The Big Bucketing Trip

Erik Fearn has strange ideas about fishing.

Deep-sea fishing ain’t what it used to be. I was raised on adventurous fodder such as Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea where wiliness and brawn set the tone for deeply meaningful battles between Man and Beast (and the guy doesn’t always win either…), or in-your-face documentaries that show car-sized sailfish – the King of the Seas – ramming the offending fishing-boat into submission.

Scary, adrenaline pumping stuff, especially for a city-slicker like me who always thought that fish spawned and bred in the Frozen Food sections in grocery stores - the only place I’ve ever seen them.

Recently, while scuba diving in the Maldives, I was invited, along with several big playing anglers, “to spend a glorious day cruising the high seas of the Indian Ocean in search of a chance encounter with some of the biggest marlin and sail-fish anywhere”.

Or so the brochure said. What this basically amounts to is zig-zagging the featureless ocean all day long staving off seasickness with a picnic basket full of warm beer and greasy chicken – looking to pick a fight with anything, anything at all. Perhaps, as I’ve heard, even other fishermen who’ve encroached on you, um, surf.

The secret, apparently, is to get going before dawn because that’s when the big fish are at their groggiest. The giant marlin has just gotten up, and has nothing on his mind except some breakfast.

The high-tech 30 footer I was on, The Prowler, was skippered by - get this – an old British salty (ex-African colonialist and all that) named Lord William. His impressive claim to fame is having caught one of the biggest marlin on record – single-handedly – weighing in at a whopping half tonne!

Lord William pulled me aside, keen to explain the science of big game fishing: The design feature that makes a deep-sea fishing boat so easy to distinguish is the triple storey “tower” near the stern which doubles as the helm and watch-tower.

From up there, the skipper can scan the horizon, looking for flat patches of water on the ocean, which indicate strong currents. These currents carry with them a never-ending stream of marine-life, reluctantly doubling as potential food for our quarry. For marlin, swimming into one of these currents must be very much like going to a drive-thru, I would guess. (“Today, I guess I’d like a McFish… again”.)