Hooked on the Andaman Sea

The Andaman Sea shines as blue and clear as the eyeball of the Buddha, east of the wider face of the Bay of Bengal. It is a rare hybrid of open ocean and vast circumscribed loch, stippled on its western extreme by a fringe of eponymous islands and blocked to the east by the long, bony sweep of the Malay Peninsula.

The Andaman Islanders speak a language proved unrelated to any other on the globe, as if they were bent on keeping a tribal secret. Among other things, they hold sacred the sailfish.

They have kept their secret well, because until recently, few in the West and not many in the East knew that the Andaman Sea gives up some of the best sport fishing in the world.

Up north, near what we used to call Burma but now have been sweetly redirected to call Myanmar, the mouths of the Irrawaddy muddy up the eyeball a bit, but here in the pupil, it is blue, blue as an egg, blue as a Buick, and in the dog days of August, at the edge of the monsoon, it becomes mirror flat. I (continued on page 205) The Andaman Sea (continued from page 92) watched a 120-pound sailfish tail-walk 100 meters across the surface of that mirror, and the fisherman inside me concluded that he didn't have to die to go to heaven.

Of course, if the fish had been on the other end of my line instead of my wife's, I probably would have tried on death after all, just from the pure jolt of adrenaline. I have felt the surge and buck of a marlin and (for a moment) the lilt and pull of a sailfish, and the two are about even in my book. Beauty and the beast. I know they both have their champions, but the Andaman Sea made a sailfish believer of me, because it is the most beautiful fish running. Blue, green and silver blend furiously in the web-work of its sail.

Now, watching it on the end of Patty's line, 400 meters away, I realized this was what I had come for. I needed that realization, because it had been a long, strange trip to the Andaman Sea. The gods of the islanders conspired against me. World politics threw its wrench in. too. But I was on a charter boat named Ocean Bird out of Phuket (the resort town on the southwest coast of Thailand), snug in the piscatorial arena of what I was already beginning to think of as "my lake." Paradise is always a pain in the ass to get to.

"Sorry, sir, we don't do those kinds of tours." said the first travel agent I called. I called him because his name was Ken Fish and he was listed at a New York firm named Adventures in Paradise, and the combination sounded like just what I had in mind. But with the first words out of his mouth, I hit a brick wall. OK, so my reputation as a—how can I put this gracefully?—a boulevardier had preceded me. I was a married man now, and of my three obsessions—sex, food and fishing—only the last was left.

"Those kinds of tours" were, obviously enough, sex tours, hedonistic excursions into the fleshpots of Patpong Road, the Cowboy District, Bangkok, Thailand. The Thai sex industry got its kick start from the U.S. military presence during the Vietnam war (ah, the blandishments of imperialism), and now tourism—apparently abetted by the popularity of the sex sallies—is the major source of foreign exchange for the Thai economy, ahead of rice.

So I had a little trouble convincing Fish about the purity of my motives. He actually was one of the few Stateside travel agents who had caught on to the real draw of the Andaman Sea. As the Caribbean gets too familiar and even Australia gets crowded, Thailand looks more and more attractive to the loose coterie of fishing tourists, trophymen and Hemingway clones who travel the international game circuit. Five or even three years ago, Phuket simply did not have the facilities to support serious game fishing. But just recently, the charter business has boomed, and fairly well-equipped boats can be had for about $80 per person or $480 a day.

The Andaman Sea trip was to be my dry run, my first tourist excursion to Thailand since my marriage. Fish, the man, set me up to go after fish, the animal. A man, a plan, a fish—Andaman! He chartered me on the Ocean Bird out of Chalong Bay, Phuket, for a day excursion to Chicken Island for sailfish, stopping for an overnight stay on Phi Phi Island, fishing all through the next day and then returning to Chalong the next evening. He also booked me on a shark-fishing trip along the coastal shelf of the Mergui Archipelago, but I told him that trip conflicted with a one-day excursion into the rare precincts of Burma—excuse me, Myanmar. I was disappointed, since shark fishing has the faint tang of danger to it: It's done at night, with the great white as its ultimate prey.

