The Fish

The Sanibel pier is a t-shaped structure that juts out from the eastern-most point of Sanibel into San Carlos Bay. One walks onto the pier through a covered entranceway with benches on each side, away from the tangle of rods, line, bait buckets, and fishing carts ahead. I was standing on the north end of the t-dock when I noticed the young eleven or twelve year old boy cater-corner from me holding his fishing pole with two hands, one over the stem, the other on the reel handle. His eyes never strayed from the end of his pole. Every so often a woman dressed in a loose-fitting yellow blouse and a calf-length black skirt would get up from the bench and walk up to the boy. She’d spend a few minutes looking out towards the causeway bridge, say some words, and then make her way back to her seat. Most likely she was his mother.

This happened a few years ago, when fishing was good around Sanibel and one might expect to catch a keeper or two at the pier. I arrived thee around nine or ten. I saw stringers of sheepshead and other fishes attached to lines through their eyeholes. Still alive, their bodies undulated with the incoming waves. The “regulars” had already put in a good two, three hours of fishing. A Vietnamese couple wearing wide brimmed hats worked the north end of the dock, flinging lines baited with live pilchards under the pier. An old man dressed in khaki from his hooded cap to his shoes had set up three poles next to the pilings, and laid hooks baited with mole crabs as close as he could to the oyster-encrusted wood. A hyper young guy in shorts and tee-shirt cast a large hook baited with half a mackerel some forty yards out into the bay. When he hooked a blacktip shark, everyone on the t-section of the deck cleared out as he ran up and down the boards playing the fish until finally landing it with a thud on the deck. By late morning some tourists, sporting colorful tees and swim suits, arrived with their poles and shrimp buckets and started casting out their line, not realizing that schools of fish were actually feeding and resting right under their feet. I knew that at the end of the day the pier would look like a butchery with the filleting board and deck under each cleaning station stained with blood and speckled with glistening silver scales.

Suddenly I saw the boy’s pole top jiggle then pull down into a smooth tight curve. Excited, he spun the reel rapidly without playing the fish – if it was a big one it would surely snap the line. But as the fish broke the water plane I saw it was a sheepshead, about ten inches in length, a nice catch but under the size limit for keeping. He reeled the fish in and worked with it a while to get it off the hook. His mother, putting away her cell phone, walked up casually from the front of the pier, took a look at the fish, then said a few words to her son before turning back. Right away he drew from his belt a narrow knife, set the thrashing fish on the cleaning board and started to fillet it. He made a few too shallow slits behind and alongside the gills. Then he sliced into the flesh parallel to the spine while trying to control the gasping, flapping fish with one hand. Making one last effort to survive, the fish slammed its head onto the board, raised its dorsal half up and then down with enough force to propel it over the back railing and into the water below. Showing no sign of being flustered or angered, the boy mechanically sprayed his knife with the water hose, replaced it into the sheath on his belt and packed up his small tackle box. His mother came up to him and together they walked down the pier, onto the sandy beach, and toward the parking area.

I had wanted to go to the boy, admire his catch, and explain that the fish needed a little more time to feed and get bigger, but I was not prepared to help him fillet an undersized fish that should have been thrown back. In any case, everything happened too quickly for me to do anything at all. I decided to leave.

While putting away my fishing tackle, I though of a young twelve year old boy who had just moved to Westchester, to a new home, a new school. He was fishing along the shallow tree-lined banks of the Bronx River with a friend. Both boys were using hand-lines baited with dug worms. Then I saw a slightly older boy sitting in a wooden rowboat with his father and grandfather, drifting through winding inland marshes of Long Island Sound, fishing for eels and crabs. The boy’s father was coaching him not to react when the crab hit the chicken neck but to ever so slowly raise the line until the blue-claw just came into view below the surface. Wide-eyed with anticipation, he held the line still until his grandfather could work a net under the crab and with a sweeping motion scoop it up.

With my rod and tack box in hand, I made my way along the side of the pier. I stopped for a moment where the boy had been fishing. Gazing downward, I was surprised to see the black and white sheepshead moving in a tight circle, its sliced body-half flapping at an angle away from the rest of its torso. Streaming blood and bubbles from its would, the fish wobbled round and round, futilely trying to reach the piling only a few inches away, unaware of the dark shadows with gaping jaws that lay in wait on the other side.