Sea Stories...

Was down in Peru for a wedding recently. Aside from the wedding, a bunch of people signed up to go on a trip to Cuzco, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, and some other places. Some of the group were older, some younger. Of the younger (20s + 30s) people, some partied obscenely, while a cadre of about 4-6 others were generally mellower, particularly late at night. I was in this second group. By the closing days of the trip, Group B had sort of made it an unofficial custom to get a bunch of late-night drinks at the hotel bar in Lima before going to bed. Personally, I had taken to guzzling coca maté (coca-leaf tea) since suffering altitude sickness in Cuzco, so that’s what I’d have to relax after a long day. The others drank mostly whiskey.

Anyway, over plenty of whiskey, coca maté, and counterfeit cigarettes, we’d swap stories. Since most of us didn’t know each other that well, we had tons of fresh stories to tell. I think my favorite yarn of all was contributed (very slowly and with lots of hand gestures) by Rob, a blond-haired and lobster-skinned boat captain from Nantucket.

He prefaced it by saying, “Hey, I got a pretty good shark story…”

Well, I may have forgotten some details, but this is the basic deal:

So, Rob was crewing on a fishing boat off Cape Cod at some point in the past. The boat was long-line fishing, which is where they drag a (long) line with lots of hooks on it, like in A Perfect Storm. In fact, this story is a lot like an episode that happened in the movie.

Well, Rob and this other crewman are baiting the hooks on the long line as it reels out into the ocean. Apparently this was taking place around dawn. Meanwhile, the boat’s captain, a massively fat, huge, and salty guy, is up in the tower of the boat, driving. As they reel out baited hook after baited hook, all these sharks--dozens of them--start coming right up into the wake of the boat, just off the stern. As Rob and the other guy work the lines, the sharks are thrashing around just below them in a feeding frenzy. Apparently they were attracted to the bait, or perhaps to some of the fish blood and guts that was washing off the deck.

Rob’s not sure how it happened, but the other crewman gets caught on one of the hooks (or pushed, or something (at this point Rob threw in a “maybe it was my fault”…he didn’t pause to elaborate and nobody pressed him))…either way, the poor guy goes flying off the back of the boat and into the christforsaken drink—directly into the school of feeding sharks.

Well, no sooner had Rob called “Man Overboard” than down the ladder flies the massively fat captain. He runs to the stern, and in one motion grabs a long, aluminum gaffing hook off the gunwale, slams it through the back of the foundering crewman’s shoulder, and hooks it right through his chest near the armpit. Then he yanks the guy back on board with the hook. Once the crewman was safe on board, the captain hacksawed off the barb protruding from the crewman's chest, pulled the rest of the hook backwards out of the guy’s shoulder, and called the Coast Guard.

I asked Rob if the crewman was pissed and/or in agonizing pain as a result of basically being harpooned. Apparently the guy was neither. I guess the shock took care of the pain, and the abject terror trumped any anger at being speared like a whale. The captain did save his life, after all. He grabbed the crewman so fast that the sharks didn’t have time to get a piece of him.

That story led to a long discussion about a classic tale called Sailing Alone Around The World, by one Joshua Slocum. It’s a great, great sea yarn, and a true story. This old Yankee sailor repairs a beat up wooden sailboat and, setting off on April 24, 1895, takes it around the world (alone, as one might have guessed from the title). Many adventures ensue.

It’s a pretty short read, strangely compelling, and genuinely entertaining. Best of all, it’s on the web for free:

http://www.arthur-ransome.org/ar/literary/slocum2.htm