Sailfish battle has a ‘call me Ishmael’ moment

It must have been in the mid 1980s, Headwind thinks, when he caught his first sailfish.

Last month, he caught his second one. He hasn’t gotten over it yet and probably won’t.

Would you?

Cabeza teased Headwind: “You’ve been fishing for 80 years, and 50 of those years in South Florida, and two sailfish are all you have to show for it? No wonder you’re such a head case.”

If Cabeza knew what I know about the sailfish that Headwind calls his first, he would tease him harder.

Headwind was the captain that long-ago time on his own 85-horsepower 17-footer. It was one of those rare early spring days when you could get away with taking a rig that size out past the second shipping lane.

Headwind had the wheel. Our buddy Joe Oglesby, a bass fishing purist out of his element on blue water, was on the rod and reel. I was the gaffer.

Joe still brags that he caught that fish, as of course he did. His hands were the only ones on the gear. Headwind and I brag that we caught it, all three of us, and in a way we did.

“Sailfishing is all about teamwork,” Headwind likes to say as if a man with two sailfish on his personal scoreboard is an expert.

In a way, Headwind is. He used to work as a volunteer observer in billfish tournaments. He saw what the leading competitors did right, and what the losing ones didn’t, and he made notes.

Other than that, he spoke to the fish. Nobody else was doing that. When they heard about it, they thought Headwind was crazy.

“Take it easy,” he would say to weary sailfish. “We’re going to get that hook out of your jaw and stay with you until you catch your breath and swim away no worse for the experience. This is a catch and release tournament, and we want you to enjoy it.”

Cabeza, a former psychiatry student, said he can understand why people thought Headwind was crazy.

“I was on first name terms with every billfish in Miami waters,” Headwind said, convincing Cabeza even more. “Gamefish and baitfish. Sailfish, marlin, houndfish, ballyhoo, you name it.”

Cabeza bet him a beer he couldn’t remember any of their names.

“All billfish are named Bill,” Headwind said. “I’ll take a premium beer in a long-neck bottle, thank you.” Here’s the main thing, he’s been telling everyone for weeks:

“You want a sailfish to jump a lot. You want it showing off its best dance moves, tail-dancing like a ballerina toe-dances, only more violently.

“The difference is that the ballerina comes down on her feet, gracefully. If you’re in the front row, you can barely hear it. The sailfish lands on its side or back, clumsily. You can hear the thud of its fall. You can hear it holler ‘ouch.’

“It doesn’t take many jumps for the sailfish to tire itself out. If he doesn’t throw the hook, he’s yours.

“If he doesn’t jump, there’s a good chance you’re his.”

That long-ago sailfish jumped as if he’d just invented the hoochy coochie. We had it aboard the boat in about 10 minutes, exhausted more by its own efforts than by ours.

Headwind’s latest sailfish wasn’t a jumper. It was a swimmer. This one had sea conditions in its favor — 3- to 5-foot waves and a whistling wind of 20 knots or so, the sort of stuff that makes you brace yourself against any part of the boat that’s available, other than the throttle.

Then again, this time we were on Tiller’s boat — twice the length and 101⁄2 times the horsepower of Headwind’s old skiff. It’s built for those cobby conditions, even though we’re not.

I’m not sure Headwind’s sailfish understood that it had an advantage in the rough seas and stayed under water to make the most of that.

“Viscerally, yes, but not intellectually,” he guesses. I mean Headwind guesses, not the fish. He talks with fish and is good at interpreting their body language.

About halfway through the battle, the sailfish poked its head out of the water to see what it was up against.

“OMG, it’s Headwind!” the sailfish cried. “I’m outta here!”

That is Headwind’s translation. Certainly the sailfish’s actions support his interpretation.

It took off. Headwind tightened the drag on the reel. His line kept leaving.

That went on for a while. Headwind grew tired. He wondered if the sailfish was as tired as he was.

“Jump, you profanity!” he shouted. The sailfish swam on.

“Jump, I say!”

We had been fishing around the last reef before blue water, where once in a while you see a fish trap marker.

We saw one. On the bottom, about 100 feet down, lay a trap.

The sailfish was swimming straight at the marker. Headwind knew what that fish was thinking. “The rope!” he hollered. “Tiller, keep it away from the rope!”

Tiller was only following the fish, not controlling it. “You’re the one with the rod and reel,” he hollered back.

I hollered that at sea, a rope is called a line. Headwind didn’t hear it or he would have told me to shut up.

He tightened down harder on the drag, hoping his 20 pound test line wouldn’t break. The sailfish pulled mightily, hoping it would.

It didn’t break, but the fish wrapped it around the trap line.

I am not at liberty to repeat what any of us said at that moment.

As if to prove what Headwind keeps saying about teamwork, Tiller hove to beside the trap marker. He put his engines in neutral and darted to the rail.

“Hand me the rod, Headwind,” Tiller said, and Tiller obeyed.

“You’re supposed to say ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ to the captain,” I mumbled so Tiller wouldn’t quite hear but still I can claim I admonished him.

“The gaff! Grab the gaff!” Tiller ordered me.

I grabbed it and used it to grab the trap’s line. He saw that the fishing line was wrapped around it only once. He passed Headwind’s rod under it, then over, and handed it back to him.

Headwind reeled. The line came tight. The sailfish swam away again. All of us feared that it had been able to replenish spent energy while waiting for us to free the fishing line, but we were wrong.

It made two short runs, with Headwind recovering more line than he’d been giving.

Finally, close to our port side, the fish made its only leap, fell on its side and said something that only Headwind could hear: “You got me, boss.”

Tiller grabbed the bill. I grabbed the tail.

Headwind flopped onto the lid of the forward fishbox. “Hold still while we turn you loose,” I said. “You may experience some slight discomfort. That’s a dentist joke.”

Headwind asked if I was talking to him or the sailfish.

I said I was talking to him, of course. Only crazy people talk to fish.

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