Fishing in shorts and no shirts – the standard summer uniform – we would occasionally catch a bream that was bigger than our hand could hold. So with one hand on the hook we pressed the big bream against our bare chest and pinned him there. While we held the fish against our chest with one hand we removed the hook with the other. Big bream became known to me back then – and they still are today - as “tittie” bream. If you told someone you caught a tittie bream they knew you had a big one.
Jim took that big snapper out of the net to remove the hook. The wind was blowing harder now and raindrops were getting bigger and closer together. Jim was wearing a pair of white coveralls, some he brought from his job as mechanical engineer, and he stood to grab the fish
Old habits die hard, the saying goes. Jim couldn't get his hand all the way around that snapper, so he did what he knew to do. He pressed the fish against his chest with one hand – just like we did back in Tennessee. Only I don’t know a fish in Tennessee with teeth like a five-pound mangrove snapper.
Mangrove snapper have this nice habit of popping their mouths open and slamming them shut faster than you can blink your eyes. They will sometimes snap like that several times while you hold them.
I think it was right about the time the first lightening strike scared Patsy enough that she screamed, that the snapper did his mouth routine on Jim’s chest. In a split second I had two people screaming – Patsy because of the lightening, and Jim because his snapper had latched onto him. When I say latched on, I mean he bit, with half-inch long canine looking teeth, right through his coveralls and into his chest!
I think the snapper knew he had hit home, because he would not snap again and would not let go! What he did do was squirm and flop as Jim tried to hold him, and that only made the pain worse.
By now the wind was blowing a good thirty knots, and the anchor was dragging. At least the bow of the boat was still into the wind, I thought. The poor umbrella was staining as Patsy held on almost in tears. I think at this point Jim was beyond “almost in tears.”
He yelled over the wind to me and asked what he should do. Why was this fish so stubborn, he wanted to know? My reply didn’t help.
“That why they call them snappers,” I said, and as I did I watched the umbrella swing violently around in the wind and turn inside out.
Now all three of us were getting soaked with rain; Patsy was half screaming and half crying, and Jim was sitting there staring eyeball to eyeball at his “tittie” snapper.
I looked at Patsy; she looked at Jim; then we all looked at each other and began to laugh. If someone had caught this fiasco on film I think it could have made the evening news!
As quickly as the storm came in, it moved out, and we began trying to organize the boat. Jim just sat with his friend still attached.
It took a good ten minutes with needle nose pliers and four hands to release Jim from his fish. It took another few minutes to get the fish to let go of the coverall.
Jim is retired now. He is probably reading this and chuckling to himself. We caught a lot of big snapper in the years that followed, and we still fish together from time to time. But neither of us will forget that day he found out why they call them snappers!
