(Originally published Sep/Oct 2017)
When The World Stands Still . . . Just for A Second
By Capt. Tred Barta
I am sitting at water’s edge in Islamorada, Florida. I am 65 years old, will never walk again and am known worldwide as a guy who never gave up and never said never. My 26-foot Andros was built around my wheelchair, and I still hunt and I still fish and I will until the day I die. There is not one year since the tender age of 14 that I have not traveled around the world and fished or spent the entire spring and summer in the Northeast canyons.
I am not at the beginning of my career, I am at the end of it. The shadows grow longer every day. I have earned the privilege to write anything I wish, unedited. So if you are reading this, take a deep breath and listen to the old man and the sea.
What is it that draws us to the North Atlantic shelf of the Northeast canyons? What is in our soul that lies so deep that makes us spend endless hours watching our lures and rigged baits off the gun site on the moon at the Virgin Islands. As blue-water fishermen, it feels like we spend most of our life while at the helm looking back at the spread, then forward. What is it that drives us in almost a drunken passion to buy boats, tackle and technology that so many cannot afford to allow us that one second when the world ceases to rotate? How can I explain it?
My life is all about the one second. The very moment while trolling eight lures that an unnatural little ripple in the wake pulls me to my feet and then at the top of my lungs yell “HOOKED UP!” as a 350-pound bigeye rockets out of the water and inhales the right short, throwing whitewater into the cockpit on the west wall of Atlantis. What if I were to tell you that moment in time is who I am, that moment of the strike, where a large dark blue shape transitions from right to left underneath the entire spread and then inhales a left short dink ballyhoo on a 20-pound outfit. Out of the water he comes, all 600 pounds of blue marlin on the wrong rod. Why did he not eat the Black Bart 1656 on the long rigger, why? I cannot tell you why.
When you are a blue-water fisherman, and especially a blue-water captain or mate, it appears that everything you do, every day, every minute, is all invested for that one second. Sometimes the second is prolonged as the image of a black marlin inhaling a trolled skipped bonito seems to frame himself in your mind, almost like a painting. The smell of the jungle, great white waves crashing on a vertical landscape at Tropics Star Lodge, Panama. You are in the moment, in the second. Everything you have worked for, everything you are, everything you wish to be is confirmed in one second. It is the bite, it is the anticipation, it is the hookup, and it is pure electric. It is not only the sight or the excitement, it is who you are. At that very moment of the strike you are witnessing God’s creation. You are privileged to see something that almost all of humanity does not have the privilege to see. The strike does not come easily. It takes so much time, money, effort and coordination. In my case, it blew up two marriages, but that single second when the world stands still flows in my veins.
I personally believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. I believe that Jesus Christ is our Savior. I believe that those who walk with Him do not walk alone. And by the way, they do not go to sea alone either. So to those detractors of Tred Barta, let me give you some real ammunition. For those who believe and for those who are blue-water fishermen, I believe that this special second that we enjoy, that we spend hours looking back for, is God given and for me, a captain or mate who has lived his life well and followed the word of Christ as your moral compass, a man who has been fair to his crew, who is honest, who shares and who is kind. This man that I describe, when this man experiences the right rigger going down and sees the entire strike, may be closer to God then one ever knew.
Everyone can make fun of me, they can crack jokes. But the great people of Big Game Fishing Journal are not laughing. Because they know exactly what I am talking about. It is such a privilege as I sit in my wheelchair, paralyzed from my chest down to share with you an entire lifetime condensed, even today in this very moment, for all energy pointed in one direction, that moment of the strike. The moment of the bite, the moment when it all comes together. A moment that is so pure, so rare and so wonderful that my words still cannot describe.
I leave you my friends with one wish: Let go of the entire world and everything in it, discussions of politics and war and work and relationships. I hope the world stops for just a second, for all of you.
Til next tide,
Tred’n Water
Capt. Tred Barta
