You remember the climax of Jaws — the primeval moment when Quint the crazed Ahab-like fisherman goes mano a mano with the monster of the deep? He comes to the rear of the listing boat and straps on a leather belt with a phallic protrusion: a metal receptacle into which he shoves the haft of his puny fishing rod. And you look at this terrifying mismatch between a man’s tackle and the might of nature, and you think, ‘How the hell is that going to work?’ Such were my feelings, amigos, on a blustery day in the Indian ocean when I realised I had a whopper on the line.
‘That is a big fish,’ said Paolo the skipper, and his eyes widened as my reel spun and the taut yellow filament shot out behind us. Just as in Jaws, there were three of us afloat, and we had been at it since sunrise several hours ago. We had chugged up from the island of Benguera, off the coast of southern Mozambique. Now we were a couple of miles off a long sandy island called Mazaruto, and the weather was starting to cut up rough. There were spots of rain, and the hull was slapping against the troughs in the grey-black sea. ‘This is good for fishing,’ Paolo had told me earlier, as I tried queasily to keep my footing. ‘When it is like this the fish cannot hear the boat.’
Paolo and Eric seemed to be staring at the trackless main, as if they could see the very spoor of the fish. What are you looking for? I asked. Surely one wave looks much like another? ‘Birds,’ explained Paolo. The big fish eat the sardines; the sardine guts come to the surface; the birds follow the sardines and the successful fisherman follows the birds.
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