Alicia Johnston

"Oh no, not another one!" I groaned as I felt the line spring taut and heard the whirr as it raced off the reel. The relentless pressure that I would fight for the next hour and seven minutes began, thus started my second battle for that day with the monsters of the deep. My groan was deceiving. Although I was tired from my early morning episode with another tarpon, I was still overjoyed at the thought of catching one more. This one weighed on 105 pounds – disappointing since I wanted the fish again to be larger than I was. Unlike the first, this one was more fun to fight because he jumped often, enabling me to see my competitor. For competing it was. This was not simply a leisurely fishing excursion. It was an outright competition to see who would outlast the other.

Earlier that day, I had caught my biggest tarpon ever, a 140 pounder. I struggled with the beautiful beast, which outweighed me by 30 pounds, for one hour and forty minutes. Each one of those 100 minutes was filled with struggle, sweat, and pure determination. I did not actually set the hook in this one, as I did the second one, but that only slightly decreased my excitement at the chance to outdo another tarpon.

Once more I began the motions to reel in my fish: pull the rod up and reel on the way down. I must have repeated this back- and shoulder-wrenching motion thousands of times. Every time I turned the reel and pumped the rod, my arms, shoulder, back, and hands ached and burned. Yet every amount of pain in those turns brought the prized tarpon closer to being mine. As the struggle neared the end, there were times when he would come almost close enough to the boat to be grabbed by the captain. Then he would abruptly turn and race away, taking with him those precious inches of line that I had fought him for tooth and nail (literally – tooth for him, nail for me). Each time he taunted me only strengthened my resolve to capture him. I pleaded with him in my mind: "C’mon fish. Just come to the boat for a little bit. I only want to see how pretty you are and get my souvenir scale – then I’ll take out that nasty hook and let you go." Obviously, this fish was deaf. The behemoth tarpon, attempting to achieve the level of my stubbornness, continued to resist. I was beginning to wonder if this was going to last as long as Davy’s six hour fight in Islands in the Stream. Obviously he did not realize that if I had to fight for three weeks, I would eventually capture him and win. I told him, "You might as well give up now and make it easier on yourself. I’m going to beat you and that’s all there is to it." And I did.

Once I finally got him close enough to the boat for the captain to hold him, I realized how big this creature really was – trophy size! The beauty of the fish struck me as the sun reflecting off his iridescent scales momentarily blinded me to the incredible agony that I would soon endure. In the following pain-filled days, I realized that the entire struggle – the sweat, the heat, the back cramps, the aches in muscles that I never before knew exited – was well worth it. I had proven the extent of my previously unrealized determination, and all this on a lazy summer’s day in southern Florida.