By Tony Deyal
Kingfishers are brightly coloured birds famous for hunting and eating fish. If that is not me, it is my son Zubin who will be fishing with me in Tobago on Monday. Kingfisher is also a beer, and while your line is out and you’re waiting for a bite, you just have to grin, beer it, and get involved in some fishing business and not fishy business. One kind of fishy business you have to stay very far from is dishonesty.
For instance, if your doctor was giving you a rectal exam but he had both hands on your shoulders, that is fishy to the bone, or burn. It is different from when a cop tells you, “There is something really fishy about the evidence” and it turns out to be a red herring.
In my case, I don’t trust marine biologists. Something about them feels very fishy. The worst is when an artist, a mathematician, and a fisherman commit a crime. The police investigator found that it was not only very sketchy and didn’t add up, but with a boatman involved, it had to be very fishy. What made it worse is when one of them told the officer, “Go fish yourself.” It turned out to be a Board Game and had nothing to do with the sea. While they were still in hot water, it was not as bad as being hard of herring and when you ask the boatsman for help he refuses. He turns out to be totally shellfish.
Fishing in Tobago is fun because of the challenge. The flying fish there are very bright. They swim in schools. When I throw out my reel fishing tackle, it is a case of nearer my Cod to thee. And when I boast about catching a hundred-pound biggie. I make it clear that it is not me that weighed it, the fish used its own scales. And when it comes to boasting, I am not the worst. Nothing makes a fish bigger than when you almost caught it, or the line broke and it disappeared. If you don’t believe me, ask the fish. All you have to do is drop it a line. Of you can put a girl with you on the side of the boat and call her Annette.
However, enough of this. It is just me and my anxiety to be in Tobago when you’re reading this column. It is unlike Trinidad where the fish don’t always bite, and I have to lie like my partner Mike who was out in the north of Trinidad in some really bad weather and never caught even a sardine. So, he stopped by the vendor and ordered four catfish, making it clear that he wanted them to be thrown and not handed to him because he had to boast to his wife that he, and he alone, caught four big ones.
The vendor smiled and told Mike: “In that case, I really feel you should ask for Red Snappers.” Mike was upset and asked: “But why? You know I like catfish more than any other fish.” The vendor laughed loudly, “Well it is because your wife stopped here earlier today and told me that when you come later to buy fish, make sure I give you Red Snappers because she wants to have it for dinner tonight.”
While my wife has no problems with my son Zubin going fishing with me for an entire day, some women are not into fishing at all. In fact, if a woman never went fishing with her husband, she would never know what – a patient and quiet man she married. Or to put it in the fishy business column, a woman was very upset by the way her husband was treating her. She complained that before they were married he used to buy her a lot of gifts but now he had stopped. His response was, “Darling, have you ever heard about a fisherman putting bait on a hook for the fish he already caught?” He was lucky she didn’t fry him dry. But he had his way when one day he reached home and his wife was dressed in a very sexy outfit with everything showing and she grabbed him and after a kiss told him, “Tie me up and you can do anything you want with me.”
He tied her up and went fly fishing. What she did not know is that the best way to a fisherman’s heart is through his fly. Actually, what many in that position eventually find out is that if you give a man a fish, he has food for a day but one you allow him to fish, you can get rid of him for an entire weekend and, in his absence, both of you can do some serious fly fishing.
Some men and women believe that fishing is like dating. It’s all catch and release until you find a keeper. However, the men and fish have more in common than the men and women because they both get into trouble when they open their mouths. On the other hand, whether they are out fishing or at home, women see men differently. As Gloria Steinem, the American journalist and social-political activist insisted, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” No wonder men head out to the sea, not to catch fish but to catch themselves.
There is something in fishing that makes me, and many other men, feel we are doing the right thing. The fish don’t feel so. They go out of their way to make us look foolish. First, we find out that all men are equal before fish. Then, Nobel Prize winner, John Steinbeck, added, “It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.” John Ruskin, the English writer and philosopher, took it into another ocean, “No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever as free as a fish.”
When I worked for the West Indies Cricket Board, I joked that when I die I want to be buried at sea and have the members of the board as my pallbearers, That was a joke of sorts but not my love for the sea. From the first time I saw the sea I was caught hook, line and sinker. It was like being in the third heaven. It is said that the ocean stirs our hearts and inspires our imagination, giving us eternal joy. I look at my son Zubin when he’s home and has something to read, or complete, and smile. He takes the car and goes to one of the seaside hotels, buys a beer (which lasts the entire day), and does his work with the sea in his eyes, heart and mind.
It is clear to him, me, and so many others that, as the poet Navvirah Waheed said, “If the ocean can calm itself, so can you.” I go even deeper and learn the truth. As the poet, Henry David Thoreau, wrote, ” Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
*Tony Deyal was last heard responding to a friend who asked, “How you going to Tobago? By plane or by ship?” He answered, “Boat.”
