Believe me, I’ve tried, but I can’t hide an agenda to save my life. In fact, the only thing I do worse than hiding my own agenda is uncovering someone else’s. I take absolutely everything at face value, something my mother has been known to twit me about. “Concrete-bound,” she calls me.

Until about ten years ago, I used to say that I was the most straightforward person ever to walk the earth. And then I met Kevin, who makes me look like Henry James.

One of the reasons my husband and I live in peace and harmony is that we leave nothing interpersonal to chance. If he wants me to know something, he knows he has to tell me. In English. Body language and pointed hints will not get the job done. And this suits him just fine, as it is his first impulse, when he wants me to know something, to tell me. In English.

Kevin is a relentless and compulsive truth-teller, and tackles every situation head-on. Although he has a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the workings of other people’s minds than I do, he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. There isn’t much of a filter between what he thinks and what he says, which means you almost always know what he’s thinking – a wonderful thing for a woman who can’t uncover an agenda to save her life.

And you always know where he’s been. He’s fundamentally incapable of not telling me what he did while I was away.

And, while I’m away, he’s always up to something.

Last week I left him alone for an afternoon and evening, and came home to find him sprawled on the bed, with what looked like closing credits scrolling up the TV screen. “Hi honey,” he said. “I had a steak and watched a war movie.”

So you did.

“And you know what else?” he asked, a glint in his eye.

Alarm bells went off. Leaving Kevin home alone with power tools, not to mention a big hairy truck with 650 foot-pounds of torque, is not always wise.

He led me into the living room and picked up something that looked like a cross between a fishing pole and an electrical conduit. He could barely suppress his pride. “It’s a sabiki rod!”

A sabiki rod!

A sabiki hook

A sabiki rod, for those of you have never jigged for mackerel, is a rod specifically designed for a sabiki rig, which is one of the most diabolical of all fishing lures. It’s a length of line, five feet or so, with five or six teeny hooks spaced along it, each attached to the main line with a length of line about four inches long and decorated with a little feather.

To use the rig, you attach a weight to the end of it and drop it down to the sea floor. Then you reel it up to the depth you think the school of mackerel is. Then you jig it, jerking it up and letting it sink again, until you get a fish.

If your sabiki rig is in a school of mackerel, you will get a fish, or several fish, immediately. A mackerel cannot resist a sabiki rig, and it’s not unusual to pull the rig up with a fish on every hook.

But that is not why the sabiki rig is diabolical. The sabiki rig’s diabolical nature is evident only when it comes time to put it away. It is impossible to store a sabiki rig without tangling it hopelessly, and every fisherman has spent the better part of a full-length movie untangling sabiki rigs in preparation for the next day’s fishing expedition.

If there’s one job Kevin hates, it’s untangling a sabiki rig, so he set his mind to building a rod that would obviate the need for it. The internet has all kinds of suggestions, and he amalgamated a number of them into his own design.  As is his wont.

The Zebco set-up

It started with a Zebco 404 reel, which is the kind of reel kids use – you press a button to release the line and cast. It costs about $13., and comes spooled with 15-pound test. The Zebco then got attached with a hose clamp to a five-foot length of PVC, and Kevin drilled a hole through the PVC a few inches above the reel. The line gets threaded through the PVC pipe and attached to the sabiki rig. At the end of the rig is a weight with a hook that’s big enough to not fit through the PVC.

So, when you reel in the line, the sabiki rig gets housed in the length of the PVC, and the weight on the end keeps it taut by hooking over the end of the pipe. Then a little pipe insulation on the reel end for grip, and a cap on the end of the PVC so the edge doesn’t abrade the line, and Bob’s your uncle.

Total cost? “Seventeen dollars!” said Kevin, “So I made two!”

Kevin's sabiki rod

Yes, while I was out my enterprising husband made two sabiki rods. I should go out more often, I figured. So, yesterday, I went up to Boston to interview a source for an article and have dinner with my friend Dianne. I came home quite late, but Kevin was still up. I put down my bag and was about to take my coat off when he stopped me.

“You wanna come see what I did?” he asked, flashlight in hand.

The same alarm bells went off. No matter how many constructive things Kevin gets done while I’m out, the alarm bells will always go off.

He led me outside, around to the side of the house that faces the pond. He shone the light on a hole in the ground. And then a second hole. And a third. All the holes were where stumps used to be.

“You pulled the stumps!” I said.

“It was awesome!”

Now, stump-pulling, under ordinary circumstances is hard, frustrating, sweaty work. It is most definitely not awesome. Which led me to believe we were not dealing with ordinary circumstances here.

“I’m afraid to ask how you did it …” I said.

“Well,” he began, “I backed the truck up by the side of the house.”

That would be the big hairy truck with the 650 foot-pounds of torque. I knew that truck was trouble. But I didn’t think he’d try to use a truck on the side of the house to pull a stump in the back of the house. I groaned.

He told me how it went down. He tied a rope around the stump, and then ran it around a tree down by the water, and up to the truck. Just because it’s worth picturing, I have worked up a crude graphical representation.

The house is our house. The red rectangle represents the big hairy truck (the other two vehicles are actual, less hairy, vehicles). The red X is the stump, and the white line is the rope.

He put the truck in its lowest four-wheel drive gear, and started to creep forward. The rope stretched. He crept some more, it stretched some more. And then, as he crept, the rope released and made that boing-oing-oing noise you hear in cartoons.

At first he thought the rope had snapped, but then he realized it had pulled the stump out with such force that it flew all the way out into the pond. He had to go down and haul it in.

It was so much fun that he pulled two others. The only reason he stopped was that he ran out of stumps.

