Day 7: Contemplating Cod

When the fish aren’t biting, it gives you lots of time to think. My mind goes to strange places when it’s idle.

Like what it’s like to be a fish for instance.

When you catch fish, you don’t always hook it in the mouth. Sometimes you hook its tail or its head or its belly.

Imagine you’re at an outdoor festival with your friends. The turnout is huge and you and your friends are lining up at a food truck. Your friend orders a nice juicy burger.

He is about to take a bite, but all of a sudden instead of a burger – it’s a giant hook, that pulls him by the head and into the sky. Meanwhile, as your friend is about to take a sip of his beer, he gets hooked by the arm and pulled into the sky. Before you can react your partner gets a hook in their butt and disappears into the blue above you.

WTF?

Later, back at the dock, we gut and filet the fish and toss the discards back into the water.

Now imagine that you’re still at the festival (why you would still be there, I can’t imagine) and your friends’ heads and random body parts start falling from the sky.

I would be seriously messed up if I was a fish.

You hear about people being abducted by flying objects. Some are returned but aren’t quite the same. What if giant aliens are just “fishing” for us and earth is their ocean?

Catching no fish is a dark place for me.

I caught a lot of fish that were the wrong kind or too small and threw a lot of them back. I watch them swim away, but I wonder if they survive much longer after that. I happily confirmed this was the case when I caught a fish that had some war wounds on his head from a previous battle.

Downtime in the boat is spent a lot talking about “You should have seen the time …” as well as “The one that got away”.

I wonder if fish do the same thing. Like, do they go to the ‘fish bar’ on the weekend and the guy fishes brag about how they were caught one time but wrestled their way off? Do the police fishes talk about how their partner jumped on the hook in front of them to save them? Is there a fish Legion where the fish are missing an eye, or a fin, or have huge scars and they tell the young fishes about what they went through so that they could have a better life?

I hope we catch more fish tomorrow. Ivan is eerily laughing to himself. I’m like, “What’s so funny?” He says, “This is how I cry…”