The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 14.4 • THE LUCK EQUATION

My first trip to the Saudi Arabian side of the Red Sea. I was the only American—the rest were Brits. We were ready to head back up the hill, but the designated driver mistook reverse for first gear and rocketed the Toyota Land Cruiser backward into the surf. Once he realized he was going the wrong direction he found the right gear and spun the axles down to the sand.

I got out of the Air Force in August of ’72 after five years in, with 18 months of that spent in the Far East. Stateside was in the throes of high inflation and high unemployment—stagflation, according to the pundits—and so, with a degree and five years as an officer, I was still hitchhiking to two jobs, getting nowhere, obviously not solving the luck equation. Around this time, an Air Force friend sent me an advertisement from the Air Force Times: a Los Angeles company was recruiting guys with my experience (I was a fighter controller) to go to Saudi Arabia and work with the Saudi Air Force.

By November 1973, I’d wound up at the Royal Saudi Air Force Early Warning and Control radar site, about 8,000 feet up in the Arawat Mountains of the country’s southwest, within driving distance of the Red Sea—though of course “within driving distance” is a relative term. In this case, it meant four bone-jarring hours down the escarpment on unimproved dirt and rock roads carved from the flanks of the mountains, following wadi beds sometimes running with water. You had to haul everything you needed—food, water, fuel, gear. If something went wrong, it went very wrong.

The Red Sea was a nearly pristine fishery. Commercial fishing was limited to refinements of techniques in use when God found the Prophet in the desert east of Mecca. Recreational fishing did not exist. But there was one problem: I had no fishing gear, and none was available in Saudi Arabia. It was a problem that could be solved, but it would have to wait until my first home leave in six months.

I met Lumsden in the intervening months, and he turned out to be the best waterman I’ve ever met. He was in his 40s, while I was in my late 20s, and he had spent a lot of time in the Middle East. He taught English (British English, to be exact) to Saudis on the King Khalid Air Base near Khamis Mushayt, who would then become our tech and controller trainees on the site.

Lumsden was quiet, almost shy, around 6 foot and slender, with a strange gait owing to childhood polio. But in the water he had gills, and with a spear gun he was a hunter par excellence. During his time in the Middle East, he’d collected a lot of gear, and he was able to set me up with fins, a mask, snorkel and even a speargun for our trips to the sea. I was comfortable in the water from diving while stationed at Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West, but I’d never used a speargun.

Lumsden didn’t like to drive, but I did. His logic seemed to be invested with the Inshallah principle, like an Arabic version of que será, será—what will be will be. I, on the other hand, was comforted by the delusion that driving gave me some influence over my fate. Together we made several speed runs down the hill, leaving after work on a Thursday, spending most of Friday in the water, then bombing back up the hill, ready for lessons and training on Saturday. On our trips to the sea, Lumsden would leave camp early, return around midday, have some water and take care of the fish he’d shot. For lunch, he’d pour a can of lukewarm beans down his throat. Then he’d disappear into the sea again for the afternoon.

Lumsden was critical of my hunting technique, which is to say I didn’t have any. I was an impatient and impetuous American scaring the fish, always moving too fast for the underwater situation. Lumsden was a stalker, I was a hit-and-runner—end of story. We hunted alone and got along fine.

On one excursion, Lumsden was off doing his thing and I was snorkeling above a barely visible rubble reef and live coral heads in about 40 feet of murky water. A goliath grouper, maybe 6 feet long, materialized out of the haze and rolled on its side, sizing me up. I froze, and I think the animal realized it had lost the surprise factor. Its pea-sized brain re-computed the luck equation and concluded that I was not the opportunity it sought. Slowly, the beast sank from sight. With my eyes glued to the bottom and breathing hard, I slowly swam back toward the inshore reef.

You get used to certain sounds underwater, like the sound of yourself breathing, either sucking on a snorkel tube or hearing your exhaled breath bubble to the surface. But there are others. I was on my own again, snorkeling one early morning in about 20 feet of clear water with canyon-like coral rising around me. The scene was like an agreeable acid trip: totally relaxed. But something intruded on my reverie: a whooshing and, as it got louder, rushing sound. What the hell could that be? I thought. The wind? Naw. I poked my head up for a look around just in time to catch a shoal of baitfish throwing themselves into the air in a scattered panic and coming straight at me. Before I knew it I was wrapped in a bait ball, until the scrum blew through a few moments later chased by some jack-like fish.

Six months came and went. I was back on the beach, this time with gear: a flyrod, a spinning rod and a few big streamers and assorted lures. One beach we camped at had a flat that shelved off into about 20 feet of water studded with coral heads. Offshore, a rocky pinnacle, an igneous relic of times past, jutted through the surface; though it had zero flat real estate and was devoid of vegetation, the bats and gulls that hung around it provided enough guano to fertilize the state of Delaware. It stank. On the far side of the rock the bottom dropped off. With fins, I could easily swim out to it on my back, gear held up out of the water.

One day I was on my perch on the seaward side and saw what I took to be a three-foot shark finning along the surface. I nonchalantly laid the fly out in front of the fish; what followed was like a camel hoof to the groin. The fish exploded all over the fly. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I was in for a monumental clock cleaning. A few seconds later, I reeled in the tattered tackle.

I met a guy from the east coast of Florida a couple weeks later who was doing runway construction on the base. By that time, I had recovered enough to describe the encounter without stammering. Without hesitation, he said, “Man, that must have been a cobia! They’re here. I’ve seen them in the fish suq [market] in Jeddah. People always mistake cruising cobia for shark!” A cobia. I should have known, I just wasn’t expecting it. I’ll call it bad luck. Opportunity demolishes the ill-prepared.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 14.4

THE LUCK EQUATION

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The Flyfish Journal 13.4