“It was awesome!”

I am glad to be married to the kind of man who uses his time alone creatively and constructively. And if, some day, that means he burns down the house or totals the truck or severs a limb, I take comfort in the fact that I’ll be the first to know.

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We’re not there yet, and Kevin’s been unsatisfied with the pace of our progress. So he dispensed with the whole leapfrog thing and went ahead and bought a boat and a truck.

The boat is a Steigercraft 23 Chesapeake, with an enclosed pilothouse and a cuddy cabin. At least I think that’s what it has – I’m still a little iffy on the terminology. Better I show you a picture.

The hull is from 1990, and has a recently re-fiberglassed deck and a new gas tank. The engine is a 2008 225-horse Evinrude E-tec. It’s s super-low-emissions two-stroke, the big brother to the 50-horse version we have on our oyster boat.

The best part is that it’s totally tricked out. It’s got super-groovy Raymarine radar and GPS, and outriggers on the roof that are controlled from inside the pilothouse. It’s got enough rod holders for a small village and – get this – autopilot.

I was a little worried about the autopilot when Kevin explained what it could do for us. “We can go out to Horseshoe Shoal and set it to go in circles over our favorite spot.” I immediately had visions of us, lazing in the sun, as our boat went on autocrash with another boat with the same favorite spot.

“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “We also have collision avoidance.”

A 23-foot boat with a pilothouse and cabin is a lot more boat than our current 19-foot center console. It’s the biggest boat Kevin was comfortable trailering regularly, and he’s only comfortable trailering it with a big hairy truck. So he flew to Chicago, made a deal on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty diesel, and drove it home.

While he was gone, our friend Bob stopped by. Bob knew all about the boat; he went to see it with us to because we wanted it to get the Bob Seal of Approval. I told him Kevin was away, driving home in the big hairy truck we bought to pull it.

Bob scratched his head and took a pointed look around our property, densely populated with boats and trucks. “I see a lot of addition,” he said, “but not very much subtraction.”

That hit the nail on the head. When Kevin got home, we had a come-to-Jesus on the issue of subtraction. At first, Kevin contended that I was overreacting to addition. “Hey, at least it’s not multiplication,” were, I believe, his exact words. I told him that if he didn’t focus on some subtraction, we might be headed for a long division.

So we officially have for sale one 19-foot Eastern center console with a 70-horse Johnson, a 14-foot Carolina Skiff with a 25-horse Honda four-stroke, and a 1970 Series IIA Land Rover. No reasonable offer refused, since we’ll never have room for the Queen Mary at this rate.

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Boats, though. Boats are another matter entirely.

I think it’s because a new car would do pretty much what an old car will do, only more reliably and comfortably. But a new boat opens up whole new horizons.

Mobile Bay, from the deck of my fish camp

Yesterday morning I went fishing in the shallow waters around Dauphin Island. It wasn’t a propitious kind of fishing day; the wind was strong, and there was a neap tide, which meant the water wasn’t moving much. But I was on Dauphin Island and I was damned if wouldn’t go fishing, given the chance.

I was given the chance by my hosts, who set me up with a personable young man named Richard Rutland, whose company, Cold Blooded Fishing, runs charters around the island.

My first thought, after “I get to go fishing!” was, “Nice boat!” It was a 24-footer, powered by a 225-horse Yamaha four-stroke. Comfortable, fast, with a draft of about a foot.

The Power Pole

We zipped across the windy part of Mobile Bay out to a sheltered cove in the lee of a barrier beach.

“We’ll anchor here,” Richard said, and pressed a button. I hear a bzzzzzz kind of noise, and we were anchored. Huh?

“What did you just do?” I asked. I knew no anchor had been let down, but we definitely weren’t moving.

He pointed to a gizmo next to his engine. It’s this thing called a Power Pole, and it’s basically a stick attached to a hydraulic mechanism that sinks it into the sea bed. Press the button, it goes down and you’re anchored. Press it again and it lifts and you drift.

Down, stop. Up, go. It was a revelation!

We did some stop-and-go fishing, casting live shrimp, along the beach side, but the Power Pole was the most interesting thing going. The fish were not in evidence.

Richard decided we’d try another spot, and he zoomed us around to the other side of the island, to a wall of rocks that line the spit of land that holds the airstrip. We went to one end, and he used his trolling motor, mounted on the bow on a metal contraption that secures it to the gunwale when you don’t need it and flips it into the water when you do, to troll along the wall.

I got a couple of nibbles, and had hopes for an actual fish, but they were not to be realized. Richard caught one nice flounder, and I got nothing. Nothing but a lovely boat ride, on warm southern waters, with an extremely nice and knowledgeable guide, so I wasn’t feeling too sorry for myself.

My boat envy was acute, but I could keep it in check.

Richard, of Cold Blooded Fishing, and his flounder

That night, though, it was to reach bubonic proportions.

Our group had a dinner made by Wesley True, the chef whose Mobile restaurant, True, earned him a James Beard nomination this year. But we didn’t go to True to eat that dinner. Oh no. Wes came to us, and cooked at the spectacular waterfront home of a local couple who invited a bunch of journalists over, just because.

Lisa and Skip have not just a spectacular waterfront home, but also a spectacular waterfront pool, with an attendant spectacular waterfront poolhouse. They welcomed us, a group of strangers, with warmth and grace, and our dinner began at the spectacular waterfront bar, where we drank gin mixed with Wes’s house-made tonic. What followed was a multi-course meal about which there will be more at a later date. Right now, today, I have to tell you about the boat.