Like all lucky fishing trips, this one started out badly. We flew into Bangkok from Hong Kong, had time for an idle tour of a few nearby wats, then tried to check into the Grace. The Grace Hotel is a little downscale for most people's tastes, but I remembered it fondly—too fondly. "Ah, Mr. Goldstein," the pleasantly happy-faced manager greeted me, and before I could warn him off, he went on: "You want two-girl suite? Air mattress lotsa soap suds," laughing like a maniac. We stayed at the Hilton.

The community of sport fishermen forms a loose-knit private cabal, like that of golf, say, or surfing, though its members would shudder at the comparison. Its top echelon are the trophy hunters, the men who enter tournaments and hire themselves out as guides. I was a parvenu compared with some of those pros, and even the avidity of some amateurs made me look like a mere worm fisher. Melanoma candidates all, par-broiled and wizened as old men, they haunt the shores of Bimini and Perth, making side trips to the Baja, maybe, or Newfoundland.

I traveled to Thailand with a set of two Penn International reels couched in a traveling case lined with black velvet, and a smaller case with two lighter Shimanos. The Penns are the Rolls-Royce of salt-fishing reels (a bad metaphor, since I once owned a Rolls, and it caused me more grief than pleasure). They are beautiful objects, for starters, and resemble nothing in their smooth efficiency more than Swiss-clock escapements. I listed sex, food and fishing as my three obsessions, but I actually have another one, which also survived the matrimonial cut: gadgets. It is wrong to love objects, the philosophers will tell you, but then, no philosopher has ever reeled in a trophy-sized marlin for me.

The Ocean Bird, a rather dumpy-looking white-and-blue 50-footer, chugged out of Chalong Bay, on the eastern side of the finger of land occupied by the paradise known as Phuket Island. Unfortunately, we weren't on it. It chugged back in, picked us up and chugged out again. By nine o'clock, Thai time, we were trolling for tuna, kingfish and sailfish, on our way to Chicken Island. Jonas, our Thai captain and guide, assured me that Chicken Island was the finest sailfish ground in Asia. I had my Penns rigged to 80-pound rods and my Shimanos to 50-pound, and I was all set. Jonas used Jet Plug lures for tuna and knifelike Rapalas for the larger fish, baited with live sardines from the bait tank on board.

On the way out, I began to taste what an amazing fish tank the Andaman is. I was fooling with a smaller rod when Patty pulled in the fattest skipjack tuna I had ever seen. It was barrel-chested, if fish do, indeed, have chests (this one did), and it reminded me of those little overfed dogs elderly people are prone to herd along the sidewalks of New York. Fat tuna meant a happy, healthy food chain: If they were this big this far down in the pecking order, I salivated about what the really big fish were like.

I found my answer when what turned out to be a four-foot wahoo suddenly slammed my line. The Shimano whined like a dentist's drill. Thinking I had a trophy-sized sailfish, I immediately asked for the fighting chair when it hit, but the crew just laughed and fitted me with a stand-up harness. Sailfish or no, the wahoo fought like a divorce lawyer, making ragged plunges against the arc of the line, working itself back and forth, testing the limits of its doom. It was fine, high action, and when they gaffed him, I felt a bit of the same thrill I had when I nabbed my first bluefish off the coast of Long Island, lo, these many years ago.

The wahoo's colors fade upon capture, like a street-gang member's colors, and he becomes indistinguishable from his less feisty cousin, the king mackerel. If you can't tell from the fight, you can see what you have as they bring it alongside: The wahoo, what the locals call Pla Insi, has distinctive vertical stripes on a silvery body, while the dorsal of the mackerel is the emerald of a dragonfly. But they both turn gray and flat in the air, and Patty and I couldn't tell which was which after she pulled in a mackerel and it was stored next to my wahoo.

