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FISH TERRORS

“BITE MY FLY!” I woke up screaming. My girlfriend, MC, tried to calm me as I hyperventilated and shook an imaginary rod. Perhaps I inherited fish terrors from my good friend and commercial fishing captain, Joe Craig—while we were at anchor, he’d often wake me screaming about fishing in his sleep—or maybe my subconscious was trying to work through the emotional aftermath of all the fish that had ignored my lures or gotten away.

“Stop!” MC yelled as I nearly hit her. I was mimicking throwing my rod down in disgust. “Calm down. You had a bad dream. Was it the Arctic grayling this time?”

“No, it was that pike again. He just swam there, smiling with his big eyes and teeth, laughing at me as I tried everything I could to catch him.”

“You need to get help. You have a problem.”

“What’s my problem?”

“Something bad. It’s more than just being a lousy fisherman,” she said. She was still proud of the seventy-pound halibut she’d caught with my dad a few weeks prior. Though she’d once been a vegetarian, her Facebook profile picture for the next seven months would be of her and a dead halibut. She even started giving experienced longliners advice on how to catch the big ones. She got even cockier when Troy Leatherman, the editor of Fish Alaska Magazine, asked to use the picture for a cover shot.