Outside Lisa and Skip’s house was a dock. Next to the dock, lifted out of the water by one of those dockside boat lifts, was a boat. A 32-foot Regulator with twin 350s. Now that’s a boat.

Skip is a rabid fisherman, and has a charter license so he can turn other people into rabid fishermen. (Lisa gets seasick, and stays inshore.) When I asked him about his boat, and the kind of fishing he did, his eyes lit up as he told of snapper, and marlin, and tuna.

“You wanna see the tackle room?” he asked.

Tackle room? Tackle box, I know. Tackle drawer, even. But tackle room?

It killed me, the tackle room. Fifty or sixty rods, outfitted with top-of-the line gear of various sizes, equipped for various fish. There were probably a dozen Shimano tuna reels. There were cabinets filled with lures and line. There were even big soft chairs, so those among us who were suddenly weak at the knees could admire the room in complete comfort.

I wish Lisa and Skip had been jerks, because I’m never jealous of anything jerks have. But Lisa and Skip are anything but. They are charming, and engaging, and hospitable. They put their home at our disposal for the evening, even though, for all they knew, we’d wreck the joint. And so I don’t just want their boat, and their tackle. I could use something of their personalities, too.

Boat envy, you see, is limitless. I most definitely want that 32-foot Regulator for offshore excursions. But I also want the 24-foot flats boat with the groovy hydraulic anchor.

And about that Tacoma …

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Uncertainty is the mother of superstition, and getting food first-hand – farming or fishing, hunting or gathering – is maddeningly uncertain. Hunters, in the absence of a sure-fire way to find deer, swear by lucky hats or rabbit sightings. In the quest for consistent harvests, biodynamic gardeners harness cosmic-astral influences by burying chamomile-stuffed cow intestines.

And fishermen, fishermen are the worst. It starts with a world-wide prohibition against bananas on boats, and goes downhill from there.

I’m a fisherman, but I’m also a hard-assed empiricist. I’m not superstitious, but I see how it happens.

This past weekend, Kevin and I went out for bluefish. Our favorite bluefish spot is Horseshoe Shoal, 25 square miles of shallows in the middle of Nantucket Sound. We’ve been there many times, and there’s one particular spot on those 25 square miles that’s been very good to us.

We went there, like we always do. We put in the same lures we always use. We trolled in the same direction, at the same speed, that we always troll. We got nothing.

The shoal is crisscrossed by rips, abrupt changes in the flow of the water as it is forced up by a ridge or reef on the sea bed. Fish tend to congregate around rips, and trolling along a line where the surface changes from rough to smooth is a reasonable way to tackle a stretch of water.

That’s what we did. We went along the rips. We weaved around the rips. We crossed the rips on the perpendicular. We got nothing.

We saw no birds. We saw no fish, either in the water or on the fish finder. It was a calm, sunny, fishless day.

And then, without warning, Kevin took off his pants. I turned around and there he was, at the helm, in his underpants. It wasn’t risqué; the underpants were modest and substantial, no more revealing than 70’s-era gym shorts.

I was mystified. “Why did you take off your pants?”

Before he could answer, his rod bent 90 degrees and we heard the whizzzzzz of line running out against drag. Kevin put the boat in neutral, got the rod out of the holder, and fought the fish up to the boat. It was a beautiful, fat, seven-pound bluefish.

“I took them off because it was hot,” he told me after we’d gotten the fish on ice.

The key to catching fish is being where they are. Once we find them, we stay there, going over the same spot, in the same way, over and over. Kevin got a bite on each of the next three passes, and landed two more fish. I got nothing.

We were using the same lure, trolling on the same rip, from the same boat. The only difference was that I was wearing pants. It was maddening. But I am not superstitious and I was not going to fish in my underwear.

Finally, I was vindicated. A fish! As I was reeling it in, though, I realized it wasn’t a bluefish. It wasn’t fighting and twitching and taking line. It was just swimming in, docile. I saw it flash in the water. A striped bass, too small to keep.

Kevin shook his head ruefully and gestured to my pants.

Animals, up to and including humans, are wired for causality. When caged pigeons are fed pellets at random intervals, they start contorting themselves in strange ways, trying to replicate whatever it was that made the food come down the chute. We humans do rain dances and sacrifice animals and wear lucky hats.

I know the fish probably started to bite because the tide shifted and the water started moving faster. That Kevin got bites and I didn’t was either the luck of the draw or the motion of my rod, which is more flexible than his. I know all that, I do, and I’m a hard-assed empiricist to boot. And still I was tempted to take my pants off.

Even though I didn’t, I finally caught a fish, and then another. We had seven fish in the cooler when the water calmed and the bite died.

As we headed in, we passed a boat that had been trolling near us. They, too, were packing up to head in. They’d been within a couple hundred yards, but we hadn’t seen them hook up once.

As we got close, we could see why. In a tragic misunderstanding of fishing principles, they had taken off their shirts.

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Generally, we eat well. I’m a competent cook, even a good one, but most of what I make is pretty pedestrian. I’m a big fan of composed dishes like stews and soups and casseroles, and I make them out of whatever it is we’ve harvested lately. I don’t post many recipes because it seems silly to tell someone to go out and get the same mix of ingredients that we just happened to have.

A sea bass

Last night, though, we had something worth repeating.

We’d gone out bluefish fishing on Sunday, and come home with two sea bass in addition to our seven bluefish (more on that later). I’d cooked sea bass once or twice – it’s a dense, white fish with a mild flavor – but I didn’t have a favorite way to make it.

So I called Gus.

I know I’m not supposed to traffic in ethnic stereotypes, but if you want to know how to cook a fish, call a Greek.

