West Coast salmon fishing is a religion practiced in fog. Somewhere off the Washington coast that August, visibility was measured in boat lengths and faith, and our neighbor Gary, slip 14, immaculate Grady, opinions about everything, had lent us his spare downrigger with the solemnity of a man handing over a family heirloom.
"Set it at forty-two feet," Gary said. "Not forty. Not forty-five. Forty-two." We nodded the way you nod at advice you intend to ignore.
We set it at forty. For two hours the Pacific gave us nothing but kelp and humility. Then, purely to prove a point to nobody, we dropped it to forty-two, and the rod snapped out of the clip like it had been ejected. What came up after twenty minutes of drum-tight line was a king salmon with shoulders, the chrome-bright kind that makes a whole marina put down its coffee.
The fish went in the box. The downrigger went back to Gary polished like a trophy. And the number forty-two went into family law: we don’t troll any other depth, we don’t discuss it, and Gary has never once let us forget it. Some men are owed royalties in perpetuity. He collects his in smoked salmon.
True depth of the strike is disputed by exactly no one, because Gary was watching from his boat the whole time. He says the fish was bigger than we remember. For once, the witness is inflating our story for us.