But it was sailfish I was after. I had never caught a big one, a keeper, a den ornament. My father had one on the wall of our apartment when I was growing up, and I remember fetishizing it, both as evidence of my father's prowess (it meant, to my young mind, that he would always be there to bring home the kill) and as a harbinger of the wider world of nature, miraculously present in the claustrophobic confines of Brooklyn. The sail fascinated me, even garishly painted as it was. The sail looked unreal, alien, female. I used to pet the fish and pretend to be swimming alongside it. Among the inevitable blows of adolescence was the realization that my father had not, after all, caught the damn thing but had it palmed off on him by the disgusted wife of a divorced fisherman (sooner or later, all fishermen divorce). Later, I accidentally punched a hole in it with a baseball bat, but of course Freud will tell us that there are no accidents.

Now I was in the home court of the sailfish, ready to play H-O-R-S-E for keeps. I fought and caught a wonderful black marlin on the way to Chicken Island, but it was on the small side, even I though it took me 30 minutes to land. I was going from one exhilaration to the next, but always in the back of my mind. I thought of the sailfish. I barely glanced at the marlin, though I had sweated for it and it had snapped back my wrists until they ached. I broke open a beer and looked out over the turquoise Andaman where, I was convinced, lay my greater triumphs. We had a lunch of fresh-broiled wahoo drenched in lime: Food, fishing and gadgetry had combined in a vortex of bliss. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, what fresh heaven is this?

In the afternoon, the clouds broke open and the sun dazzled us, beating down on my skull, enervating me. I tried to stay up for the strike I knew was to come, but I confess I dozed a bit in the full lull of the water. Patty and I were both on the big rods with live bait, and when the strike came, they hit both of our rods at once—the worst possible situation, since the lines can slice each other off. We immediately did as we were trained and set our reels in free position, with just enough drag to prevent backlash. Patty's fish was off port and mine was running away from the stern.

"Steady," said Jonas, unexpectedly close to my ear. My universe had closed down into a tiny window at the end of 250-pound leader, and his voice made me jump. "Get ready ... set 'em—now!" Patty and I both bucked back to set our hooks, and I had the most marvelous feeling in the world as my fish cleared the water. He was beautiful. Easily bigger than my father's shameless trophy. He slapped the water and then went back up. Newton was wrong, he said. Gravity is the bunk.

We were still not out of the woods. Patty and I were both shouting, screaming, acting like kids, as we were getting settled into the fighting chairs. The two fish came perilously close to tangling once or twice, while the mate dug the motors into the foam and tried to get ahead of them. Finally, both fish were going in the same direction. For the next 40 minutes, time and space telescoped down to me and the fish and the thin filament connecting us. I felt like a kid with a play phone: I had a can with a string, the sailfish had a can with a string and we were holding a dialog. Mostly, what it said was, "Not today, Al." Its airborne flashes never ceased to surprise me, as the line would slack moments later, alter the fish had already dived.

"She is a beauty," Jonas said, coaching me, coaxing it. "Maybe one fifty, one seventy-five. Get her close so we can see her." Him, her, it. The sailfish had embraced all permutations of gender.

Patty's fish was already brought up behind the transom, a very respectable fish. As the mate grabbed the leader, she said something that clutched at my throat. "Let it go," she told the mate. "It's too beautiful to kill." Jonas said later that it was a 120-pounder, easy, "a keeper." In a way, the release of Patty's fish made my battle more desperate. I worked my fish back to gain some line.

Ten minutes later, he cleared again, and I he whole crew ooh'd and ahh'd. I could hear the camera shutters going off as though I were at a film opening. I began to get cocky. The fish made a big circle and came to the surface, his tail clearing, his dorsal fin raked back, purple in the blazing sunlight. Then he heaved himself up and rolled onto his back, snapping the hook out of his throat and sending the leader zinging back through the air like a reject letter.

I was crushed. Zen Buddhism, I thought. Maybe I'll take up Zen Buddhism. The agony of the loss upset me all the more because Patty had given her fish back to the sea. Had I been too greedy? If I had offered to cut mine loose, would it have offered to come willingly into the boat? A pall settled over the whole afternoon. I was baiting hooks and sending out lines, but I was just going through the motions. We gave up early and headed back to Phi Phi Island, where we were to stay for the night. I resolved to get off the boat and stay off it, finished with fishing for the trip.

