Shark Story--Part Two

Guest Post—second installment by Diane Kane

THE ONE THAT DIDN’T GET AWAY

BY DIANE KANE

 As with the first fish, when it got near the surface, Captain Bob had me step back while he reached down with a grappling hook to pull the fish on board. This time was just a bit different. When Captain Bob leaned over the stern, he could hardly believe his eyes.  A very large dark shadow slowly approached the surface and he was face to teeth with…

“It’s a Shark!”  he screamed.

“Shark?” I questioned with disbelief. What will we do? I thought. Will we cut the line? I hoped. Heck no, we chased it! 

Captain Bob dashed to the bow to release the anchor.  He instructed Lollie to climb to the helm where she expertly maneuvered the craft backwards over two miles in circles, just like she knew what she was doing, even though she had never done it before in her life. As I stood transfixed in the middle of the deck with a small rod and reel in my hand and a shark at the end of the line, I looked around to find Captain Bob by my side with a harpoon in one hand as he set the drag on my reel with his other hand and told me to, “Just keep reeling!”

My jealous shipmates had mysteriously been transformed into enthusiastic supporters. Quickly discarding their so far fishless poles, they each took on more fruitful activities. My husband, Tom, took charge of the only camera on board. In all the excitement, he managed to get only one good shot. Jess kept time with his watch, counting off each minute, making me feel as though I was in labor. Scott was purposely pacing the deck and giving thanks that he had decided not to take a swim. Dominic was eager to get his hands on the rifle that was on board. 

But Captain Bob warned him, “We can’t shoot until we get him close enough to the boat to set the harpoon first. Sharks have no airbladder,” he explained. “If you shoot him, he’ll sink right to the bottom and we’ll never get him up.”

A True Shark Story

Guest Post by Diane Kane

Diane and I met at a writer’s group that started at our local book store that unfortunately went out of business. Diane works as a mail carrier and is a wife, mom, grandmother, and fast-developing writer in her spare time. The following is a true story she graciously agreed to share and that will be continued in installments over the next two weeks.

THE ONE THAT DIDN’T GET AWAY

BY DIANE KANE

“IT’S A SHARK!”

 The words of Captain Bob Lavalley of the 37 foot charter fishing boat “Fishin’ Off”, out of Newport, Rhode Island still echo in my mind.

The headlines read, “411 lb, 9 ½ foot Mako shark caught less than two miles off Newport, RI beach.” A newsworthy story in itself since sharks that size are not known to be in so close to shore. Add to that, it was caught from a boat rigged for only 20 lb bluefish. Have I got you hooked yet? Well, top it off with the fact it was caught on 40 lb test line and oh, did I mention it was reeled in by a woman! Hard to swallow? Well, this is no fish story.

September 11, 1989, it was a hot day, well into the 80’s, a perfect day for a leisurely fishing trip or so I thought. I didn’t think the name “Orca” was printed on the bow of the boat and I was sure it wasn’t “Captain Quint” at the helm, yet close by silently awaited my “Jaws.”

On Board was Dominic Coppolino, owner of the Barre Mill Restaurant where I was employed as assistant head chef. Also along for the fun were my husband Tom and three friends Scott, Jesse and Chris. The first mate, Lollie, and I were the only women on board that day.

It was my first deep-sea fishing trip, so the guys were being just a little patronizing to me as they planned the pool. “Let’s make it five dollars apiece for the first fish and five dollars each for the biggest… Is that ok with you, Diane?” they asked with smugness.

When we set anchor, Chris commented on how calm the sea was. “If the fishing isn’t any good, we could go for a swim,” he said.

Lollie, the fist mate, warned him against it. “Sometimes small makos follow the fishing boats to feed on the bluefish,” she said.

“What’s a mako?” I asked innocently.

“Shark!” she exclaimed. “Cousin to the great white, not so big but faster and more dangerous.” Little did I know, I was soon to meet my mako.

Lollie baited the poles with small fish that she cut in half. Disregarding any manners, the guys grabbed the first five poles in their eagerness to win the pool for the first fish. Lollie took special care baiting mine and gave it a spit for good luck. I’ll never doubt fishing superstitions again. A few minutes later I reeled in a beauty of a bluefish. It put up a great fight and I was thrilled. My shipmates were just a little disgruntled, griping about beginners luck and having to pay me the first pool.

Lollie and I, comrades by this time, just gave each other a smirk as she baited my line again. This time she put on a whole bait fish and gave it an extra good spit. The guys were eagerly watching their poles in hopes of at least capturing the pool for the largest fish, when the tip of my pole bent over as if it would snap off. So, with barely a breather from my first catch, I began to reel in my second. Little did I know it would be almost an hour until I would be done reeling this one in.

“This one is bigger,” I said as I strained to reel it in. Of course my fishing mates thought this was just my way of adding insult to injury, complaining about my damn good luck. They were ready to throw me overboard. Thank goodness they didn’t!                                                             

     

More Books

More Books

Read Grey by E. L. James, a rewrite of Fifty Shades of Grey from the main male character’s point of view. All the controversy about the books and the movie amused me. At its heart, the story is typical of the romance genre—boy meets girl, some conflict threatens their relationship, and they overcome it to live happily ever after. Wildly popular, the story has many similarities to the also popular Pretty Woman.

