Free Man With a Pan by John Donahue Page B

the engines slowed and the plumber sprang up, leaving my head to slam onto the bench. Zombielike, I put on my rubber coveralls and Glacier Gloves and stumbled out to the rail in the predawn gloaming.
    There, ten miles from Block Island, wedged into a stretch of water that was maybe a single square mile, was the entirety of the Montauk fishing fleet. I knew all the boats from my childhood fishing days: the small black Vivienne, the trim white Montauk, and the massive Viking Starship . It was like a return of old friends. And yet enemies, too. Because when there are this many boats crammed into such a small space of water, one or two boats will often get lucky while the rest will go home fishless.
    But as we got closer to the Viking Starship, I came to see one, two, four, ten rods bent under the weight of serious fish. When I finally got my gob of clams to the bottom, within seconds my rod was bent double. I reeled three cranks, and snap, my line broke when the big cod below made a lunge bottomward. I quickly retied and sent my hook down again. Wham! Another big cod on. This one made it to the surface and into my milk crate. Meanwhile the Lindenhurst plumber to my left already had four codfish. He seemed to have some kind of special method. He would flip out his line at a forty-five-degree angle from the stern of the boat, let it drift around, and then, watching the tip of his pole twitch with the first tastings of a codfish, mutter to himself, “C’mon, you motherfucker. C’mon, you son of a bitch. Take it, you fucker.” And then, rearing back on his heels and setting the hook, his pole bending deeply, he’d exclaim with the full capacity of his lungs, “HAVE A NICE DAY!”
    The “bite” continued all morning, although, thanks to bad technique and faulty equipment, I dropped 75 percent of the fish I hooked. The Lindenhurst plumber meanwhile accrued codfish after codfish. “HAVE A NICE FUCKING DAY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” he screamed again and again, setting the hook on more and more cod—savagely, terribly, with a rising chaos of blood thirst in his voice. I was using a medium-size plastic milk crate to keep my fish, but the plumber had brought along a garbage can four times its size, and it was brimming with the tails of dying fish. “HAVE A NICE DAY, YOU STUPID COCK-SUCKER!” Fish after fish. A second garbage can. The beginning of a third.
    In the course of my twelve hours at sea I caught about a dozen five-to-seven-pound cod, giving me a total take-home “round weight” of about seventy pounds. I paid $140 for the fishing trip, which meant that all of my delicious fresh cod cost only two dollars per pound. A tremendous savings! The only problem is that cod have a low “fillet yield,” meaning that a lot of their body is devoted to their huge heads and not to the pearly white boneless fillets that extends from pectoral to the caudal fin. So I really only had thirty-five pounds of fillets. That meant something like a four-dollar-per-pound cost. In order to bring the price back down again, I would have to resort to more drastic cost-saving measures …
    First, though, I dealt with the fillets. Thirty-five pounds of cod meat will last my family about ten weeks, which means almost all the meat had to be packed for the freezer. If I hadn’t blown my book advance, I might have had the $85.00 to buy a professional vacuum packer. But since I had blown my advance, I did some research and discovered on a fishing Web site a way to vacuum-pack that involved a pot of water ($0) and a box of Ziploc bags ($2.99). Here’s how it’s done: Fill the biggest pot you have with cold water. Put your codfish fillet in a Ziploc bag. Close the bag, leaving just one little dime-width gap open at the corner. Submerse almost the entire bag in the pot, with just the open corner of the Ziploc seal protruding above the surface. The water pressure will force all the air out of the bag, and this is good, since the less air you have touching