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Even a bad day at sea can be a good story By Jason Schaefer Independence Day weekend, my parents, Ron and Brenda, my brother Austin, his girlfriend Megan, and my uncle Bruce and aunt Colette took an eight-hour deep-sea fishing trip off the coast of Port Aransas. Even as we boarded the boat about 6:30 a.m., we knew conditions would be grim. An offshore storm system was brewing. We’d all been on the Gulf of Mexico before and knew its reputation. Like a woman whose hormones are raging during the last month of her pregnancy, its condition can change from calm to angry in a matter of minutes. Imagine a huge blue sheet, stretched flat and held in the air by a group of 8-year-old children hopped up on Kool-Aid and candy bars. This was the surface of the gulf. Now put a marble on the sheet, right in the middle. This was our boat. Now imagine the children shaking his or her edge of the sheet up and down, screaming with childish delight. Watch as the marble hops, skips and jumps through the air across the undulating sheet. Now imagine it’s raining, and you come close to the conditions we experienced that day. Early morning rains at sea are cold, unpleasant things. We all felt how I imagine a cat feels after being dunked underwater. For the first two hours, we watched as our soaked first mate baited lines and cast them into the water to troll. What’s worse, nothing bit. Still, what we saw on the rocking, raining gulf was a surreal work of art. A gentle mist rose from the surface of the water as the heavy rain struck it, settling around the peaks in rings. It looked like a photograph of the Scottish highlands, only blue. The oil tankers anchored at sea — hulking, rusty things in the daylight — became red ghosts in the mist. It was truly a spectacle, and were it not for the seasickness, I’m sure it would have given us all pause. I could see it growing in the faces of my uncle and aunt — that vague displeasure that comes with whitecaps in your stomach. Bruce is a seafaring man who rarely gets sick even in rolling water, but he felt it that day. He later told me he had never been on the ocean with Colette in good weather. What a shame. My mother, God bless her, had an iron stomach before she had us kids, so we hear from our father. But some time during the third hour, she was an inhuman shade of yellow. She wouldn’t allow us to turn back on her account, and she later told us she wished she could have fished because it looked so fun. Even with a Dramamine substitute, which she took to avoid grogginess, she bent her head over the side twice and hugged a bucket all the way back to port. My father, ever the immortal fighter pilot, and Austin, ever the roughened, redneck cowboy, seemed unaffected by the rolling ocean. Even Megan, who tried in vain to stay tucked out of the spray, passively watched the fiasco unfold. I felt less than perfect. Though I watched the horizon like a wolf, a trick to prevent a bad stomach, it was all I could do to think of something other than what I’d had for breakfast. And we thought nothing could get worse than the rain and the rolling waves. I was standing in the entrance to the cabin below deck, a nice supportive place to stay somewhat dry, when the first mate, who was beneath me, suddenly jumped up and patted my leg. “Move, man, we got a fire!” he said, his eyes wide. Right next to my feet, a little tongue of flame from an electric short was erupting out of the fuse box. Electrical fires are terrible things to have aboard a ship. Your options if the fire gets out of control are limited — go down burning or jump into the sea. Luckily, the captain, who practically leapt from the helm to the fire below, was on it like a duck on a June bug. They put it out in less than five seconds. In seven years of boating two or three times a week, neither of them had seen a fire on board. In more than 35 years of boating, Bruce had only seen one. The captain asked if anyone had brought bananas with them — bad luck for seafarers. None of us had, though. In spite of the fire, like a repetitive joke, we stayed out at sea. About noon, we decided to head closer to the shore and fish off the oil rigs. Now to me, this was the highlight of the trip. With the waves splashing over the deck and the captain at the wheel working to keep us from running into the rig we fished not 12 feet from, we engaged in what my father later dubbed “combat fishing.” We were soaked, struggling to stand and catching virtually nothing. Austin and I got a bite each and lost our bait. He later caught a ling, a strange species that looks like a cross between a catfish and a shark, but it fell off his hook before he could haul it into the boat. It was too small, anyway. We called it a day about an hour before schedule only because even the captain said he didn’t trust the growing swells and poor conditions. We were the only boat at sea. When we pulled into port soaked and laughing, glad to be on solid ground, the looks on the other boater’s faces told us they thought we were crazy. That felt pretty good. All in all, I would rate the trip like a bad Schwarzenegger movie — full of action and adventure, all fun and ultimately horrible, but something you come away from completely happy. And in this case, glad we survived. The lesson? By all means, when the weather gets rough, don’t hesitate to head back inland. And even if you get stuck out in the mess, don’t fret. If you stick it through, you’ll have a great story to tell.
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