[TEST] Holy Waters: The Sea

Editor’s Note: The first issue of the all-new Field & Stream print journal includes a feature titled “Holy Waters,” a collection of six essays written by Phil Bourjaily, T. Edward Nickens, Will Brantely, and others. Here’s an online exclusive of one of the essays. To read the others, you can become a member of the 1871 Club, or purchase an individual copy of the journal here.

I’m ancient, but I’m not an ancient mariner, even though I grew up a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean and have fished the Atlantic and the Pacific. Some people love the ocean. I do not. In the back of my mind there’s always the thought that you can drown in it, and that it’s filled with things that want to devour you. This is not paranoia. There are 100,000 fishing-related deaths worldwide every year, and 300 fishermen take up residence in Davy Jones’s locker -every day.

Some seas, I grant you, are beautiful to look upon. I have gazed out on the Pacific from the beach at Midway Atoll, and it was indeed blue, and scenic to a fault. But it was also swarming with tiger sharks that migrated there to feed on recently hatched Laysan albatross chicks, which were taking to the ocean knowing how to swim but not fly.

My uncle was a naval officer during World War II and had survived a typhoon while navigating that same Pacific. It was, he said, the most scared he got during the entire war, including during bombing by the Japanese. You could shelter from the bombs, but there was nowhere to hide from a typhoon.

As a young boy, I heard the story of how, in the 1930s, not far from where I lived, an ocean liner named the Morro Castle washed up on the New Jersey shore at Asbury Park after catching fire at sea. More than a hundred passengers and crew died. It was a stark reminder that if something happens to your ship, you cannot run to safety. You can, however, choose between drowning and burning to death.

And so, I grew up viewing the ocean, any ocean, as something you could admire, but it was best to know where the life jackets were stowed—an idea fully cemented the day I first beheld the -Bering Sea, about 20 years ago.