True confessions from an American fish out of water
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2004/November/14/st...
Helen Meservey
November 14, 2004
Ever keen for fresh material, my sister wasted no time inquiring about the purpose of my trip to Mexico.
We live on opposite coasts, she and I, and we are not in the habit of frequent communication. We do not share much by way of personal style, and our
values have evolved quite differently over the years. I, for example, abide a generally vegetarian diet and read books on Buddhism; she cooks with
meat and attends Mass on Sundays.
Fishing, I told her.
It was a true and unimpeachable reply, improbable though it was. The week before, I had accompanied a friend to Baja California for his annual harvest
of ahi, or yellow-fin, tuna and mahi mahi, which in Mexico they call dorado.
Veiling incredulity and impervious to the irony, my sister simply nodded.
Fishing indeed, I thought.
I learned a lot on my trip, most notably that sport fishing is not limited to sitting catatonic in a metal boat on a still pond in Maine waiting for
the fish to bite or the sun to rise before you die of cold.
In southern Baja, where I was, even the fish don?t get cold. The boats, called pangas, are made of wood or fiberglass, and they fly across the
shimmering blue like pelicans copping a breeze.
Your skipper, your panguero, is likely to be barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and shorts. He?ll be friendly, efficient and professional, and he?ll want
to be the first boat out in the morning. With the right luck, timing and gratuity, he?ll take you to an underwater canyon where the fishing is a
fast-action sport.
On your panga, a modest, sun-yellow number designed for two, getting a tuna onboard is a three-part operation.
First, after flinging handfuls of sardines into the deep, you hang a live one on your hook and cast it out among the others. Sooner or later ? way,
way sooner in this case ? a hapless silver fish with golden fins will fancy upon your sardine. You?ll then spend several long minutes reeling it in,
taking care not to snap the line or tangle your pole with that of your companion.
Second, once your frantic fish is spiraling away at the water?s surface, your panguero will lean over and grab the line, pull your fish to the side of
the boat and bash it over the head with a plastic baseball bat. This, you understand, stuns the fish, causing it to stretch out straight and quiver
like it?s been plugged into a wall outlet.
Finally, your panguero will hook one hand through the gill of your stunned fish, unhook its mouth with the other and drop the bloody, still-shuddering
body into a compartment built into the back of the boat expressly for this purpose.
For dorado, the procedure is different. You drag live mackerel behind you, enticing the doomed fish to leap out of the water in an paradoxical display
of might and vivacity.
Once you reel it in close, your panguero lances it unceremoniously with a crook. Then, because the fish struggles on and on, he clobbers it one, two,
three times, and again and again and again with the bat, rendering it finally, bloodily, subdued and captured.
I did not share these details with my sister. I did not explain that I merely observed this spectacle and that my intention simply was to glimpse a
world that had theretofore been foreign to me, to look plainly at the fact that some creatures die unpleasantly for the pleasure and sport of others.
If she had probed, I might have described to her the experience of sitting in a palapa back onshore with an icy margarita and the freshest plate of
sashimi I ever dreamt of.
But it is the tradition and practice between us to respond to these inquiries with concision and truth; scandal is bonus.
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