Dave shook the red metal gas can linked by thin black-rubber tubing to a 35-horsepower Johnson outboard. The sloshing sound inside the rusty tank was barely audible over the sound of wind and waves.
“We don’t have much left.”
“You’ve got plenty. Don’t worry. This is the last run.”
The two young men were riding in a 17-foot jon boat about a half mile off Masonboro Island.
“There he goes again,” Paul said, holding his pole high as the 20-pound test line sang off the reel. He let the fish run as Dave, his roommate and best buddy since the ninth grade, swung the bow around and aimed in the direction of the escaping line’s travel.
“I’m telling you, this is it. You are going to have to cut him loose. We need to head in.”
Dave searched the horizon for other boats but didn’t see any. The captains of those vessels had the good sense to head in when they saw the approaching dark clouds.
Dave watched Paul as he reeled fast when the line went slack, letting up as it tightened. A big wave struck the boat, nearly knocking both men overboard. Dave felt something about to come up. The thought of running out of fuel, along with the pitching and rolling, was not helping his attitude. Or his queasy stomach.
“That was close,” Paul said, regaining his balance while holding his rod tip high with one hand and clinging to the side of the boat with the other. Suddenly the fish made a wide circle.
“Get ready to cut the line.”
“No way.”
“We’ve got to head in.”
“We’ve got plenty.”
“Like heck we do.”
“This is something big, a king or a wahoo. We can’t let him go now.”
The rod tip jerked. Paul quit talking and concentrated on what he was doing. Dave turned the boat sharply to put the square bow into another large swell then quickly steered back to follow the fish.
The day started out calm enough to take the jon boat out in the ocean but now the wind was rising with the clouds moving in fast from the east. You could smell the rain and feel the sky about to explode. The horizon on the seaward side looked like the lid on a huge black iron pot.
“Cut the line. I’m heading in.”
“No. I’ve got this. Just give me another minute. You’re too impatient. You’ve got to learn to go with the flow.”
Paul remembered an outdoors show where sunburned men wearing long-brimmed white hats and sporting huge beer guts thumb-pressed buttons on expensive electric reels to winch black sea bass up from the deep. One after the other. It was bottom fishing at its high-tech best.
“I’d hate to be cranking these up by hand,” one of the men on the show said.
His buddy laughed.
“Me too. Technology is a wonderful thing. A man can never have too much technology.”
Paul kept reeling with no help from electricity, bringing the fish closer and closer to the boat.
“Get ready to gaff him. I told you we could do it. He’s coming in.”
Dave grabbed a short gaff as the water next to the boat frothed white. The young man saw the sea creature, big, beautiful and clean in the green water — a living torpedo. He lunged with the hook, snagging the fish near the base of the tail and flopping it heavily over the side. Dave grabbed the tiller again, goosing the outboard and steering into the face of another big swell. The fish, still with the gaff hook through him, beat against the stainless-steel boat bottom. The gaff’s handle whacked Dave hard across the shin.
“Bonito,” Paul said. “Must be a good 20 pounds.”
Dave did not see the small baseball bat he normally used to stop a fish from thrashing around. One swift blow to the skull was all it usually took.
“Must have left the bat in my truck,” he thought.
Paul reached down and removed the gaff’s large barbless hook from the fish. The small hole in the silver skin did not produce much blood. The bonito thrashed violently for a moment, stopped, then pounded the boat bottom again. Another wave hit, causing Paul to quickly sit down on the boat’s middle bench.
Dave opened the throttle and headed toward land, riding the face of each green-cresting swell, aiming the bow toward the top of a water tower he could barely make out on Wrightsville Beach.
Blood trickled from the inch-long gash below Dave’s right kneecap, mixing with blood from the bonito. His stomach felt worse. Usually, Dave navigated parallel to the swells. But this was not one of those days. The water was too big. The swells grew larger with each passing minute.
Paul looked at his fish, which lay still for a moment, big, heavy and silver through the middle. The bonito suddenly came to life, alternately banging its crescent-shaped tail and blunt, streamlined head against the boat bottom.
“She’s a real beauty. We’ll be grilling tuna steaks tonight for sure.”
“We’re still a long ways out.”
“Stop complaining. Where’s your spirit of adventure? What’s life if you don’t push the edge a little? Remember what Hunter Thompson wrote.”
“What was that?”
“The only people who know where the edge is are the ones who have gone over.”
