Letter #148 to friends and familiares: the Incompleat Angler

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.” 

-- Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea; 1952.

"I shall make ye fishers of men..."
"Good because I am starving from the old way..."

-- Anonymous.

Recently I read a great story about the most unexpected success of a casual fisherman. I am something of an obtuse angler, too. As a kid in Sydney, I used to fish by hand and catch little yellow-tails and throw them back in. That was my down-time, often followed by pick-up cricket games. The next time I went fishing was twelve years later off of Palm Beach in 1980 when I was visiting a college bud.

We went out into the ocean in this big cabin cruiser of some apparently wealthy man, the father of my host’s roomie. This boat even had sonar to detect the schools of fish. We zipped around, this way and that, in an endless search for fish; B-O-R-I-N-G. Two highlights of that day, one inane and the other intuitive, were the one catch of the day as well as a ‘sonar’ duel between man and nature.

The rivalling sonars made for the better story. The tech finally came through and the skipper found his school. This older gentleman was anything but genteel, treating his trophy girl-friend like a toy in front of his adult son of the same age as the girl. The score with the sonar disappointed me mightily since we would be marooned for another few hours on that damn boat. B-O-R-I-N-G.

Until two dolphins with a “high sense of porpoise” cruised by, spiraling in the water and squealing. Well, now, school was out; nary a nibble. And I have always wondered whether those dolphins had somehow audibly warned those innocent fish of the peril picked up by their natural sonar. Nature 1, technology 0. We floundered for a couple more fruitless hours amid bickering among the hosts: B-O-R-I-N-G.

Then, in the waning moments, the least equipped nautically (i.e., me) got something. People were rightly floored (or decked) that it was I who snagged the only beast of the day. So, I struggled a bit, trying to keep the fish on the line. The older man was jealous – quickly emphasizing that I had captured small game judging by the negligible arc of my rod. Yes, I suspected as much and I did not care – I just wanted to get off that boat.

Finally, my catch was close enough that it surfaced intermittently, as fish do when they struggle desperately, and almost always without success, to escape back into the deep. One BIG catch about my little catch: it was a plastic bag.  Since I was the first to realize my catch was phony, I tried to ward off the expected flak by exclaiming with a dryly ironic voice, “Oh, wow! I caught a plastic bag, mahhhn!” 

Well, before the rhazzing could start, the trophy girl-friend, with whom I had been chatting as the only one paying any attention to her, laughed hysterically and said I was so cute, etc. Normally, such attention (even if patent non-sense) from a pretty lady would have been welcome. Not that day. That almost led to my being escorted over the gunwale with, “Good riddance, punk,” by you know who -- the gal's surly patron.

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My fishing days were finished, thankfully. Until duty called as a banker in the late 1990s. Calling on non-bank financial institutions – basically, finance and insurance companies – I had encountered my fair share of ethical and accounting sink-holes populated by "snow lizards"; thank you, David Rosenberg of Pittsburgh. Most executives, however, were lovely people and very honest. On the whole, insurers are a decent bunch.

There was one real sinkhole besides sub-prime lenders and that was the bond insurance niche. These guys basically substituted for banks who traditionally provided guaranteed performance (i.e., scheduled payments) under bond indentures. In a long-since saturated segment, these monoline bond insurers were on the hunt for any money they could pick up, no matter how questionable the insured security or transaction was.

In the late 1990s, one bond insurer acquired another. Think of it as in-breeding within the Ponzi family. Well, I had to help ring in the union with a fishing day with the Treasurer of the consolidated insurer. Angling off of a cabin cruiser in Long Island Sound would normally sound like a fun idea. Except that I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning to get to some ungodly suburb in Connecticut in order to launch.

Additionally, the treasurer of the merged bond insurer had come over from the acquired company – a company that I had never touched with a ten-foot pole, no matter how profitable its financial statements had appeared. Some companies just don’t pass the smell test. And then there was this dung heap. The acquiring insurer figured it could make the dung heap into fertilizer for future profits.

Fine, but count me out. Though a leader in bond insurance, that large acquiror had ceased passing my smell test sometime earlier, too. This was not the first time I met the new treasurer. Frankly, he was a well-coiffed grease-ball; anybody who goes out of his way to tell me that l am a “genius” or "really talented" wins no points with me. For one thing, though I would dearly love to be a genius, I simply and surely am not one.

Curious? Yes! Smart? Eh, perhaps. But, a “genius”? Forget about it. Mr Slick was a man whom I did not trust at all. So, I arrived with my fellow bankers with hair dishevelled, cow-licks prominent and overall expression pouty; clearly neither a morning person though, perhaps, a person in mourning. (And yes, that sink-hole cratered a few years later, just as I figured it would; no retirement plan for the world's oldest profession!) We finally set off into Long Island Sound after Mr Slick had finished kissing my ass since I was the guy with the bank’s checkbook….B-A-R-F.

Of the six people on that cruiser, I was absolutely the most out of place, not only in terms of zero enthusiasm and unkempt appearance but also my fishing experience and ability.  Long Island Sound apparently has many blue fish – allegedly difficult to catch – and ‘stripers’, or ocean bass. When I got ‘spoke to’ by the senior manager in our delegation, I reluctantly picked up a rod and gave fishing a go along-side the slick.

Et voilà! Before I knew or understood what I was doing, I was hauling in many fish, perhaps the most. My haul included an apparently elusive blue-fish; that claim about the blueys, however, may have simply been more ass-kissing. Truthfully, I have no idea. To cap the day off, I even caught the largest striper of the day. That fish was one heavy BASStard; I swear it was fifteen pounds, maybe more.

Soon enough I received a photo in the mail of me holding that big dude with a putrid smile on my face and the (by then drunk) slick with his arm around my shoulder. So much for all those Dale Carnegie sales courses I had laboured through as a young and incorrigible misanthrope. At least somebody hosted a big dinner that week-end with that striped creature, duly stripped, as the guest of honor.

Needless to say, I was never sent from Central ‘Casting’. Yet life runs in a full circle. These days, when I spend some time in the Adirondaks thanks to the generosity of my sister and her family, I will cast a little here and even less there in the quiet end of Long Lake. As it was for me fifty years ago in Sydney, my down-time is not goal oriented; it is simply restful and the fish are lucky that I am the one with the rod.