We knew Gus was our kind of person the moment we met him – he was cooking a whole lamb on a rotisserie that he had made himself out of a washing machine. We had heard that he liked to go fishing, but he corrected us on that. “I like to go catching,” he said.

Gus had told me that sea bass was one of his all-time favorite fish, so I figured I’d try cooking it his way.

Hydroponic greens

His way was simple. Snip off all the sharp parts (sea bass have spiny fins and tails). Scale them, clean them, and take out the gills. Cut three slits in each side, and salt the fish inside and out. Let them sit in the fridge overnight. Grill about 20 minutes, and serve with a sauce of olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and oregano.

I had a beautiful head of slightly bitter greens (I forget exactly what kind) from our hydroponic system, and some winter kale from the hoophouse. I sautéed a couple strips of diced bacon, added onion and garlic, and then the chopped greens.

The dinner, badly photographed

The sauce was as Gus prescribed. Olive oil and lemon juice in a 2:1 ratio (emulsified in the blender), with salt, pepper, and a handful of chopped fresh oregano.

That’s it. That’s all it was. And it was spectacularly good.

Somehow, the smoky bacon and bitter greens were balanced by the acidity of the lemon juice, and the fish was just flavorful enough to assert itself through it all.

When I make something truly delicious, it’s always an accident. I know, if I try to repeat this, it won’t be quite the same. But it’ll be worth a shot.

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Hello Tamar,

I have been reading your blog now for about a year with great interest and amusement. I do not know how I ran across the blog. Maybe it was when I was doing some research on raising chickens on Cape (no chickens yet). I was hooked and I started following Kevin and your progress on various activities. I enjoy how you approach each new challenge and the humor you interject into your articles. I have followed Kevin and your steady forward progress with fishing and boats. I have not read any Blue Fin Tuna activity yet. Therefore, I would like to invite Kevin and you to join my wife Susan and me out on my boat for some tuna fishing.

A complete stranger invited us tuna fishing. Tuna fishing!

If you’re unfamiliar with what goes into tuna fishing, this might not seem like such a big deal, so let me bring you up to speed.

Tuna are very big, they swim very fast, and they seldom make an appearance in waters that are navigable by small boats. If you want to fish for tuna, you need to begin with a boat that can go offshore. Our boat, a nineteen-foot Eastern with a 70-horse Johnson, is not such a boat. Jon’s boat, a twenty-five foot Grady White with twin Yamaha 115s, is such a boat.

A tuna reel

But the boat is just the beginning. Tuna-fishing gear is heavy, large, and expensive, and rigging a boat costs thousands of dollars. And having the gear is necessary but not sufficient; you have to know what to do with it. Tuna are wily and elusive, and it takes serious study to figure out where to go, when to go there, and what to do once you arrive.

Alternatively, you can just wait until someone with a rigged boat and several years’ experience e-mails you and invites you to come along.

This past Saturday, we set the alarm for 3:45 AM so we could meet at Jon’s house in Harwich Port at 5:00.

I very much wanted to make a good impression, but being short on sleep and imperfectly caffeinated has a way of impairing your judgment and I began by talking way too loudly in a house where people were sleeping. Fortunately, we didn’t stay long. The boat was ready to go, and we followed Jon to Saquatucket Harbor, where we put in.

There were six of us aboard. Kevin and me, Jon and his wife Susan, Susan’s brother Doug, and Doug’s wife Linda. It became clear early on that Jon and Doug were the serious fishermen. Susan and Linda were there to make sure the boat’s Cheerfulness Quotient never dipped. They both started the day laughing and smiling – no small feat in the pre-dawn hours – and they never stopped.

We came out of the harbor and headed south. The plan was to go around the tip of Monomoy Island, a long, skinny beach runs from the elbow of Cape Cod about ten miles south, and then head north to where tuna had been spotted, and caught, off Chatham.

Jon and Kevin

Jon’s boat makes our boat seem like the kind you wind up with a rubber band and let loose in the bathtub, and it was a pleasure to be cutting through the ocean, on the way to tuna fishing, as the sky began to light up over Monomoy.

The sun was just barely over the horizon as we got to the area where tuna had been sighted. “Look for activity,” Doug told us. “Birds. Whales.”

Whales? I’d read that whales frequented the waters east of the Cape, but it seemed like such a far-fetched idea that we’d actually see them. But not five minutes after he’d mentioned them, Doug pointed to the horizon. “There! That was a spout.”

I missed it, of course. I always miss it.

We headed in the direction Doug indicated. As we got closer to where he’d seen the spout, we saw a dense cloud of birds. Closer still, and we could see the whales under the birds. Whales. Many whales. They were breaching, and feeding, and generally making a ruckus. It was astonishing.

And it was time. Time to put in the gear and start trolling for tuna.

Doug, setting a lure

Doug went below and came up with the four tuna rigs and two outriggers. Two of the reels were smaller, and we put them in rod holders on the transom, set to troll directly out back. The two larger reels we put in the holders in the gunwales, about six feet from the transom. We hooked them to outriggers, which are long poles that extend out and pull the lures away from the boat. If you have them, you can troll four lines without entangling them (most of the time).

As I tried to help Doug hook the lines to the outriggers, I felt the first small wave of seasickness. I handed the line off to Kevin, and looked out at the horizon. When the nausea subsided, I went back to the job, but it didn’t work. As soon as I focused on something in the boat, I started to feel sick.

