The Longest Silence

Silver King: A Glimpse

WE WERE LOADING LUNCHES, rods, and tackle into my skiff by the glare of the car’s headlights. The weather was deteriorating. I turned to marine weather on the skiff’s radio and learned that we were in a tropical disturbance and that a hurricane plane had been sent out to view the center of it. George Anderson and Jimbo Meador were my companions, men who never confuse angling with male bonding: fine dining and gentlemanly hours were out the window. We had fueled up at the dock instead of siphoning gas from the rental car with a borrowed garden hose as George and I had done in the past. We were going to look for tarpon in a new place, a stretch of beach, a deep pass and broad, sandy banks that looked ready to receive spring migrants. We had a watermelon in the icebox, sandwiches, a couple of gallons of water. With George aboard, this would be all there was to eat until the last drop of gas had been burned looking for fish.

He had tied up a supply of leaders, cautioning us to lubricate our knots with Chapstick instead of spit. “Use spit and you overheat these copolymers. You break off a lot of fish.” George had been chasing tarpon so long this spring in the keys that he had tendinitis from pulling up leader knots. Jimbo had never caught a tarpon before and right now it was the only thing in the world he cared about. I had made a blind guess that this area would hold fish, but I couldn’t be sure.

I eased the skiff up onto a plane. The quartering chop was coming at us from the southeast and the boat pounded up sheets of spray that stung our faces. I strained into the darkness ahead of the semi-airborne skiff, trying to remember any obstructions that might lie in front of us. “I remember this old boy from Baldhead Island,” came Jimbo’s Alabama drawl above the wind, “going from Southport across the Cape Fear River headed for Frying Pan Shoals, I guess …”

“What about him?” I hollered.

“Well, he hit something in the dark. Found him dead in his skiff.” I looked even harder into the blackness ahead, picking out a few lighted markers, a few house lights along the shore, those of a barge and then a tug. We didn’t realize what a lee we’d enjoyed until we got around the island. The wind was gusting up to twenty-five knots and prospects for fly-fishing were bleak.

By the time dawn began to break under scudding clouds and gray skies, we were searching for tarpon. George scanned the water intently. I stripped out line and false cast the twelve-weight line when a gust of wind flattened the backcast and sank a size 3/0 tarpon fly into the back of my head, the barb buried well below the skin. “We’ve got fish!” George shouted, then suggested I kneel on the deck so he could examine the fly. I doubt that he ever took his eye off the fish as he seized the fly with his pliers and yanked it out of my scalp. Next he removed a long file from the pocket of his shorts and retouched the hook point. Stepping back to the casting deck I felt a trickle of blood going down the back of my neck. Later, when I told a friend at the dock how George had helped me, the friend asked, “Does he do children’s parties?”

The fish were, in fact, traveling slowly toward us, rolling with open mouths and looking like a nest of enormous baby birds awaiting a worm. I cast to the edge of the school and was able to turn one fish, who then gathered himself under my fly and sucked it down. I hooked him and he burned off for about fifty yards. Out of nowhere, a hammerhead shot through the school looking for my tarpon. I tightened the drag and broke the fish off, leaving the shark sluicing through a piece of empty ocean. Re-rig, start over.

Hours later, we found the most beautiful big school of tarpon under a sky burnished pearl by the tropical wind. They were barely moving, their thick green backs just under the surface and their steeply angled, gunmetal-gray fins piercing the surface in such numbers that, from a distance, they looked like a small island. We eased up on the school and Jimbo cast into them, stripped, and hooked a fish. Stepping backward off the casting deck, he nearly went over the side. There was a circle of white around his eyes as the fish headed for the sky in the first of a series of ocean-bursting jumps. George stood next to Jimbo and coached him to keep a deep bow in the rod and put maximum pressure on the fish. After several hundred-yard runs, the vaulting leaps were reduced to surface lunges and the fish was soon alongside the boat. Jimbo sat down, pouring with sweat. George and I could reimagine our own first tarpon as we looked at the silvery bulk of this great game fish. We knew the euphoria our friend was feeling, and the odd, pure relief at the moment of release; the tarpon eased itself back into the darkness under the skiff and resumed its migration.

While I ran home against the falling tide, a happy Jimbo indulged a reverie about his grandparents, Osceola and Naomi, who fished for gars with whole croakers. “Benny Jones worked for us then and he cut those gar into steaks with an axe and took them to Gertie Pearl to sell in her nightclub.” Jimbo smiled, either at the memory or at the Gulf of Mexico; it was hard to say.

But that was a whole other story. George was still looking for a fish.