Thursday, December 9, 1999
Fish story just might top Hemingway’s
famous tale
By Bill Whitaker
Mac Hearn’s friends back in parched Jones County are used
to his telling some pretty big whoppers about life at sea, but
his latest tale has them reeling in disbelief.
After all, catching a huge blue marlin is seen by many hardy
anglers as the ultimate test between man and nature, something
supremely glorified by Ernest Hemingway in his famous tale The
Old Man and the Sea. Of course, when you hear about Mac’s
own considerable ease in catching a blue marlin — well, it
kind of trivializes all that Papa Hemingway championed.
Still, it’s a tale that has them talking and speculating
and wondering up around Stamford.
“Well, in all my experience, it’s never happened
before and it’ll never happen again,” Mac assured me.
And he’s probably right.
Although Mac, 44, is an old Rochester farm boy whose family
now lives in Stamford, he and a dozen or so other men from Jones
County regularly leave dusty West Texas behind for several weeks
at a time. He works for an outfit called Veritas DGC in Houston,
toiling all around the world in the seismic industry, mainly in
directions that involve the seeking of untapped oil.
Often the men’s work takes them a couple hundred miles
out into the Gulf of Mexico where they acquire data through 3-D
seismic research, scoping out the ocean bottom and what may lie
beneath it. Then oil companies buy their data.
But occasionally their work involves more idle pursuits, including
fishing.
A great life
“We’ve fished a little of everything, including snapper,”
Mac said, “but mainly it’s dolphin fish. Now, by that
I don’t mean dolphins like porpoises, I’m talking about
the fish. But every once in a while we’ll catch something
like a swordfish. It’s really a great life. The only hard
part is being away from home so long.
“But then, on the other hand, farming back in West Texas
is also pretty rough!”
All of which means wife Cyndi and friends back home are accustomed
to hearing some tallish tales about fish, especially along the
gulf coast.
“On my last trip to the Gulf of Mexico, our crew had an
unusual experience on the M.V. Polar Princess, which is a research
vessel for recording seismic data to find oil in the gulf,”
said Mac, who serves as the crew’s chief observer. “This
time we caught a blue marlin. It weighed around 300 to 400 pounds
and was 10 feet in length.”
Admittedly, Mac is being liberal when he refers to the marlin
— perhaps the most prized of all catches along the Texas
coast — as being “caught.”
Seems this particular marlin stuck his bill in the wrong place
— specifically, into the cable the men use to collect seismic
data.
“Basically, he attacked it,” Mac explained. “I
mean, he drove his nose all the way through that cable. Now, normally
he’d tear a cable to shreds, a fish that size, but he got
his nose stuck in cable about 2 inches in diameter and, well,
it kind of clamped down tight on his bill so that he couldn’t
get away.
“It was something. I’ve never seen anything like
it.”
It took all five men aboard the vessel to haul the blue marlin
in — and that was only after they realized they could only
free the fish by sawing his bill off. The men finally realized
that, pretty much without trying, they’d “hooked”
a whopper of a fish.
The Old Man
“We were just awestruck,” Mac said. “To stick
his nose into a two-inch cable in all that big of an ocean was
incredible. And, considering the toughness of that cable —
well, he had to be swimming pretty fast to drive it into it. So,
yes, there were a lot of jokes, mainly directed at me, about The
Old Man and the Sea.
“You see, I’ve been fishing out there for two years
and it seems like I never really catch anything. In fact, I guess
I haven’t caught anything of significance till now.”
The end of this fishy tale?
“Well, we cut about 100 pounds of meat off him, but it
wasn’t any good. It was kind of a gray meat. But, you know,
he was just beautiful in the water — ocean blue with speckles
all over him — but they turn gray after they’re out
of the water for long. For a while, though, our eyes were just
fastened on him.
“Of course, our company got mad at us about it,”
Mac said, referring to the final fate of the unusually enormous
Makaira nigricans. “They said they wanted to mount it. They
wanted to freeze it and then get somebody to stick the nose back
on. In fact, they said they wanted to mount it on the wall at
the office with the nose still sticking into the cable.”
At last report, company officials were still contemplating
mounting the blue marlin’s bill — sans marlin. Now that’s
company pride.
Bill Whitaker, who hates to think what Mac and his crew
might find if they were doing seismic research in Loch Ness, can
be reached at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.
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Copyright ©1999, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews
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