Fish Tales - by Janie DeVos

 

                                    

             Author (in foreground), with sister, Kathy, fishing in the Bahamas, circa 1995.        

     My husband and I are anxiously waiting for our new pontoon boat to be delivered.  Though we haven’t even broken ground on our new lake house (septic system placement problems—don’t ask), we have a dock slip.  It came with the land. Thus, we put in our order for a new pontoon boat before we even had a pot to p*^$ in.  Literally.  This should come as no surprise to those of you who know us.  We’re native Miamians, and we fish. 

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, my family has been in Miami since the early part of the 20^th century, and throughout that hundred years’ time, we’ve fished everywhere from the Florida Keys, to the Bahama Islands.  Unsurprisingly, we have quite a few fish tales to tell, and while all of them may not involve record-winning fish, or even the actual catching of them, the stories resulting from the trips were well worth the effort of going.

Take for instance the story of my dad and uncle fishing for snapper one day off of Miami, in Biscayne Bay.  The fish had been biting well, and the men had a whole stringer full of them hanging off the side of the boat in the water.  All of a sudden, Uncle Lew whispered to Daddy, “Don’t breathe.”  Slowly turning to see what it was that had my uncle depriving him of air was a shark that had risen to the surface like some giant enemy submarine, checking out its next target.  The aluminum boat they were in was 12’ long, and, terrifyingly, the shark was longer than the vessel.  Obviously, the scent of bloody fish had attracted it, and the shark eyed the string of snapper, as well as Daddy and Uncle Lew.  Then, for whatever miraculous reason, the mega predator decided there was better fare to be found elsewhere in the bay, and it submerged back into the depths.  Firing up their small Johnson outboard engine amidst a flurry of exclamations, the men decided they’d had enough of fishing for one day, and they pushed that throttle has hard as they could getting back to shore…but not before pulling that stringer of fish aboard.  Which brings me to the long-held, unspoken rule about fishing in my family: Never go home empty handed. 

My grandfather would often go fishing with my dad and uncle, and if they were skunked (i.e. caught no fish), then my grandfather made them stop at a fish market to purchase whatever was freshest, and then told my grandmother, mother and aunt that they had caught them.   He usually embellished the claim with some whopper of a tale, but the women weren’t to be fooled: The fish were half frozen.

Another taboo among my fishing clan was that when on a mission-of-fishin’, one was never, EVER, to be thwarted from getting a line in the water. 

One evening, my cousin, Brian, and I headed out to do some night fishing from a seawall behind an exclusively expensive private girls’ school.  It just so happened that on this particular night there was a debutantes’ ball going on, and things were looking bleak as far as making the first cast.  “Well, that takes care of that,” my cousin disappointingly stated. 

“Not so fast,” I replied, quickly formulating a plan.  After all, we had plenty of bait, and, more importantly, a cooler full of ice cold Coors.  “Grab three rods and our tackle box,” I said, jerking my head toward our fishing gear in the backseat.  Then I went around to the trunk of the car and grabbed our cooler and a blanket. 

“Hold the rods straight up,” I instructed.  Then I threw the blanket over them so that only the handles appeared at the bottom, making it look like the legs of a tripod of some sort.  “Follow me,” I said, marching off with the cooler toward the school.

We walked through the brightly lit front yard, past the circular drive, where men in white tuxedos politely opened the door for the ladies arriving with their escorts in their BMW’s, Bentleys, and Mercedes, and on into the side yard, where we were finally stopped by security guards. 

“Hold up!” one exclaimed.  “You can’t be here!”

“We’re photographers,” I stated nonchalantly, looking around as though I was scoping out where we might capture the best shots for posterity’s sake.  “Where do they want us?”

“Around back,” the guard replied, pointing.  And that was exactly where we wanted to go.

We walked past the stone courtyard, where many strings of soft white lights illuminated the beautiful young girls in their perfect white organza dresses waltzing along in the arms of their perfect-looking escorts.  On we walked, without any of the perfectly-perfects giving us a second look, until we were deep into the dark backyard and finally at the seawall.  Then, we uncovered the rods, spread our blanket on the ground, wound fresh earthworms around our hooks, and cracked two cold ones.  I don’t remember catching anything that night, but it didn’t matter.  Our lines were wet, a soft breeze was blowing, and the glittering Miami skyline rose up in the distance, reminding us of how far our family had come since they first rode in on Henry Flagler’s railroad in 1916. 

Many years have gone by since my great-greats first threw a line into the Florida waters, but one thing has not changed through them; our love for fishing, and our love for telling fish stories.  Most of them are true, but, every now and then, one may be thrown in that is a little more fiction than fact.  It’s a chronic condition of every good fisherman—the telling of big fish tales—and it’s one that there is no cure for.  However, as my husband and I start to collect our own fish stories on the new pontoon boat, I will relate them to you in the most honest, unembellished way.  I promise….kind of.