Setting up tuna lures is a big job. Each lure is really many lures, to mimic a school. So you’ll have ten separate squid, with metal bars to keep them apart, and a big hook in the rearmost squid to catch the fish. Our set-up had four lures, and they have to be let out so they don’t get all tangled up, and spaced so they look realistic from below. There is an art to picking lure species and color, and spacing them effectively, and Doug would look at what we were trolling and let one out a little or pull one in a little until he liked how they looked.

I wanted to help. I really wanted to help. But I was getting sicker by the minute.

Doug, who is the most energetic fisherman I’ve ever seen, clearly could have handled the whole job by himself, but Kevin helped him anyway, and I tried to pay attention.

Doug and Kevin got the lures in, and Jon maneuvered the boat to stay alongside the whales and birds. The tuna are often where the whales and birds are, and there were a good half-dozen boats in the area, doing the same thing we were. But nobody seemed to be hooking up, which we knew because all the boats were talking to each other over the radio.

Hopes were high, though, because there was so much activity. The pod of whales we saw was one of many. There were literally hundreds of humpbacks out there, circling and feeding and circling again.

We navigated among the whale boils, trolling for tuna. I had the camera out, but without much hope. In my callow youth, I used to dismiss the existence of the Loch Ness monster based on the fact that all the photos were blurry. Now, with a camera full of pictures of frothy water where whales used to be, I’m a believer.

It's a whale. Honest.

Nothing’s easy when you’re seasick, but looking at a viewfinder is one of those things you just don’t want to be doing. It put me over the edge, and I found myself in the ignominious position of retching over the side of a boat full of people I really, really wanted to like me.

Not only that, when I wasn’t actively vomiting, I was doggedly staring at the horizon, trying to anticipate the movement of the boat so my brain and stomach would be on the same page. I was just a pleasure to be around.

And that’s how it went for a couple of hours. Troll, retch, repeat.

Only a few boats caught tuna. As the whale activity gradually subsided, some of the boats left for greener pastures eastward, but Jon and Doug weren’t ready to give up. We started to troll south, back toward Monomoy, and there was talk of stopping for some striper action if we didn’t get a tuna.

Doug, who’d been monitoring and adjusting our lure set-up, switched out one of the lures to see if the tuna were interested in something other than squid, and we started motoring slowly southward.

The wind was out of the north, so a southward troll was the least choppy. I discovered that, if I sat in the bow, looking forward, I could keep the nausea in check, so that’s where I went. The sun was out, and I started to feel a bit better. I even dozed off.

I woke to the sound of “FISH ON!”

I scrambled back to the stern as Kevin, Doug, and Linda were reeling in the three lines that didn’t have fish on them. The last one, the one with the fish, Doug handed to me.

The fish wasn’t taking a lot of line, and everyone aboard thought there was a good chance it was a striper or a bluefish, and not a tuna. I started reeling, and the line came in easily.

I didn’t last, though. As you reel in, you have to move the line back and forth across the spool, and that meant looking down. I looked down, felt that nasty glugging in my gut, and asked Kevin to be my proxy.

He took the reel. At first, the line was barely tight. Striper. Bluefish. But then, it tightened. The fish pulled. The fish surfaced. TUNA!

Reeling in

Kevin didn’t have to fight the fish long. He was using gear that can handle a fish that weighs several hundred pounds, and this tuna was no match for it. Still, though, it fought. Kevin brought it up to the boat, and it got stronger all of a sudden. It took some line, and went deep.

Kevin, coached by Jon and Doug, let it go for a while, and then started to muscle it up. He pulled the rod, and then reeled up the slack. Pulled and reeled. And there it was. Doug took the gaff, and pulled it into the boat.

I’d never been face to face with a tuna before. It is a lean, mean, swimming machine. It’s sleek and hydrodynamic, with retractable fins. Everything about it is pointy. Pointy head, pointy fins, pointy tail. A tuna is sharp.

Tuna!

Doug and Kevin got a line on the tail, and held the fish over the side to rake the gills to bleed it. In all probability, it was dead by then, but they put it in the water and towed it backward for a while, both to make sure the job was done (I’m told a fish drowns when you do that) and to wash off some of the blood.

What the tuna was eating

When we pulled it back in the boat, Kevin gutted it, and he pulled out the stomach so we could see what it was eating. The contents – sand eels – shed some light on why we caught a fish.

For most of the day, we’d been pulling lures of squid but, as we started to troll southward, Doug put out one with white Sluggos, wormy things that look like eels. That’s what our tuna bit on. You catch fish with lures that resemble what the fish is eating.

By tuna standards, ours was small. By ordinary fish standards, it was enormous. When you’re used to thinking a fifteen-pound bluefish or a thirty-pound striper is a trophy, a 65-pound tuna is a miracle.

Jon got out a giant insulated bag, like the kind you put your frozen groceries in, only tuna-sized. We slid the fish in, filled the bag with ice, and stowed it below.

The lures went back in, but that was all the action we were to have. From my seasick seat in the bow, I heard the occasional whoop, but it wasn’t a new fish. It was Doug, unable to contain his enthusiasm for the fish we’d already caught. We reached the end of the tuna grounds, and pulled in the lures. When we picked up speed, my stomach settled and I was human again for the ride home.

The fish is in the bag.

Jon, Susan, Doug, and Linda are part of an extended family that shares a summer compound. When we parked the boat in the driveway and started to unload, members of several generations came out to look at our tuna.

It was a beautiful tuna.

We took it out of its body bag and put it on the table Doug keeps there for the purpose, and he showed us how to filet the fish into quarters.

Jon and Doug gave us a whole half of that fish – some fifteen pounds of tuna – to take home. When I protested that they had many more mouths to feed than we did, Doug told us that his family wasn’t really crazy about tuna. Okay, twist my arm.

