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We moved Villainy over to Big Majors and ended up meeting Franco and Loretta from Otremare, another Beneteau 46.  Franco was into spear fishing with a Hawaiian sling, a type of sling shot that propels a long aluminum rod with a point.  This is the only legal way to spear fish in the Bahamas – no spearguns, no dive tanks allowed.  It sounded exciting and I wanted to try it.  I may be the only vegetarian (yes, I don’t even eat fish) that hunts, but I’m complicated.  Besides the excitement and irony, I was further motivated by a primal instinct to hunt so I could feed my woman.  Franco and I headed out with spears cocked and eyes squinted.  Here’s how it goes.  You swim around at the surface around coral and grassy areas where fish like to live until you see an ugly fish.  Yes, an ugly fish.  The beautiful fish, tropicals, are apparently not tasty.  However, they are friendly and swim right up to your pointed spear.  Franco seeing me eye one that was to my eye not beholden beautiful admonished me with his waving finger that he was not to kill.  The problem is the ugly fish, grey and plain, with maybe only a bit of color, must know they taste good because they do not like you to get close to them.  They swim much faster than you can so you have to employ a strategy.  Although veteran spear fisherman surely know better than I, one thing to do is watch them hide under a rock or little cliff where they may feel safe from your large lumbering body surely unable to fit into where they are.  Then you go down slowly pull back like you are drawing on a bow and you release the spear from about 6’ away hoping to pull their body out on the end of your spear.  The second strategy is to watch where they are swimming or where the current is taking them and try to anticipate their approach.  Then you swim to the bottom at an intercept point and get very still and wait for them.  Any movement will cause them to swim far far away from you.  Both of these worked for us that day.  I struck first spearing a yellowtail snapper that hid underneath a ledge from me.  I went down upside down peering my head below the ledge and saw him cowering in the back.  My heart was racing.  I heard Galit tell Franco and Loretta the night before over wine that he doesn’t even kill flies; he shoes them out the windows.  But I must feed my woman!  I slowly drew the spear in the sling and fired a wicked fast bullet.  I couldn’t see anything as a cloud sediment formed under the ledge, but I knew I had hit it as the spear was twitching violently from the cloud.  Although almost out of breath, I lunged deeper to retrieve the shaking spear.  Wide-eyed I withdrew the jerking fishkabob and surfaced.  Now what?  I looked around for Franco and saw his snorkel several dozen yards away unaware of my kill.  I looked left and right and behind me wildly as a large barracuda had been following me earlier and sharks might smell the blood.  Panicked, I swam Phelpsian toward Franco putting up a wake still holding the twitching fishkabob at arms length refusing to look at it as it felt horrible enough through my hand’s extension.  Finally, when I reached Franco and I allowed myself to look at the fish, I pleaded to him it looked much smaller out of the water.  He said it always does and something about the mask as a lens.  As Galit and I had discussed several times now, the “humane” thing to do is to kill it quickly and the chosen method of humane fishermen is to put a knife blade into its brain.  She asked me before I left on my crusade if I thought I could do it.  I honestly said that I was not sure.  For the test I brought a knife with me, a dull ended sail rigging knife that was not at all appropriate but all I had.  I was not even sure it would penetrate the fish’s skull and the thought of having to use the serrades to saw into him is ghastly.  I asked Franco if I should try to put a knife into his brain.  He said, no, with a furrowed brow and shook his head slowly.  It is not necessary.  I don’t know if it was the look of horror that was surely on my face or that the fish was too small or what?  But I was relieved and swam to the rocky coral bluff to lay the fish until we were done.  Franco yelled to make sure he was dead and would not get away.  I was in such a state.  I swam clumsily over the coral that I am so used to respectfully giving wide berth.  Breathing hard and swallowing water.  I sat there and looked at the fish on the spear.  It was not moving much anymore except from his trying to breathe.  I pulled him off my spear and gently laid him on his side.  For the first time I saw blood gushing from his side where the spear had gone straight through him.  He flapped a few more times requiring that I hold him in my gloved hands until the intimacy of the moment and his life were gone.  I am sure his eye was fixed upon me as I imagined what he saw in his last moments: my mask pinched face and bulging eyes, surely more noble than the jaws of a barracuda.  He looked larger now as I could feel his meaty body and even see into him through the spear’s hole.  I got back in the water and swam over to Franco much much to my surprise ready for more.  I had a blood thirst now following my first kill.  I could feel it pulsing through my body.  My eyes were keen.  My breathe could be held for long periods of time deep under the water as I waited still with spear cocked full spread.  I saw Franco take a long shot at a fish swimming beneath him that sent his spear through the fish.  A brilliant shot!  As he went to collect the fishkabob, it got off the spear somehow and swam away and under a coral head.  Franco, not giving up, went down again after him.  I watched from the surface, listening to my snorkel breathing, as Franco lay still right outside the ledge the fish had escaped under.  Then, I saw the fish back out a hole in the large boulder of a coral head opposite of where Franco was steadily readied to pounce.  I swam down sneaking up from behind and sent my spear through the fish’s body as he was busy attending to Franco.  The fishkabob shook tremendously stirring up a cloud of sand.  I swam down to get him and as I was bringing him to the surface, he shimmied off the end of the spear and swam away.  With two visible holes in his side streaming two misty lines of blood, he escaped.  Franco and I looked at each other astonished and just shook our heads.  Nuff respect.  That fish won.  Although my blood thirst remained, we had scared all the fish away and we called it a day. 

Galit, having worked on a fishing boat before, emotionlessly gutted and cleaned the fish.  She covered it with butter and lemon and lime juices, wrapped it in foil, head and all, and baked it for a short time.  As I watched my woman eat my kill, I felt like a man.  But still a bit squeamish and not enough of a man to eat it with her.