The sky turned black. The outboard motor coughed once, then coughed with increasing frequency as the engine drank each drop of precious fuel with the prop intermittently spinning then stopping. Dave hoisted the gas can above his shoulders, trying to drain the last slug of precious fuel into the sputtering Johnson.
The motor gave one more powerful surge, pushing the boat forward. When the motor quit for good, everything got dead quiet. Except for the wind.
“I told you we were almost out of gas.”
“Here. Let me have a try.”
Dave moved to one side as Paul jerked the start rope. Nothing happened. Paul tried again and again, each time reaching down and squeezing the rubber ball used to prime the outboard before starting. He returned to his middle seat because of the rocking and too much weight in the stern with both men back there.
The boat rose and fell with the waves as the men stared at the bonito. The flopping had stopped. The bonito’s eyes were dull gray, glazed with the film of death.
The waves and wind were fortunately pushing the boat toward shore.
“You ready for the big swim?”
“Not really.”
A few drops of cold rain pelted the ocean. The black edge of the storm hung over the men, dividing the sky from what was calm and good to the west and what was bad and fast coming in from the east.
Dave folded his arms, trying to keep warm. He’d heard about people dying of hypothermia on an 80-degree day.
He suddenly thought about the time he was 11 or 12 hiking the Loop with his mother at Wrightsville Beach and a sudden storm came up. Dave’s mother, a devout Baptist, did not want to get soaked.
“The Lord will protect us in here,” she said, dragging her son by the hand under a church overhang.
The rain poured down and lightning struck as the mother and son stood with the water pouring like a curtain off the church roof overhang.
“Be patient. We’ll just wait right here for a while until it stops. The storm, like everything else, will soon pass. God will watch out for us.”
Dave wished he had a church doorway to get under and wait for the storm to pass the way it did that day.
“There’s a paddle up front,” Dave said. “Keep us headed toward shore.”
Paul crawled to the bow and pulled a short wooden paddle out from under a tangled cast net. He got on his knees and started paddling the way he’d seen powerful, big-shouldered men paddle outriggers on TV.
“Don’t worry,” he shouted, paddling hard. “It’s all good, man. Remember that. It’s all good.”
The rain came down in violent torrents, obscuring everything in gray thrashing sheets that danced off the rolling surface. The ocean seemed to calm a little.
Dave stood in the stern.
“I can’t see the water tower.”
Paul stopped paddling, breathing hard. Water plastered his long blond hair to the back of his tan neck. He suddenly wished he’d gone surfing instead of fishing.
About four inches of water was in the boat. The bonito wobbled stiffly in this new tide, surrounded by empty cans that bobbed like small buoys in the sloshing water.
Paul resumed paddling. Dave grabbed an empty plastic bottle, cut off the top and started bailing. Dave always found that staying busy was another way to keep from feeling seasick.
A lightning bolt lit the sky followed by a crack of thunder. Cold rain came down harder. A rogue wave crashed into the craft broadside, capsizing the boat and tossing its occupants, empty cans, cast net, fishing rods, tackle boxes, backpack, life jackets and dead bonito into the sea. In the calm dark, just a few feet below where the men treaded water, a school of sleek, adult bonito, the perfect marine predators, chased a school of menhaden, their favorite prey.
A few days later Paul’s bonito washed up on Masonboro Island, where gulls picked all the flesh from the skeleton.
About a week later four sport fishermen sat at a small outside table at a tiki bar on Topsail Island. The night was warm and breezy.
One of the men, a retired line worker, had just finished radiation treatment for prostate cancer and was given the all-clear from his oncologist to do whatever he wanted to do — even fish in October in the next bluefish tournament where the four friends would place third out of a hundred teams, the best they had ever done. Of course, none of them knew the results yet.
“Did any of y’all hear about those two guys fishing off Wrightsville? Those guys who capsized out there during that big storm last week?”
“Yeah. I read a boat found them the next morning just as the sun came up clinging to those big granite boulders at the end of the rock jetty off of Masonboro Inlet like a couple of drowned rats. They were lucky to be alive.”
“You’ve got to be crazy to go outside in a jon boat with a storm coming in.”
“Sometimes young men are in a hurry for adventure and don’t think things through. Y’all were young once.”
“Did they ever find the boat?”
“I think the Coast Guard found it washed up somewhere down near Sunset Beach.”
“Never put out to sea in a jon boat before a big storm. That should be included in any Waterman’s Bible.”