Doug and fish

Since Kevin and I moved to Cape Cod and began this enterprise, we’ve found generosity and goodwill everywhere we’ve gone. Linda taught me to clam and Dan helped us fix more machines than I like to think about. Christl and Al continue to help us with our garden. We have a viable hive of bees because of Claire and Paul, Andy and Brian. We’ve learned local waters for fish and lobster with Bob and Suzie.

When the only thing I knew about Jon was that he was willing to invite us tuna fishing, sight unseen, I assumed he was nice. You have to be nice to do that. But I had no way of knowing that he was introducing us to a family of people who are smart and funny and cheerful and interesting. Nice is just the tip of the iceberg.

Besides, you gotta love anyone who’ll pee in a bucket in front of a stranger, which Linda did without losing the thread of the conversation.

After the fish was processed and iced, Jon took us for a tour of the property, which includes thirty acres of overgrown cranberry bogs, separated by berms that Jon and Doug keep clear of brush. The berms make wide, open trails, and the family allows anyone who likes to come walk there.

Last stop was the vegetable garden, which had several vines loaded with a strange kind of yellow cucumber. Linda told me the family wouldn’t eat them because they were strange and yellow.

I offered to take them home, process them, and bring back pickles. Susan got a couple of compound buckets, and we picked them and put them in our truck.

I’m glad to have pickles. I am. But all I really wanted was a reason to go back.

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I use the term “caught” loosely. We reeled the fish in, but that never would have happened without the kindness — not to mention expertise and equipment – of strangers. There’s a story about catching that tuna, and it involves new friends, exciting adventure, and whales. I’m going to tell you all about it in the next day or two. Meantime, I’m going to throw chronology to the winds and tell you first about the tuna sushi we’ve been eating.

We caught the tuna yesterday. All the way home, we talked about what to do with such an embarrassment of fish riches. Yes, we’d need some seared steaks, but what else?

Toro sashimi

You can’t be driving home with some fifteen pounds of hours-old bluefin tuna on ice without thinking sushi. There would have to be sushi.

Anyone who knows the first thing about microbiology knows you’re not supposed to eat fish raw without first freezing it. All fish, even the ones fresh out of the ocean, carry parasites, and some of those parasites can make humans very sick. Most of those parasites don’t survive below 32 degrees, and so all the responsible authorities recommend, in the strongest terms, freezing all fish before you make it into sushi.

We don’t have a flash freezer, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to compromise the texture and flavor of this pristine fish. (Did I mention that we caught it ourselves?) So we said to hell with the responsible authorities. We’d risk it and sushify some of our tuna.

The elderly, along with infants and those with compromised immune systems, are most strongly advised to avoid risky food, but we knew my parents feel just about the same as we do when it comes to responsible authorities, so we invited them over. Besides, they’re not that elderly.

Neither Kevin nor I has ever made sushi before, and we didn’t expect to get complex techniques, techniques that sushi chefs make careers out of perfecting, right in a night. We were aiming for a reasonable approximation.

Sushi rice is easy enough, and I made a batch of it. Kevin sliced tuna from both the belly and the body of the tuna. We made sashimi, we made sushi, and I made a spicy tuna roll with the scraps. (I didn’t have one of those bamboo mats you roll sushi with, so I used a silicone baking liner instead.) Kevin broke out the blowtorch, and seared the top of some of the sushi.

Spicy tuna roll

Stylistically, it would undoubtedly have gotten us kicked out of sushi school. The slices were uneven, the rice was clumpy, the rolls were loose. But damned if it wasn’t the best sushi we’d ever had.

The thing about catching your own food is that you’re never sure just why it tastes better than other food. Was this meal better because we were eating tuna that was impeccably fresh, handled correctly, and never frozen, or was it simply because – did I mention this? – we caught it ourselves.

We had it again, tonight.

Kevin and I have eaten in some of the best restaurants in the world. We have friends who are wonderful cooks, and have invited us to share many extraordinary meals . We’re not so bad ourselves, and we eat well at home. But I can’t remember ever feeling so fortunate as I did, standing at my kitchen table crowded with dishes and condiments and rice and this beautiful fish, eating lopsided sushi we made from a tuna we caught ourselves.

Well, a tuna we reeled in ourselves. The actual catching is another story, and it is forthcoming.

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Yesterday we caught nothing, but it was a sunny day. The company – my husband – was certainly congenial. But not being home cleaning or raking was inadequate compensation for the particular way in which we caught nothing.

We started with high hopes, because two guys were catching bluefish right off the dock at Prince Cove, where we put the boat in. We thought about staying right there, but we decided to head out to Cotuit instead.

There were two reasons for this. First, we hoped to get bigger fish. Second, the kind of fishing going on in Prince Cove is not my favorite kind.

The bluefish were in the cove because they followed the schools of bunker. Bunker, which Cape Codders call pogies but are technically menhaden, are small, filter-feeding fish that move in massive schools up and down the Atlantic coast. They have the bad luck to be at the bottom of the food chain, and schools of bunker often have schools of predator fish underneath.

When the bunker come into Prince Cove, you can look into the water and see masses of them swim by. Periodically, they surface en masse, and it’s a good bet that a hungry bluefish pushed them up out of the water.

To catch a bluefish, you liveline a bunker. But first, you have to catch a bunker.

Bunker eat phytoplankton and zooplankton, neither of which can be put on a hook and dangled in the water. If you try and use a regular net, the fish just scatter. You can use a cast net, but if you don’t have one (we don’t), you catch them by using a treble hook with a weight and casting it over the school. Then you yank it, hard, through the fish. If you do it right, you snag a fish with the hook. It’s pretty barbaric.

