As we rumbled past the same flat on this day, I shouted above the engines while holding down my hat, "You ever see that big ‘cuda again?"The guide shook his head, thought for a moment, and then opened his tackle bag. He took out a trolling rod, a bait-casting reel, and a bright yellow tube lure, and signaled for the boat driver to slow down.

"Is okay, no, is okay" he assured, completely ignoring me and tossing the tube lure fifty yards into the boat’s wake. This is what happens when you are fishing alone: you are at the mercy of the guide much of the time because you don’t outnumber him.

Your know how it happens. Without warning, a silver shot horsed through the waves like a cog in a gear, and I let out an unprintable exclamation as I leapt up to watch. A big fish was on it. A big fish, like one that could be mistaken for a log on a flat. He chased that lure with open-mouthed lust. "Cooooonyo, mi perrrd!" Felipe purred with an instant loss of breath."What do I do, what do I do?" I was shouting. I started stripping. "Don’t strip, don’t strip!" Felipe laughed excitedly.

With a clunk as though we had snagged a rock and a terrific splashing snap, the fish took, and sounded deep."What do I do? What’s going on?" Line ripped from the reel."Just hold on," Felipe reassured. "Just hold on!" The tension slacked a hair, "REEL, REEL, REEL!"

I reeled with fury, with anger, with love in my heart. I was going to get this one. With an explosion of water, the fish was in the air flopping with the fury of a race car in a wreck."Holy ----!" I cried, he was down again, and swam past the boat. The driver whipped down the sun shade on our 30’ XX XX, and I climbed over it with the rod toward the bow to follow the fish.The barracuda was up again, waving himself in the air, flipping, crashing back down into the sea. So much for bonefishing.

I reeled again, getting him close, and then held on with sensitive fingers as he made his final, futile runs. When he was thrashing next to the boat, our driver reached his thorny hands down and grabbed the living monster by the gill to bring him into the boat. I was at the bow, and my guide and the driver were at the stern. The log of a fish lay between us, silently gasping for air.

"If you catch a barracuda, will you bring it back for me?" He had asked that morning. I was watching a little girl on the beach as he spoke. She had picked up a severed fish head and held it over her tiny face, wriggling her body in fish swimming motions. "Sure," I answered, "We’ll get you a big one."This was a big one, alright. But I had never kept a fish before, not even a tasty-looking trout. Was this going to be my first keeper? I thought about the several days over my two trips here that Home Boy had cooked for me, and then gone down to my room to search for and kill any cockroaches he found before I went to bed because I was chicken. "Okay," I said, "We keep it for Home Boy."

The fish went into a series of thudding death flops, practically killing himself with the force of the smacks of his own head on the deck, and I watched the irridescence of its white flashing sides fade to steely gray. The boat was moving again, but I kept my eyes on the dead fish, with a mixture of self-loathing and pride. I felt like the cat that ate the canary, but at the same time, I felt bad for the canary.The boat stopped at a flat. "We need to take a picture of you with the fish," Felipe said.I was torn. This would be evidence, and the ghost of Lee Wulff, real or imagined, would haunt my dreams if I flashed it around.

I climbed from the boat anyway, and took the flopping carcass of the fish as the diver handed it over the side for me. The weight of it knocked me over, and the dead fish slid all over me, spreading stinky barracuda slime all over my clothes like butter on a corn cob. If you don’t already know, barracuda have a strong and unpleasant smell, which was now in a cloud around me. "Get those clothes off, or the smell will seep into your skin. Trust me," Felipe cautioned. I stripped down to my bikini, pulling a sticky shirt and pants off, and the boat driver began to rinse them in the salt water.

We got back to Gran Roque at the end of the day, and Home Boy waved to us from the kitchen window. A man on the beach grabbed the rope we tossed and pulled our nose on the sand. I climbed onto the bow and lifted the fish, just as I am doing in the shot, and tossed it from the boat onto the beach. I was the great white huntress. People stopped walking and stared with expressions of wide-eyed shock. Home Boy’s jaw hit his chest, and then he let out a terrific yelp. I climbed from the boat without a word and went to take a long hot scrub.

When I emerged from my room with the fresh smell of lime and a cool white dress, Home Boy was walking around the lodge holding the massive, stinky fish in his arms like a baby. After everyone had seen, at least twice, he carried it to the kitchen to filet. He cut the head off right away, and tossed it from the kitchen window onto the beach, next to the spot where the two kids had played with discarded fish heads earlier, for passersby to trip over or stop and stare at. When he left for the plane, he carried a bag full of wax-paper wrapped fish flesh that he doled out to anyone who asked.

I don’t regret keeping that barracuda and I never will. But the profoundest regret of my fishing life does come from that day. I regret that I did not walk onto the beach in the moonlight, when everyone was asleep except the men who play guitars on their doorsteps long into the night, and hold its head in front of my face like a mask, and wriggle.

--Catherine Hooper--