The monk vs. the knife

It’s pitch black, I can’t discern if it is the salt water, pouring rain, or the fish guts that has left me more cold and soaking wet than I had ever been before.
I am out in the middle of the ocean…and it’s a storming, shitty night…
I am ripping through as many monk fish as I possibly can, quicker than I am capable, fighting more than I probably should, to do so.
That is the thing…with fishing…you can’t bound through it with brute force, you have to be fluid…and save your energy.
Because here I am,
19 hours deep in that day…and my fingers are bleeding…I don’t even feel like my arms are attached to my actual body any more....only connected by my brains will to keep fucking going…everything hurts….
I am trying to cut my way through the thousand pounds of fish before me, at such a pace that I am not paying attention to everything I am supposed to be paying attention to.

Thus the infinite danger of having any business being out on a boat, if past being crazy you are in any way an idiot….

And so, the pools of guts that are spilling out on to the deck area from where I stand, have not been cleared properly to keep stable ground…I lean off to the right to get a hold of yet another thorny monstrous looking creature that has it’s mouth open completely pissed off and ready to bite with sharp teeth intention…
Let me tell you...Monk fish are ugly and slippery bastards…
You have to handle them, by digging your fingers in to their eye sockets. If you handle them any other way… the thorns will tear you open…or even worse- The Mouth.

The Mouth will lock it’s pitbul jaw down on your hand…where you then are faced with having to
not panic,
but ever so calmly
take a knife, to forcefully stab through their head so that their neurological function collapses…thus releasing their clamp on your hand.
I know this because it happened to me…
but that is not the point in this story…


I had successfully turned the fish over to have at it with my knife, when I slipped on the guts that I had not cleared out of the way. I fell back, my hands flew up…
The thing that caught me from falling off the boat in the middle of the sea, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a miserable fucking storm, was my knife…
As it had launched itself in to the underside of my fathers arm while he was working next to me to cover the weight I wasn’t pulling on my own.

I was relieved, then panicked, to pull the knife out…and so I did...
which is the point that mortified me…because my father just looks at me with a slightly begrudging, but mostly stoic smile….completely un phased, as far as I was concerned and says
“ Thanks Des, I didn’t really need that muscle”…
And then he turns to continue doing what he had been doing for the past thirty years of his life.
Fishing.