This Month's Story
FISHERMEN THINK THEY ARE THE ONLY FISHERMEN
Fishermen think they are the only fishermen.
Well, they’re not. They share the waters with others who, while not strictly “fishermen,” have an equally strong interest in catching fish. However, they have an incentive that your average rod and reeler doesn’t have:, they do it for a living. Let me correct that, they do it to stay alive.
To the fisherman sitting casting his line from his boat, the expansive reaches of the water around him presents a tranquil scene that one of the basic reason for his being where he is. It is a deceptive tranquility.
A pelican, dropping hard into the water, sends up a bright white splash and then takes off immediately, having missed his attempt at lunch. To the man in the boat, such a “got away” would not be earth shattering, but to the pelican it’s different. He’s hungry and what he is trying to catch is essential to his survival.
If we look at the scene from the view point of the diving pelican rather than the relaxed fisherman in the boat, its surface tranquility cloaks what is really an endless basic struggle of organisms striving to continue their own existence, to reproduce and eventually, to die. All our lives we see this eternal struggle all about us and become jaded and ignore it. But it is there.
I once spent a month in the Pacific Ocean aboard a small ocean research vessel as a visiting scientist. As an ex-helmsman, I spent my off hours on the bridge looking out at the water and talking to the watch standers. There are many places to be on a ship that will allow one to appreciate the beauty of the ocean, but the isolated quiet of the bridge on a long watch is the best.
As part of the scientific contingent aboard, there were two “bird men.” Their work was to classify and count the sea birds that they saw. They meticulously logged their sightings and later plotted them on charts and graphs to determine the distribution and migratory habits of ocean birds in the part of the ocean we were studying.
The men were ex-commercial fishermen of Japanese- descent. Birds are an important aspect of the type of fishing these men had been used to doing. What kind of birds they see and most importantly, what these birds are feeding on, tells the fishermen where best to fish.
This is especially true of birds on the horizon. In their comparatively slow-moving fishing boats, the fishermen’s knowing that the fishing may be a little better four or five miles away can be important.
Still, I was suspicious of the ease at which our two bird watchers identified birds at what to me seemed impossible distances.
“What are those birds there?”
I asked this to George one day on the port wing of the bridge. He came over to where I stood and I pointed out to him what looked to me to be four black specks on the distant horizon.
George looked for a moment with his glasses.
“Those are three stormy petrels, six Captain Cooks and two black terns.”
I called to the birdman on the opposite wing of the bridge.
“Yamamoto, could you come here for a second?”
Yamamoto came, glanced at George who shrugged.
“What are those birds there?” I asked.
He brought his glasses up, looked for a few seconds.
“Those are three stormy petrels, six Captain Cooks and, I think … yes, there are two black terns.”
Before I could make some flabbergasted remark on this, George pointed out excitedly to something in the water on our port beam.
“There’s a tree.”
With this, he ran inside the bridge.
I gaped at what he was pointing at. There was something there; but a tree? We were a thousand miles from the nearest land!
The first mate came hurriedly running outside to the open bridge and looked at the distant object in the water. He yelled happily and, running back inside the bridge and giving two loud toots of the ship’s horn to alert the crew, quickly ordered the ship to come about and head for what I could now see through the lens of borrowed binoculars was the floating trunk of a gigantic tree.
A very large tree.
On the lower decks I could hear a great deal of bustle, with many of the crew running aft. The mate turned over the watch to his second and, motioning me to follow him, joined the rush to the fantail.
I later calculated the log to be about 25 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. It was the remnant of a large tree that had grown for a century or so in some forest in western South America.
During a long ago storm, the large tree had fallen into some raging river that had carried it to the Coast and dumped it into the Pacific Ocean. There, equatorial currents had carried the trunk some thousand plus miles to this remote section of the Pacific Ocean we were studying.
There was more. As it drifted, small organisms had attached themselves to the tree; other organisms had then fed off these as well as slowly falling pieces of the decaying tree. Swimmers fed on these feeders in turn and beyond were larger feeders until at the periphery of all of these came the large wolves of the sea
Mahi Mahi.
And so the tree floated, carried by the ocean currents far from any land, a self-contained ecosystem in which creature lived on creature in an endless self-perpetuating cycle with the large Mahi Mahi at the top of the triangle of consumers.
Our ship circled the log with several trawl lines dragging from the stern and soon, amid loud cheers of the onlookers, several of the crew hauled up on the deck the flipping, glistening bodies of a half dozen five- six foot long Mahi Mahi.
The mate advanced on one and using a baseball bat momentarily stilled its struggles. Reaching down with a fish knife, he cut off a strip of the still quivering fish and, since I was a guest on the ship, courteously handed the raw flesh to me to eat first.
I took the offering and ate it, realizing as I did so that in reality, we on that deck were no different than the fishing birds we had counted on the horizon or these same Mahi Mahi that had circled the log a short time before.
In truth, fishermen are not the only fishermen. In many ways, we are all fishermen.
