The world according to a fisherman

While in Morro Bay, we wandered onto the waterfront piers, looking at fishing boats. A really small one was being provisioned by a man and a woman, getting it ready to head to sea. I asked the man if fishing was still a significant part of the Morro Bay economy, and got an education in response. First off, those darned sea lions are eating all the near-surface fish, and probably some deeper ones too. As if on cue, what had looked to us like a black rubber bladder floating in the harbor disappeared lazily underwater. And those darned otters are eating all the shellfish. Not only that, we (Americans) taught those darned Russians how to catch all the sea urchins. Our own government took down the towers at the World Trade Center (an airplane can’t do that by itself), and our Navy doesn’t even own its ships; they belong to the United Arabian Empire or something, he couldn’t remember. Then he said one thing I could agree with—the bankers are ruining everything else. They had let his ex-wife get ahold of 14 credit cards and charge everything to him. Now they wanted their money. “What do they expect me to do? Sell my boat?”

His boat was a bit rundown, kind of like his life. It had all the charm of a way-overused then vandalized outhouse. Painted dull black with hand-scrawled ID number on the side, it hardly looked too seaworthy. Weathered duct tape held the navigation lights and antennas to the rusty crossarm sagging from the mast. If lucky, he thought he and his crew woman could catch some black cod, the only fish left that’s worthwhile. “You’d have to go farther north to get anything good like tuna,” he muttered between puffs on his cigarette. That would be too expensive in a boat that had all the streamlined grace of a wrinkled cube.

It took some back stepping to slowly get away from him and his diatribe. We were probably the first people ever to listen past his first loony pronouncements and he didn’t want to lose such a receptive audience. We walked around to the creaking pier across from his boat and watched as he used his mouth to start the siphon flowing from a 5-gallon plastic diesel can into the boat’s fuel tank. He was probably silently cursing the oil companies and the United Arabian Empire for the high cost of fuel. As we departed the pier, I saw him enter the cabin to don his tinfoil hat and try to start the engine.