CARCOSA

STRAITS OF FLORIDA, FLORIDA

Went out for blackfin tuna. No land in sight by the time we stopped. Sky and water were close enough in color that the horizon mostly disappeared. Up and down still existed. Just harder to tell apart than usual.

It felt wrong in a way I didn't have a word for yet. Most of what was actually down there stayed down there. You felt it before you ever saw it, a hard, sudden pull on the line, some fast dark shape working beneath the surface with enough force to travel straight up the rod into your hands, and then nothing. No shape to look at. The line would go quiet again and the water would look exactly as it had before.

The tuna came fast when they came, and so did the sharks. Bull sharks, working the boat in numbers. You had to reel a hooked fish up stupid fast or lose it halfway to the surface, stripped clean before it ever cleared the water.

We didn't always win.

Got this shot mid-theft, more or less. Camera up, one of them breaching hard right off the stern, water exploding everywhere, going for a fish that was, for about half a second, still technically mine.

At some point I sat eating a half-assed sandwich, staring into the water. There was a cooler full of Pacificos on the boat. For once I didn't think I was in a position where drinking one was a particularly good idea.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I had a thought I never told anyone on the boat.

What happens if I go over right now.

I'm not an ocean guy. I'm built for altitude and thin air and knowing which way is down because down is usually attached to solid ground. Out there, none of that translated. I didn't know how deep it was under the boat. Didn't know how far the nearest shore sat. Didn't have a single one of my normal instincts doing anything useful, and with a swarm of bull sharks competing with me for the same fish, my brain quietly ran the math on falling in and did not like the answer.

Nobody else on that boat was thinking about it. I'd bet real money on that. To them this was Tuesday, mildly exciting Tuesday, the kind of day you tell a decent story about later over a beer.

I kept it to myself. Seemed like the correct call at the time, and still does.

That's the part that stuck with me longer than the shark did. Not the animal. The absence of ground. Every other time something's scared me, and plenty of things have, I've at least had terrain underneath me that I understood. Snow I know how to read. Rock I know how to grip. Out there I had a hundred feet, or a thousand, of water I couldn't see two inches into. Blue matching blue matching blue.

Got the shot looking straight down.

By the end of the day the water still looked mostly the same as it had when we got there. Blue, flat, impossible to read. Every so often the line would go hard in your hands and remind you otherwise.

Just proof, delivered through three hundred yards of monofilament, that something was down there.