Yo

October 17, 2006 – 5:13 PM – There’s always a bigger fish

Next week my host mom is going to the States to visit my host sisters, both of whom are going to school near Seattle. Samantha, whom I taught last year, is in her first year at a local community school while Denise transferred to a nearby high school to finish up high school. Like everyone who goes somewhere far from home, Samantha and Denise are craving their comfort food. For people from the Marshall Islands, comfort food means fresh fish from warm Pacific waters. Thus, my host dad and I had the responsibility to catch enough fish to fill two coolers which my host mom would bring with her to Seattle.

On Sunday morning, I woke up at about 6:00 AM and my host dad and I set out at 8:00 AM for an intense day of fishing in the lagoon. We went bottom fishing, i.e. we fished for fish that live at the bottom of the lagoon as opposed to fish that swim near the surface of the water (like tuna).

The morning proved to be an excellent day. The fish were really biting and we caught near 40 lbs before lunchtime. Most of it was grouper and snapper. However, the afternoon proved to be considerably less fruitful. Since my host dad’s fish finder was broken, we were forced to simply cruise around and drop our lines, hoping that wherever we stopped just happened to be over a school a fish. In the morning we guessed well, in the afternoon we did not. However, there was one moment when we managed to stop over a school of frenetic snapper. We lowered three liens and before the lines even hit the bottom we had 7 fish on the lines (more than one hook per line). Unfortunately we didn’t drop our anchor in time and drifted past the hot spot and only caught sporadically afterwards.

I’ll tell you right now, the most frustrating part of fishing in the ocean isn’t not catching any fish, it’s having the fish you catch be eaten by a bigger fish before you can haul them up to the surface. The whole sequence goes like this. You feel a bite, yank to set a hook, feel a big fish on the end and get excited and start reeling it in. Then, as you’re reeling, you feel this huge jerk on the rod and the rod bends all the way down as you wonder “what the hell is happening?” Then everything goes slack and you end up reeling in a large fish head. Sucks. I got a few big ones away from the bigger ones (read, sharks) though. Sometimes I even saw the sharks chasing my fish as I reeled them up. One even made a final stab at it near the surface of the water and flopped itself out, which was pretty cool to see.

Anyways, I took home a few and of course they were delicious. I sashmi’d one last night and used the carcass to make Chinese fish soup. I quickly whipped up some fried rice and called it a hell of a meal. There’s four more in my freezer and I’m still deciding how I want to prepare them.

Work is work, nothing of note to report. Upward Bound started this week so that’s going to keep me busy in the afternoons, along with supplying me with a little extra income. I considered getting a dog to scare away the people who seem to be hellbent on throwing trash on my lawn while I’m not home. However, I thought it over and decided that a dog would be way too difficult to maintain, especially in this country, plus it’s possible that the trash simply blows onto my lawn (there’s a considerable amount of it lying around the country) and isn’t thrown there deliberately. Maybe I’ll get a cat instead simply because the thought of having my first pet is kinda cool.