The String Scatters
Photo by Nick Kelley.
We’re on the ocean side and getting shots all day. We can see them coming from two football fields away: black, human-sized torpedoes sliding over white sand bottoms. Strings of a half-dozen, two dozen, and more, keep coming at us, one after the other. We mark their course, make sure line isn’t snagged on anything, take a deep breath and let it fly. When they look, when one peels away from the string, we stop breathing, the boat goes silent—though there’s nothing to hear—and wait for a massive mouth to open and the fly to disappear.
By midafternoon everyone is hungry, but no one dares stop fishing, for fear the fish stop showing. I’ve just whiffed three shots so I’m out. I step down from the deck into the cockpit.
