7/22/15
Most of us have a lie that has followed us for our whole life. A story that has been told so many times it creates a life of its own, growing larger and more outlandish with each public appearance. It feeds on awe and excitement and is never satisfied.
The prototypical example is the Big Fish. You should have seen it, from here to that door I kid you not. These days it’s not easy to carry around the big fish; smartphones, GoPros, and selfie poles have made these stories lose their credibility.
That’s why my big fish comes from the late 90’s when I lived for the thrill of a gnarly boogie board ride. The thrill that brought me face to face with a great white shark.
It was the summer of ’98 in Marin County. With 9 years under our belts, my best friend Nick and I were the bees knees. We played with walkie talkies, held regular nerf slam dunk sessions, even snuck up to kitchen after midnight to snack on forbidden candy. We were young and reckless.
Unfortunately at the ripe age of nine we had to rely on parental units to get to the beach. This was paramount because in order to be real California youth we needed to be at Stinson Beach daily. These boards weren’t gonna boogie themselves.
So we dragged any combination of parents to the beach at every opportunity. We had our shortie wetsuits and regularly peed inside them to stay warm. Any agreement to come in from the waves at a certain time was routinely pushed as far as humanly possible, after all, we had our 98 degree peepee to stave off hypothermia. Our parents often sent sentries out to tell us it was time to go home.
The goal was to push the limits in any way possible, get out past the other beachgoers and catch bigger waves. Pee in your wetsuit, then high five.
One day we were doing the routine white water wrestling far beyond the crowd, and something caught us off guard.
A seal was moving fast and it appeared to have a cut on its nose—then it was gone. I turned to Nick, “did you see something?” he nodded and we babbled rapidly about shapes and phantom fins that may or may not have been then definitely were because if we said so then it’s definitely true cuzwewerebothsayingit SHARK! Escalating fears in perhaps our first real life-endangering scenario brought the most extreme conclusion we could come up with.
We caught the next wave in and demanded to go home.
Nick's dad laughed. We explained everything and he didn’t believe us but we were scared enough not to argue, as long as we went home.
He berated us and poked fun along the windy drive back. Sitting in the back seat I too questioned what I had seen, the superior brainpower of an adult had me doubting the radical conclusion that Nick and I had agreed was fact.
The next morning our local paper reported shark sightings and all my doubt vanished. After that, a teenage boogie boarder was attacked by a great white in the same waters that Nick and I so frequently soiled.
It turns out that Stinson Beach faces the Farallones, a small island cluster 30 miles off shore that is a popular great white feeding ground. For some reason or another, there weren’t enough elephant seals to go around so some desperate sharks were expanding their palates.
My Big Fish flourished.
With no cameras or developed brains to corroborate what we did or didn’t see out there, the story grew larger each time it was told. I got used to describing the seal getting eviscerated 10 feet away from me before an incoming wave rushed me to safety. Sometimes I'd add a haunting bit when the shark turned to me just before the wave brought me in.
I knew then as much as I do now, neither of us probably saw a shark, but what kind of a story is that when you’re not mature enough to admit it? Especially when that story is right on par with a miniature zeitgeist. We peed ourselves regularly, who's to say we didn't see a shark?
Big fish are fun to catch, but some would argue that they’re more fun to talk about. If you ask Mick Fanning, it’s really not fun to discuss, more fun to live through it.
It feels good to get the record straight, and in the age of GoPros, I can show you that I’ve caught some actual big fish in my day, but the biggest ones came around when the camera was out of batteries.
Maybe it's about time you told the truth about your Big Fish, then ask yourself how and why it got so damn big.
