“A Situation Report” (an excerpt)

Look, September 4, 1956

No one can work every day in the hot months without going stale. To break up the pattern of work, we fish the Gulf Stream in the spring and summer months and in the fall. The changes of each season show in the sea as they do on the land. There is no monotony as long as the current is alive and moving, and each day you never know what you will meet with.

You go out early or later, depending on the tide which pushes the heavy blue water out or brings it close to shore. When the current is running well and the flying fish are coming into the air from under the bow of the Pilar, you have an even chance or better to catch dolphin and small tuna and to catch or lose white marlin.

When you have finished far enough down with the current, you go into some beach to swim and have a drink while Gregorio, the mate, cooks lunch. In the late afternoon, you fish back toward home against the current until sunset. The small marlin are there in the spring and early summer and the big fish in the summer and the fall.

This fishing is what brought you to Cuba in the old days. Then you took a break on a book, or between books, of a hundred days or more and fished every day from sunup to sundown. Now, living on the hill in the country, you fish the days you pick.

It was different in Peru where we went to try to photograph big fish for the picture. There the wind blew day and night. Sand blew in your room from the desert that makes the coast and the doors banged shut with the wind.

We fished 32 days from early morning until it was too rough to photograph and the seas ran like onrushing hills with snow blowing off the tops. If you looked from the crest of a sea toward shore you could see the haze of the sand blowing as the wind furrowed the hills and scoured and sculptured them each day.

The sea birds huddled in the lee of the cliffs, coming out in clouds to dive wildly when a scouting bird would sight schoolfish moving along the shore, and the condors ate dead pelicans on the beaches. The pelicans usually died from bursting their food pouches diving and a condor would walk backwards along the beach lifting a large dead pelican as though it weighed nothing.

The marlin were large and did not fight as the fish off Cuba do. But their weight and bulk in the heavy seas made it hard work, and a fish that you would bring to gaff in eight or twelve minutes you would let run again, holding him always in close camera range, feeling his weight through the soles of your feet, your forearms and your back, and finally when he was dead tired, have Gregorio harpoon him to try for the camera shot you needed in the picture.

It was steady punishing work each day and it was fun too because the people were nice and it was a strange new sea to learn. It was good too to be back in Cuba and on Pilar again.