later begging for forgiveness for his honest mistake. I hadn’t heard Tommy on the radio since I’d started this trip, so I knew he was probably just arriving and looking for a spot. “Hi, Tommy. You must be headed to the east end of the fleet. Jerry has been starting around the forty-one line. With this nice weather and favorable tide, you can make it to his east end in time to set out. Over.”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see what happens here today. I’m just getting ready to pick up my end buoy. Come in.”

  “End buoy? You’ve got gear in the water? Over,” I asked as my stomach turned.

  “Yep. I got it in late last night, but I think it looked pretty good. I’ll let you know. Come in.”

  “You’ll let me know? Tommy, you’re in my berth. I’ll be fishing here tonight. Over.”

  “Well, I heard you weren�
�t fishing last night. I have to get busy here. Talk to you later. Bye.” And he was gone. I was enraged. Tommy had just managed to sneak a set into a spot I’d fished for fourteen consecutive nights. If he caught any fish, it would be impossible to budge him. I prayed that he would have such poor fishing that even he would think he could do better elsewhere. I prayed that he would be all fouled up and not be able to get his gear back aboard in time to set again, and he’d drift into the next berth and be out of my way. I spent the day kicking myself. Late that afternoon Tommy was back on the radio with a report of ten fish. That was about half of what I’d been catching. But I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth. I told him that I was getting ready to toss my end buoy and wished him well wherever he might be going. Tommy said that he would like to stay here and set alongside of my gear, as he knew I was nearing the end of my trip and he’d like to take over my berth when I left.

  “I have bait for at least five more nights, Tommy. You might be better off finding your own set. The break has been too tight for two abreast. Over.”

  “It’s too late for me to get anywhere else and set tonight. I’ll try it next to you. What water temperature will you be favoring? Come in.”

  “I’ll be working the whole break, from cold to hot. The fishing hasn’t been good enough to fine-tune the set. And now that I’ve missed a night, things may have changed. I’ll be covering all of the bases. I think you’d be better off finding your own berth. Over.”

  “I caught all ten of my fish on the warm side of the edge. So I’ll fish outside of you. What time are you starting? Come in.”

  There was no shaking him off. I was stuck with the jerk. And I didn’t trust him. If he said he wanted the warmer water, he might be tricking me into fishing warmer myself so he could have the cooler side of the break. On the other hand, he might realize that I didn’t trust him and be trying a reverse con job on me. The only solution was for me to make my set the way I normally would but perhaps making sharper turns that Tommy couldn’t possibly follow in and out, forcing him to stay well off my gear and, I hoped, out of the fish. But, I realized, Tommy might attempt to mirror my set and end up all over me, screwing both of us up and ensuring that neither of us caught anything the next day, since everyone knows that tangled gear does not fish.