The barbarism continues as you take the bunker off that hook, put it on another hook, and cast it out to lure a bluefish. I was happier thinking we could go out to Cotuit and use good old-fashioned metal lures.

Unfortunately, when we got out to Nantucket Sound, there were no fish in evidence. The water was quite choppy, and we trolled our favorite sandbank for a while, to no avail. It was windy enough that the idea of fishing inshore appealed, and we headed back into the bay.

We tried a couple of spots on the way in, but it wasn’t long before we were back where we started, in Prince Cove. We were encouraged when we got there because Bob was there.

Us, watching Bob

If you follow our fishing adventures, you know Bob. He’s been fishing these waters for decades, with a will, and has the expertise to show for it. Much of what we’ve learned about catching fish, we’ve learned from him.

Bob has a little Carolina Skiff, and he was tied up to one of the moorings in the Cove. As we watched, he reeled in a schoolie striper. We tied up a couple moorings away from him and rigged the snagging hooks.

We could see the bunker swimming around the boat, and we watched bunches of them surface all around the cove as the fish underneath snacked.

We each cast a weighted treble hook over the bunker and reeled in, giving hard yanks.

Nothing.

We tried again.

It was a physics-defying failure. The fish were so dense in the water, they seemed impossible to miss. Yet we missed them, over and over.

Meanwhile, Bob snagged a bunker on every cast.

We were twenty yards away. We were casting into the same school of fish. We were using the same equipment. Yet he was catching fish and we were catching none.

I watched how he was doing it, and tried to do it exactly the same way. Cast. Wait a beat for the hook to sink. Tighten the line. Yank. Tighten again. Yank again.

Result: Bob, fish. Tamar, no fish.

I was ready to ask him for a cigarette, because smoking seemed to be the only thing he was doing that I wasn’t.

Kevin, meanwhile, was doing a little better. He did snag a couple of bunker, and we did manage to do a little actual fishing. The result was that the bluefish, which were small, bit pieces off the back of the bunker. Each time we reeled them in, they were smaller.

We kept trying. Hell, just look, Bob’s catching fish with dead bunker!

We caught no fish.

I have caught no fish often enough that I can generally do it with good grace. This time, though, I’m sorry to have to report that I was graceless and surly.  &*#^$& FISH.  &*#^$& BOAT.  &*#^$& BOB.

There’s a special kind of frustration that comes from trying to do something physical, something that looks simple, and failing. It’s how golf clubs end up in trees. Luckily, it’s a fleeting frustration. As soon as you stop trying, it goes away.

So, today, I’m ready to try again. I have this idea that snappers, the little bluefish terrorizing the bunker in Prince Cove, could be pickled like herring, and I want to try it. Instead of snagging bunker, I’m going to try a Sabiki rig, the multi-hooked contraption we use to catch mackerel.

Bob said it worked for him every time.

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While going through life behaving well isn’t so hard – most moral choices are straightforward – it’s very difficult to reduce “behaving well” to first principles. In general, I’d say I’m a greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number kind of girl, but I fully acknowledge the difficulty of such a far-reaching and enigmatic calculation.

Immanuel Kant, borrowed from britannica.com

Immanuel Kant thought he had the first principle nailed. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” was so compelling to him that he called it the Categorical Imperative. (Not just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill imperative, mind you.) While it’s hard to find fault with something that boils down, essentially, to “do unto others … ,” I’m not sure it helps with the really tricky moral dilemmas. Those usually involve overcrowded lifeboats, tragic accidents, or concentration camps. Thinking of your actions as a universal law doesn’t help you decide whether you should have drowned the child Adolph Hitler, if you’d had the chance.

I have gone through nearly fifty years of life on this planet without ever having encountered what I’d consider a tricky moral dilemma, so the lack of a compelling philosophy has had very little practical significance. Most of what we all consider moral behavior is uncomplicated. You don’t need a coherent first principle to figure out that, when the cashier gives you too much change, you give it back.

Life is governed, instead, by a series of smaller, less important rules. One of my favorites, borrowed from my friend Rafe, is “Never refuse a mint.” Miss Piggy contributes “Never eat anything you can’t lift.” The only billionaire of my acquaintance adds “Always do a billionaire a favor.”

Here’s my contribution to the pantheon: “Always make friends with the local brewer.”

Bluefish, drying

I will confess that I did not think of this rule in a flash of foresight. It was only after Kevin and I had met our local brewer, Todd Marcus, and decided he and his wife Beth were interesting, funny, and smart that we began to see the real advantages of that friendship. Like, when we invited them over for pizza and they brought a cooler full of their products. Or when our out-of-town friends come to visit and we get to take them backstage at the Cape Cod Beer brewery.

Being friends with a brewer is particularly important during bluefish season which, for us, began this past Saturday.

The weather was good, and it was my stepson Eamon’s last weekend with us. We rigged the rods with wire leaders and metal lures, filled the boat with gas and the cooler with ice, and headed out to Horseshoe Shoal, about six miles due south of Osterville.

There was some chop in Nantucket Sound, and it took us a while to get out. Once we got there, it was better. The Shoal is a big shallow area in the middle of the Sound and, when the wind is from the south, the north end stays relatively calm. We went to our favorite spot, dropped the lines in, and I had the first fish in the boat inside ten minutes.

Bluefish, smoking

We spent the whole morning, and came home with thirteen fish. I fileted them all and we grilled three that night, Nantucket-style. The rest went into a brine, overnight.

