Dancing With a Flattie

Twenty thousand dollars in prize money was being offered up at the 7th Annual Port Angeles Halibut Derby and the two fishermen figured a large portion of that was as good as theirs as they raced their boat back to the marina. Hosted by a radio station, the derby awarded five thousand bucks for first prize and slightly declining amounts for smaller finishers. The fishermen were excited because lying quietly in the bottom of their runabout was a beauty of a “flattie”.

It had taken the boat owner half an hour of careful reeling to work the big halibut up to the surface where his crewman had gaffed the fish and managed to pull sixty pounds of flat, white-bellied prize money over the railing and into the boat. Both men had jumped to stay clear of the fish’s tail as it pounded furiously against the fiberglass floor and hull, smashing anything within reach – tackle boxes, beer cans, and the skipper’s lunch. They waited until the fish weakened and then managed to stab the big, flat fish repeatedly in the head until it lay still. The fishermen congratulated each other for their success and already were making plans for the money, for, according to the radio, only one fish had been landed that was larger. Second place was almost certainly theirs—and with it came a four thousand dollar payout!.

After tying up their boat at the Port Angeles marina, the boat owner stepped over his craft’s gunwale and stood on the finger pier, hands held out to receive the money fish. His crewman hoisted the halibut over the rail and started the pass off the fish when all of that slippery blood on the fish caused the crewman to lose his grip. The flattie dropped straight down into the water. Just like that, four thousand dollars—slid gracefully back into the Puget Sound.

The skipper stood frozen for a long time, with his hands still outstretched. Unbelieving. And then, as quoted by a nearby onlooker “The air turned blue with a torrent of descriptive words that would have made a longshoreman proud.”

When the nearby radio hosts heard about the botched handoff, they called the local dive shop in hopes that a diver could be found to retrieve the fish.

Mike Kesl, the owner of Scuba Supplies was just in the process of locking up his store and catching some time off when the phone rang. The radio people explained the situation, adding that the skipper was offering a fifty dollar retrieval fee.

For over forty years Mike had earned his living doing commercial work on dams, big freighters, fish pens, etc. and getting into the water for a paltry fifty dollars didn’t even begin to be worth it. Besides, his drysuit was not at the shop and he wouldn’t have time to go home and retrieve it. He really didn’t want to dive in one of the shop’s rental wetsuits, so Mike called several of his instructors and divemasters, hoping they could do the job, but no one answered their phones. When the radio station called back again and pleaded once more for a diver, Mike reluctantly loaded his own gear plus a wetsuit and drove down to the marina.

“Are you sure the fish went down right here?” asked Mike, as he stood suited up on the finger dock.

“Oh yes, it slipped right down here, between our boat and the dock.” answered the two fishermen helpfully. “Bring it up and we’ll pay you fifty dollars.”

“Are you sure it was dead? Halibut are hard to kill. It might have swam off.” queried Mike.

“Oh yea, absolutely dead,” said the skipper. “We stabbed the hell out of it.”

Mike looked over the dock and down into the water. He wasn’t too thrilled about diving inside the marina. He’d done it plenty of times over the decades and knew that visibility was seldom over two feet and the bottom was covered with sea lettuce and loose leaves of kelp during the summer. He really just wanted to be at home, but he felt kind of sorry for the two fishermen, so into the cold water he went.

The bottom was only about fifteen feet down and, as Mike had predicted, was covered with seaweed and soft muck. He could see about eighteen inches, just enough to make out the white, decomposing carcasses of cleaned fish drifting like ghosts that had been thrown off the dock by fishermen during the past weeks of fishing activities. Mike really was not too happy to crawl across the oozy bottom and feel around for the big halibut under these conditions.

He swam slowly a few feet in a tight circle beneath the fishing boat and found nothing but the remains of filleted fish. So he surfaced.

“Couldn’t find it. Are you sure it was dead?” asked Mike.

“Positively” said the skipper. “I stabbed the hell out of it.”

“Well, I’ll try a sweep for it.” stated Mike gamely, as he replaced his mouthpiece and descended again.

Mike finned back and forth in a lawn mower sweep pattern, finding nothing but seaweed, scavenging crabs and more white fish bodies. He did a dozen sweeps and was just about to give up when out of the gloom, face to face, appeared the mouth and two raised eyeballs of a halibut with a thin trail of blood rising from the gaff wound in its lip, like smoke from a fire.

“Well, I’ll be damned” thought Mike, “There it is.”

And it only looked slightly less dead than the others.

A big, slippery halibut is a hard thing to lift, even if it was dead, so Mike had brought with him the tail end of a nylon rope running to the surface. His plan had been to run the end of the line through the halibut’s gill and out the fish’s mouth, then tie it off in a bowline knot so the fishermen could pull their prize to the surface.

Kesl started threading the line into the halibut’s gill. After a foot or so disappeared, Mike reached into the fish’s mouth with his left hand to grab the end of the line and pull it out to complete the loop.

Thus far the flattie had appeared perfectly dead. Even a rope being threaded through its gill produced no response. Mike had just reached into the fish’s mouth to grab the line when the halibut suddenly lunged forward like a racehorse leaving the gate at the Kentucky Derby.

For one confused instant Mike thought he had somehow snagged the bottom.

Then the bottom began swimming.

The sudden thrust forward buried Mike’s arm down the throat of the halibut. The power of the thick fish pushed Mike backwards and rotated him sideways into the ick on the bottom at the same time. The halibut wanted to swim straight ahead for an escape, but the human arm caught in its throat served as a lever which veered the flattie hard left causing Mike to follow.

Mike, for his part, was so startled that for a split second he wanted to jump out of his wetsuit. In the same split second Mike realized that the fish was not only alive, but it was practically yanking his left arm out of its socket. The pain brought him to action and he started wrestling the flatfish as its powerful tail pushed the halibut ahead, driving Mike across the bottom, spinning him around and around in the murky goo. Sea lettuce, bony white fish heads, and bottom muck whirled past Mike’s mask like scenery in a washing machine.

Heart pounding, breaths coming in quick gasps, Kesl tried to dig his fins into the muddy bottom. If he could just get a purchase on something solid he’d be able to stop the whirling, then he could lash a quick knot and he’d have that fish tied to the surface world. The respite did not come. Mike continued to be corkscrewed for more revolutions.

Suddenly Mike felt his flipper stop against a half buried rock. This was it, the break he needed. He pushed off the rock, at the same time flexing his back and arms to stop the spinning. Grasping the fish’s body with his right arm, he withdrew his left hand from the halibut’s throat and was about to grasp the end of the rope when the halibut gave a hard jerk to the right and pulled out of Mike’s grasp. With a flip of its tail the flattie gave Mike a solid thump in his chest and departed.

Mike surfaced a moment later, empty line in hand, rubbing his ribcage. His suit was coated outside with slime and inside with fine bottom yuck. He smelled rank, like the fish carcasses with which he’d been rolling.

“When you catch a halibut, you’ve got to stab the poop out of them!” he yelled in vexation at the two fishermen.

Mike went home for a hot shower. The fishermen went home empty-handed. They never paid Kesl a dime.

Even now, on overnight dive trips, the other divers sometimes hear Mike talking in his sleep.

It’s always the same thing.

“Halibut… got to stab the poop out of them.”