Status Updates From The Great Shark Hunt: Stran...

I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first become a felon -- but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now.

It is extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of Campaign '76 under these circumstances.

We are living in very strange times, and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out.

Looking back on all that, my only feeling for deep-sea fishing is one of absolute and visceral aversion. Hemingway had the right idea when he decided that a .45-caliber submachine gun was the proper tool for shark fishing, but he was wrong about his targets. Why shoot innocent fish, when the guilty walk free along the docks, renting boats for $140 a day to drunken dupes who call themselves "sport fishermen"?

The anglers assured me it was all a great thrill, but on the evidence, I couldn't believe it. The whole idea of fishing, it seemed to me, was to hook a thrashing sea monster of some kind and actually boat the bastard. And then eat it.

It was late Saturday night, as I recall, when we learned that Frank Oliver had officially won the tournament -- by one fish, ahead of the balls-out poor-boy crew on Lucky Striker.

It was not a good scene to confront with a head full of acid. We drank heavily, trying to act natural, but the drug set us clearly apart.

Sixteen months of straight politics had left me reeling around on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I needed a change, something totally different from my normal line of work. Covering politics is a vicious, health-ripping ordeal, so this unexpected assignment to "cover" a deep-sea-fishing tournament off the Yucatán coast of Mexico was a welcome relief from the horrors of the campaign trail in 1972.