On Sunday, Kevin fired up the brand-new smokehouse for his first attempt at fish smoking. Last year, he perfected a kettle-grill method, but the smokehouse lets him do a much bigger batch. There are still a few kinks to be worked out (at which point I’ll tell you in more detail about the smokehouse), but we ended up with twenty filets of smoked bluefish. A little softer and moister than is ideal, but with a balanced, smoky flavor.

When I posted our haul on Facebook, Beth posted back: “You wanna trade for beer?”

Always make friends with the local brewer.

Kevin, checking

Oh, and the local gardeners. Bluefish season corresponds, coincidentally, with garden bounty season, and Dianne and Doug gave me a very nice bunch of raspberries and blackberries. Past bluefish hauls have earned us produce of all stripes, from Doug and Dianne, from Al and Christl, from Amanda. From our friends who don’t garden or brew, there is goodwill and gratitude.

We value goodwill and gratitude a lot, if not quite as much as beer.

The problem with my rule is that it does not pass the Categorical Imperative test. If “make friends with the brewer” were a universal law, and everyone did it, there would be no beer left for us.

Such are the limits of moral philosophy.

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We had friends over, and we decided to go to the Four Seas for ice cream after dinner. The Rover, a 1970 model, is our usual ice-cream vehicle, both because we can fit six people in it and because it just seems right to go for ice cream in a decrepit old rattletrap.

The ice cream mobile

We hadn’t even gotten all the way up the driveway before ominous creaking noises started coming from the rear end. We turned around, got out, and looked underneath. There was a huge crack in the frame, just where the leaf springs attach.

That was the beginning of Spring Break.

The next to go was the Eastern, our big boat. Kevin was out with his brother Marty pulling lobster pots, and the motor made a terrible noise when he tried to put it in reverse. It still ran, but it shook and rattled and shimmied. He limped in to the dock, and when he put it in reverse again the propeller shaft snapped clean off.

Then there was the door to the truck, which got banged into the dock as Kevin was backing a boat down a ramp. Yes, we brought that one on ourselves, but still.

How a frame shoudln't look

Then came the woodsplitter. Our friend Ed had several cords of wood that needed splitting, and he made a deal with us: we loan him the woodsplitter and help with the job, and get half the wood in return. That was a great deal for us, and we brought the splitter over to his place and got started. After several afternoons of non-stop splitting, it started to struggle. Then the hydraulic pump just gave up.

After the woodsplitter was the freezer. The freezer filled with thirty pounds of striped bass, six ducks, two turkeys, other miscellaneous meat, and various vegetables and stocks. Its defroster failed and, in a bit of appliance irony, the resulting ice build-up prevented it from freezing.

I caught it before everything defrosted, and although we lost about ten pounds of fish, the rest of it was salvaged. When the repair guy came, he told me that I could keep the freezer running in the week it would take to get the required part by plugging it in during the day and unplugging it at night to defrost.

I switched the food to the bait freezer, put the bait (fish frames, primarily) in the broken freezer, and tried his method. The first hint that it didn’t work was when we started to notice the smell of rotten fish suffusing the house. Taking that load to the dump and cleaning up the mess was about as disgusting a job as I’ve done since we moved here.

Last to go, the final insult, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was the coffeemaker. It was less than a year old, and it broke only because it felt it had to show solidarity with its electrical and mechanical brethren.

Now, two months from the beginning of Spring Break, we’ve gotten everything but the woodsplitter repaired, replaced, or resuscitated. The Rover frame is patched and the lower unit on the Eastern’s motor is replaced. The door of the truck is pounded roughly back to its original shape, and freezer is freezing once more. We have a new coffeemaker, which makes lousy, insipid coffee, and which I hate with a passion reserved for single-function appliances that perform their single goddamn function badly. I’m hoping this one breaks as quickly as the last one.

The woodsplitter, we put on hold, since it’s a little hot to be splitting wood anyway.

As we were dealing with everything broken – calling repair people, locating parts, writing uncomfortably large checks – my inner Eva Gabor was getting louder and more insistent. “Times Skvare,” she said, with her charming Hungarian lilt, and I thought longingly of the times when we owned no truck, no boat, no woodsplitter, and no freezer. Yeah, we had a coffeemaker, but it worked with us, not against us, and made decent coffee to boot.

It’s when the going gets tough that I’m tempted to hightail it back to New York, and trade my boats and trucks, freezers and woodsplitters, for a 250-square-foot apartment and a Metrocard. Kevin, though, is made of sterner stuff and, since I’m not going anywhere without him, I stayed and helped get everything fixed.

We got the boat back from our mechanic, Billy at Anchor Outboard, just this week, and Kevin took his son Eamon and Eamon’s friend Emanuel out to check our lobster pots. With the boat out of commission, we hadn’t been able to get out there for a good six weeks.

Why we lobster

Kevin called me after they’d pulled the first four, to report that there were already four keeper lobsters in the livewell, and the chicken I was planning for dinner would have to wait for another day.

A couple hours later, they rolled in with our all-time record lobster haul. Ten lobsters, one of them three and a half pounds. Sixteen pounds total.

We called friends. Doug and Dianne came. Les and Val came. I picked up some local corn, made a cole slaw, and melted some butter. Kevin boiled the lobsters in a giant pot on the burner outside. Les brought some littlenecks. We opened the wine, and sat down to one of the best dinners we’ve had in our three years here.

The truck, the boat, the freezer, that’s what it’s all in service to. We’re bumbling our way through all this for the days when we can put an abundance of lobster on the table and watch as our family and friends drip butter on the tablecloth in their enthusiasm. I don’t expect to stop missing New York, but there are things you just can’t do with a Metrocard.

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