Extreme fishing was a stupid idea, a really bad, really stupid idea. It started with such clarity, such brilliance as we sat around the campfire under the coconut palms that we all looked at each other and said this is the most inventive, fantastic idea ever thought of by the human mind. It is right up there with the invention of the wheel. That is what we said, yeah, we were idiots, I admit it. If one of us men had thought it up, maybe we would have all laughed and gone out and done something sane like juggling nitroglycerin. But my 12 year old son, Falcon, the pride of the island, devised it and we, as father and male role models, wanted to encourage or mold or train him. You know some guy stuff we made up. Whatever we wanted to do, it was not to offer one of our own up to a shark attack.
We were anchored off Bodrum, an island in the Chagos Group, a very small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. An island abandoned by world geo-political treaties that forced its inhabitants to relocate to Mauritius, to leave homes, farms, lives for the betterment of a faraway Britain, cold and distant, all to rent one of it’s distant sisters, Diego Garcia, to America for a military base. The cry ‘No Nukes in Chagos’ would never disturb the nesting birds in its trees or the turtles laying eggs on its beaches.
We, on the other hand, had atolls full of islands to play with; lagoons full of fish for us to catch if we could, coconuts, limes, breadfruit abounded on abandoned farms. There were no rules except don’t sleep on the islands, don’t act like a resident, other than that have fun playing Robinson Crusoe. What a totally fabulous life!
The fishing was first rate. Chagos had never been fished commercially and the inhabitants had been off the islands for decades. The lagoon had tons of fish, enough to feed us forever but like always in Eden, the serpent raised its hoary head and we decided to try for bigger fish. We were intelligent enough not to go diving outside the reef where the tigers and great whites held sway. No, we were smarter than that, a little.
Falcon’s extreme fishing idea was not to go outside the reef but to fish in the deep holes that were too deep to dive; we would bring a hand line with a baited hook. We would drop the weighted line and swim around the surface with our fins and masks on, playing the line till we placed it in front of one of the likely caves 100 feet below. The water clarity exceeded 300 feet in this part of the Indian so it was a little like a video game. We felt distant and separate from the action as we swam around on the surface. The first time we tried it we came back with a decent coral trout, 10 pounds, big enough to be worthy not so big to have ciguatera.
The next time we went out into deeper water at the entrance but still in the lagoon looking for bigger fish. Falcon hooked a nice grouper and was fighting it when a tiger, slumming in shallow water, took notice. It wasn’t big for a tiger shark, 12 to 13 feet but its behavior set it in a different class. Attracted by the fighting fish it came in from the bottom in attack mode. Gill slits flaring, back hunched, there was little doubt it was ready to kill. His skin was black and as we watched the tiger’s characteristic stripes began to appear, vertically along its sides. Falcon resigned himself to the loss of his fishing gear and fish. The shark saw the fishing line as it approached the struggling fish and immediately changed directions, ignored the wounded, bleeding, frantic fish, it swam up the line right at Falcon at full speed. Falcon back peddled, still fighting his grouper. Within seconds the tiger was on my son and he was hitting the shark on the nose with his fins as he continued to retreat, swimming on his back, still pulling in his grouper. The shark had his eyes covered with its protective white lids to protect them while attacking, and its mouth, filled with evil-looking white teeth, gaped wide open as it tried to eat my son. Its tiger stripes were flashing with swiftly changing colors as it attacked. The four of us adults raced in almost without thought. My wife and I screaming in our snorkels to distract the shark, our two buddies from different boats racing in equally determined despite their lack of familiarity with sharks, counter attack from four different directions was too much for the tiger and he turned and sped off after an evil look at me.
Later, when I had time to play what if, my blood turned to ice as I saw my son in my mind half eaten in the middle of nowhere dying in my arms; pieces of him laying around me. The courage of our two cruising buddies who looked on Falcon as somewhere between a mascot and a junior tribe member saved his life. As did my 5’ 5” wife who while familiar with sharks, never had to stare down the dead eyes of a tiger before. That night, sleep was impossible and I remembered again how it all started. It was far better for my mental health, to think about the far past, than the events of the last 12 hours.