A rich, jaded man seems in a position to dominate a young, naïve woman (yes, they managed to make Julia Roberts’s character, a hooker, in Pretty Woman naïve) learns love and goodness through her eyes and reforms—both stories in a nutshell. The woman prevails in each and changes the man, another typical female fantasy. Neither movie pretends to be anything but a fantasy.

I found Grey disappointing. All the hoopla about the Grey trilogy centered on the male character Christian’s penchant for sadomasochistic sex but it stemmed from a tortured (literally) childhood and never escalated to actual damage to his partners. I suspect it was a mild and not particularly realistic rendering of someone drawn to that life style. The rewrite should have been the opportunity to expand on Christian’s inner conflicts and his family and previous relationship dynamics. Grey mostly rehashed the first book with very little new information introduced. He came across as less commanding from his own viewpoint as well. Save your money.

Tess Gerritsen writes the books that the TV show Rizzoli and Isles is based on. I read a book from 2002, The Apprentice, that showed Isles as a minor character. I’d like to read a more current book and see if the writing improved. This one wasn’t bad but not top notch, too much set up for the ending, which was then obvious. Rizzoli, I thought, also came across as whiny and not nearly as smart as she appears on TV.

I loved The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. He has a way with words that draws you forward and paints vivid pictures. The section that described the atemporal’s world (the main protagonists born immortal and the villains who stole the ability) and the story climax between them bogged down in description, and the switches in time and place sometimes threw me off. The last chapter zinged along.

Kegel and Book Update

Kegel Exercise Update

I’m up to ten repeats per exercise three times a day but realized I’ve been so concentrated on the exercises themselves I haven’t paid attention to whether they’re working. Debated if I should work up to four times a day at ten first or to twenty repeats at three times a day first and decided on the latter. Interestingly, I find it hardest to isolate the correct muscles when standing, which not surprisingly is also when I have the most trouble with leaking. I do better sitting and best when lying on my side with my knees drawn up to maybe forty-five degrees. Anyone trying this who has found a technique that works better for them?

Books I’ve Read

I finished Margaret Atwood’s Madd Addam trilogy—Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Madd Addam. I’m glad I bought the first two books together, which made me keep reading. I didn’t really care for the first book but found the second and third very engaging. They concentrated more on the characters than building the post-apocalyptic world of the first book, some of which I found implausible.

Cathy Maxwell’s The Highlander’s Bed is a typical historical romance and has a silly plot that was unlikely for the time period, but it was still a quick, fun read.

The second book in David Anthony Durham’s Acacia trilogy, The Other Lands, continues the story of another world’s royal siblings separated when young to keep them safe from a conquering nation and reunited to rule again. The characters and the world are interesting. To my surprise, the more sci-fi/fantasy I read written by men, the worse they seem to be at creating the non-humanoid creatures that inhabit their worlds. Maybe their imaginations are overly saturated with video game monsters. I love the flying lizard, though.

I’ve seen the movies based on John Irving’s books, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, which I liked. Someone gave me his book, In One Person, about a small Vermont town from the fifties to the present and a boy trying to figure out how to grow up as a bisexual. It meandered in places and had repetitious parts that lost my attention. Most of the story, written much like a journal, came across as real and immediate.     

Weight Loss Lies

Weight Loss Lies

The most nonsensical piece of advice—don’t think of this as a diet, think of it as a lifestyle. A weight loss regimen’s end goal is to reach a reasonable weight and eat normally to maintain it. Who would start restricting their calories if it never ended?  And I’m sorry, but while you will be healthier eating more fruits, vegetables, and lean protein and less processed junk, you won’t lose weight simply by doing this.

You have to eat fewer calories than your body needs before it will tap fat stores to make up for the deficit. Your body isn’t stupid. No matter how much fiber-rich, calorie-empty foods you eat to fill yourself up, your body will react. Especially in the beginning, hunger will haunt you. Then your body will adjust and lower your metabolism to require fewer calories. Exercise can raise the metabolism and lessen this effect but you still have to slog through it to find the balance.

And no matter what the promises of any diet or supplement, the body cannot lose more than one pound of pure fat a week for women. Men can lose one and a half to two pounds a week. Anything else is excess water or worse, muscle, if you don’t have the proper intake of protein or try to severely restrict your calories. We want instant results, but not going to happen. You have to set your mind to be in this for the long term. The more pounds you need to shed, the more overwhelming a task it can seem.

Exercise

Most know that exercise adds muscle, which weighs more, so determine your fat loss by inches rather than pounds when first starting to exercise. The latest studies suggest that exercise is less important to losing weight than diet. Exercising makes you hungrier and people tend to eat more, they say. Duh. If you are following a specific diet program with a prescribed amount of calories, you may have more cravings, but if you follow the program, you will lose weight. If is the problem.

The Diet Wheel

I have spent my life either gaining or losing weight. I’ve managed to maintain one weight for no more than a few weeks. They call it yo-yoing. It’s a wheel you start one way to lose weight. You lose focus or heart and it starts backtracking and you gain weight. It’s very hard to stop the wheel. I haven’t found the solution, and of course it’s getting harder with age to lose weight. If anyone has found something that worked for them—losing and keeping the pounds off—please share.