On having no head.

2:00 AM. Cold gusts tear through my wetsuit bringing smashing water with it. Initially the water doesn’t feel too bad since its warmer then the air, but it doesn’t take long for the the freezing wind to leave me wondering if the parts of my body exposed from the water are starting to freeze. Im exhausted, but I have no desire to leave. The fishings been slow and I ask myself what drives me to return night after night to these cold rocks? Words leave me and my head leaves with them, the empty space where my head should be is instead filled by the moons glow, the rhythmic crashing of waves. It’s as if I’m looking inwards rather than out. A rock id looked at hundreds of times seemed to be calling out to me. Normally the thought of being washed away by the current prevented me from venturing to the rock, but tonight the all I felt was a longing to venture out to the rock. Part of me wants to attribute it a subliminal hunch that the tide, weather, and location were all perfect for a big fish. The more reasonable part of me thinks it was merely sleep deprivation causing me to lose any reasonable sense of risk aversion.

I made call after call into the darkness hoping for an answer. Out of nowhere there’s a response as my arms strain to hold onto the sudden tension in my rod as the drag screams. Through nothing but fiberglass and nylon me and this fish are connected. The night seems to become even darker as the world melts away. She’s finally close enough for me to see the leader, my heart is racing, a fish of this size can make you as afraid as it can excited. She was just feet away and looked to be every bit of 50. she calmly looked at me one last time, and with one tail splash she was gone. There was no landing, photos, or measurements of this fish; nothing more than a brief shared memory before she vanished into the night. This is why we do what we do, hours of scouting and research, sleepless slow nights; all because of the potential of what will happen that next tide, the next moon phase, or the next cast.