Thursday, January 25, 2007

Tarpon + Kayak = Comedy

Those who know me well can pretty easily imagine how impatiently I made the trip from Solentiname to Sabalos, starting at 5:00 a. m. and then ending at 3:00 p. m. when, soaked in jungle sweat from the effort of assembling my boat in a rush, I finally got back onto tarpon water. This being my fourth official tarpon trolling day, I knew the drill: get to the deep run and troll against the current at about 2.5 mph; when it shallows out, turn around and troll quickly back downstream; repeat until completely exhausted and/or dark falls. Like so many outdoor activities, this type of fishing becomes calming through repetition, even hypnotic.

That is, until the STRIKE! Over 20 feet of water, there´s no mistaking the violent, rod-whipping strike of a tarpon. Nor the deep indignation of not getting a solid hookup. I took a quick range on a shed and some trees and paddled down to repeat the same line. Guess what: WHAM! another identical strike. By now my knees are feeling a little shaky with excitement. After 20+ hours of looking for them, I am finally fishing over some grabby goddamn tarpon at 4:00 p. m. on my second to last day on the San Juan.

On the third pass the rod went down into a ¨C¨ shape and stayed that way, bringing the boat to a shuddering halt and making the drag sing that sweetest high-pitched song. By the time I´d picked up the rod and ruddered around to look downstream, the fish was already completely out of the water and looking, against the afternoon light, like the most beautiful thing I have seen in this fairly beautiful country. It came down in a fearful big splash, and I pulled up the rod in acute terror -- was it still on tight? It was.

A fool´s hope suddenly fulfilled is only one of the powerful emotions that started flowing at 50 million CFS. There was also shock and awe at the size and power of such a huge fish, as well as a wild joy, even unsurpressable glee, that burst up out its buried places every time the tarpon made another violent and magnificent jump. I made some pretty damn silly hooting and shouting and laughing noises during this stage of the struggle, eventually hustling out my camera with shaking hands to try and film this exquisite moment. Luck was really with me that day, because the very moment I hit the digital film button the tarpon made its fifth jump. Try viewing that clip here.

As long as the fish was running hard and jumping, the scene seemed somewhat like a guy fighting a fish from a boat. But when the tarpon settled down and started sulking on the bottom, it quickly became apparent that a 93 pound fish holding in 3 mph current tugging, on 40 pound braided monofilament, a 40 pound boat containing a rather baffled 160 pound gringo, is the very definition of a stalemate. Periodically the tarpon made a move for the surface to roll and thrash in ways that seemed pretty clearly to be a threat to the boat. Even in my addled brain a sense of mild danger started to grow. It was about 4:45, and this stalemate could have lasted until midnight or longer.

The cavalry does come over the hill, though, in the form of local fisherman Vicente Escobar, his young cousin Chepe, and two grinning kids all packed into a dugout canoe. ¨What are you going to do with the fish?¨ Vicente asks from a polite distance. ¨Other than lose him or be drowned by him?¨ I´m thinking . . . at this point I am as ready as ever in my life to accept some help landing a fish, normally not all my M. O. So I reply, ¨If we can land this fish together, it´s yours.¨ And quicker than you can say Sabalo Chorizo, we instantly formed into a tightly organized five-man fishing team. We lashed my kayak on one side, and after clambering into their completely unstable craft, I fought the fish off the opposite side.





And man did those guys know how to paddle. They kept the boat moving opposite the fish at all times, and I kept sweating and cursing as I knelt in a slurry of half-dead mojarras and bait, keeping pressure on the fish as best I could. Once or twice I paused in the battle to take a picture; the guys all looked at me as if to say, ¨dude -- do you want a picture, or a fish in the boat?¨ Of course, I wanted both. At the sketchiest moment in this last stage of the fight, I brought the fish to the boatside for the first time and it toootally freaked out, running under the boat with the tip of my rod broken off and amazing us all by jumping on the opposite side of the kayak. In the frantic rowing to correct this situation I was sure we were all going to swim.

But we didn´t. The team kept its wits, and as dark started to deepen, we made a successful if not pretty end to the battle. I got to where I could pull the tarpon´s head up every five minutes or so, and at these moments Chepe left off paddling and turned his crudely hewn, sodden wood paddle into a club, whacking at the big silvery fish head for all he was worth, bless him. The stunned fish still took two men to lift him up into the boat. Juego ganado! High fives and smiles all around! I got a couple of shots in the wobbling canoe, and they got some serious fish meat at 10 cordobas a pound, plus the deeply embedded Rapala plug. We´d floated pretty far downstream, and I had to scurry off to the hotel to be sure of a safe landing.

Chepe happened to live in the maze of shacks down from the hotel, and I´ll be gormed if he didn´t show up the next morning in his dugout with a big bowl of chorizo de Sabalo -- tarpon sausage. I´ll be even more gormed if that shit wasn´t absolutely delicious. You could easily pass it off as pork chorizo, though somebody might comment that it had a remotely fishy flavor. I made a little bit of a mistake by taking the bowl back filled with my extraneous fishing tackle to give to Chepe, telling him I thought the chorizo was delicous. I think this forced him, with a quietly elegant and very touching Nicaraguan courtesy, to come back to the hotel an hour later with another, bigger bowl of chorizo plus tamales and sour cream made by the Senora de la casa. I made him sit down at the hotel to have a tamale and beer with me (which was stretching social codes, since he was very much a shirtless indigenous fisherman among the bermuda-pants patrons of the town´s shwankiest 15 dollar hotel) and had to think: if we could get Hugo Chavez and Dick Cheney to go land a tarpon together, then we would almost surely have harmonious friendship between nations.

So now, on my last full Nicaraguan day chillin´in San Carlos, I´m thinking that it has been a pretty damn good first month of my sabbatical. Lots of great fishing, lots of human value, and plenty of adventure. If the plane goes down in flames tomorrow, gentle readers, let be known that I died quite happy.

5 comments:

Rick said...

meckel wants to know why you are fishin for tampons?!?

John B. said...

Wow! That's all the uninitiated can say is wow. The quest. You'd of been content without the tarpon but not complete.

It's just a gass reading about the journey. Stoop me didn't realize I needed to check in w/your blog to keep updated. Thought people let you know when it was updated.

Anyways I'm goin back for a 2nd reading. See ya soon

NaHaj said...

Whoa, the trout purist in me cannot even imagine hooking into such a beast!

Pounda said...

a whoppin fish story Tappa! I am in disbelief. I think the whole thing was faked. Filmed at the SF Aquarium. The tarpon was a photoshopped Golden Gate bottom feeder. The "calvary," street salesmen from the Haight.

kahuna said...

Nice report...
something similar in the same spot:
http://www.videospin.it/esquina.wmv

http://www.videospin.it/esquina.mpg

tight lines
Antonio