Phi Phi is almost pornographically beautiful, huge cliff formations and humpbacked hills rising directly from the sea, below which, on sugar-white beaches off a tremendous lagoon, there are a few bungalows. I saw none of this, of course. I was still stewing in my funk. I left Patty and headed for the crude bar as soon as we docked.

"Al, old buddy!" an ugly American greeted me. A fan, he said. I was in no mood, but I got into a conversation, anyway. "No girls here" was his opening gambit, "so what are you doing here?" Ah-ha-ha-ha.

"I came here to fish," I said.

"Sure, sure," he said, and winked. He wouldn't believe me, wanted to know if I had discovered some sort of ultimate whorehouse tucked away in the forest.

"Fishing is lousy," I told him. "I'm going to Burma."

"Burma? I wouldn't go there," he responded. The political situation was getting dicier by the day. It was getting so bad that pretty soon, P.J.O'Rourke was going to show up. "I wouldn't go there," he repeated, trying to sound like an old hand. I had a beer and formulated a rule of thumb for international travel: Never schedule a visit to a country that has recently undergone a name change. And an addendum: Never enter a country whose government is promising free elections sometime soon.

Patty came and soothed me. Canceling the Burmese trip would mean we could stay and go shark fishing the next night. The word fishing still grated a bit. but I could feel my resistance lessening. So it was that I found myself leaving Patong Beach in the late afternoon, again aboard the Ocean Bird, which this time out was a little smellier. I found out why later, when an hour past dark, we arrived at our destination: a reef that held the wreck of a Japanese war boat. We cruised toward it and the mate tossed out buckets of rank-smelling chum into the water behind us to attract the fish that would attract the sharks. Then we anchored above the wreck.

"Watch this," Jonas said, hooking in a buoy with his gaffe. He connected a line to the boat and flicked a switch. Ninety feet below, klieg lights went on and lit up the shell of a sunken torpedo boat. It was ghostly, chilling, utterly beautiful. I felt I was looking down into someone's secrets. Fish attracted by the light came in whole schools. It was touristy, but it was brilliant.

"President Kennedy sank this boat. PT 109," Jonas told me with a straight face. Uh-huh, I thought. Wasn't he a bit to the east during the big one? I imagined hulk after hulk scattered across the Pacific, each claimed to be a Kennedy kill, like relics of the cross. We unplugged our little Disney World and cruised back in a wide circle, picking up the wake where we had dropped the chum. You could still see the dim trail of phosphorus in the water. Now and then, it swirled as it was cut with a dorsal fin.

Seeing a lot of sharks in one place has the same effect as seeing a lot of death-row murderers gathered together, or politicians or airline ticket agents—it raises the hackles on the back of your neck. I had a strike as soon as my line went out, before I even decided whether I wanted a strike or not. If having a sailfish on your line is like going to a ballet, hooking a shark is like a heavy-metal concert. You can feel the steady power as the fish churns remorselessly forward. No real thrash in the fight, just a draining pull.

"Let her go, Big Al," Jonas said. We had pulled out of the chum line and he had trained his lights on my prey, an evil-looking, blank-eyed thug. "She is too small."

"No!" I said. "No more giving back." I wanted this sea, so rich in everything, to give me something from its treasure chest, even if the jewel were cursed. The shark was half dead when we pulled it alongside and all dead when the mate put a bullet into it with his .38.

"Congratulations," Jonas told me. "You just caught a great white." That was a great white? Jesus, I thought, Spielberg must really be a genius if he can make something so small look so big. "A baby one," Jonas added, and I understood. I had caught one of the smallest great whites Phuket had ever seen, or, rather, had ever not seen, since I slipped it into the harbor without fanfare. I didn't care if I had to hide it. I felt proprietary toward it by then. He may be a bastard, I paraphrased Nixon voters, but he's my bastard.

A cobbler in Hong Kong has the skin of him right now, and I hope he is in the process of turning it into a pair of size 11s for me. Transformations more miraculous than that have been known to occur: The shark's grin is replacing a woman's smile as the symbol of Thailand for me, and the flash of sail fin is holding more attraction than a whole street of night clubs.

"I watched a sailfish tail-walk across the surface and concluded I didn't have to die to go to heaven."