Commodore Escrich Sends His Regards…
by Captain Craig Eubank
May always brings on the busiest time of year for fishing/diving guides, hoteliers and pretty much everyone in the entire Florida Keys. We’re finished with Spring Break, starting to slow down for graduation and the end of school, and then crashing head long into Summer Break and all the business that goes with that time of year.
Throw in Mothers’ Day and the assorted Birthdays and things get complicated, but we try to keep things on a roll as long as possible. As much as you want a break, you need to stay on that roll ‘cause you know as soon as the business slows down, that’s it for a while… ? you don’t even mention the “H” word around here!
Emails come by the bucketful. Typical emails read: tell me about your business, how much, how long, how big, and then there are the emails about the charter business too ?…
However, the other day I got an email that really brought back memories from several years ago and I figured the statute of limitations had surely come and gone by now.
“Dear Captain Craig Eubank,
As Commodore of Hemingway International Yacht Club of Cuba and Representative of the International Game Fish Association in Habana, I am very pleased to greet you as well as to invite you as member of Hemingway International Yacht Club of Cuba, to join us in the celebration of the 61st “Ernest Hemingway International Billfish Tournament” to be held on June 6th through 11th, 2011…”
The Cubans are very big on all the fancy pomp and circumstance, but to spare you the complete wordy invite – including all the misspellings – it boils down to being invited to the world’s longest running Marlin Tournament named for arguably one of the most famous big game fisherman in sport fishing history. Since 1994, I have gotten one of these invitations to the Tournament, along with birthday wishes, Mothers’ Day wishes, and Holiday wishes. Marina Hemingway represents Cuba at its most gracious. They certainly do want us to come back. Even if it is just business, shouldn’t we give them the benefit of the doubt? There’s talk in our current administration of change in our current travel restrictions. Will this affect travel by boat? Who knows?
Many private as well as Keys charter boat Captains spent the early nineties through about 2005 fishing this tournament and its sister tournaments, the Blue Marlin Tournament (usually in August or September) and the Wahoo Tournament held in November. The Cuban Tournaments differed in a couple of key ways. They would actually have a Captains’ meeting the night before and let the Captains decide the scoring system. They would in fact let us VOTE on whether it was a kill tournament (based on points per pound), or a tag and release system such as we have here for our billfish tournaments. Every morning was a shotgun start and you had to be inside the marina sea buoy by a certain time in order to qualify any of your catches for that day – no specific lines in or out time. For several years, they put “observers” onboard your vessel and kept an eye out so there wasn’t anything untoward going on. I have real video proof that that didn’t work so awfully well. And sometimes the observers themselves came under fire ?
Nothing’s perfect. However, keep in mind that if it was voted to be a kill tournament, nothing went to waste. The Cubans ate/used every part of every fish brought to the dock. The fish went directly from the weigh-in station (which made for some memorable pictures) to the cleaning table. I heard a lot of “all release” and “no kill” rhetoric while I was there, but it was always from the Captain of a U.S. flagged multi-million dollar sportfish with a freezer full of steaks and not once from a Cuban Captain with five hungry kids at home. And yes, I have eaten both blue and white marlin while in Cuba. In fact, if fixed right, it tastes very much like swordfish… Swordfish just doesn’t jump and put on a show when trolled up during a tournament… and that I unfortunately have never seen before.
For you to place in this tournament, you needed to have enough points to put you in the top three teams. One thing I greatly respect them for is that no money was offered to any of the winning teams. Only hand-carved trophies were given. It wasn’t a payout tournament (imagine that!). These tournaments are about bragging rights only. No gambling. The only time you heard of dailies or Calcuttas was between non-Cuban boats. There were always arguments about the tournaments being about killing or getting paid. They all had their point of view, but again, it was an invitational. I always figured that you either follow the rules of the host (host country), or stay home and complain. In 1999, it even went as far as a local semi-charter boat out of Key West that was holding the daily money, actually refusing to hand over the money because the winning boat killed the points fish rather than releasing it, and the sour grapes Captain decided that it shouldn’t be counted. That eventually got straightened out and a good lesson learned. Never come between a Ruskin fisherman and his winnings…
There were other times when the majority of Captains felt as if the outcome had been unduly influenced by any one of the vague methods of keeping points, time, allowing extra time for mechanical problems, sometimes the Calcutta was even given to the wrong boat, but those rumors only seemed to fuel the mantra of “wait ‘til next year!” And whatever pitiful amount of trade or pay you would receive for risking your boat (I should know!) just to make the crossing of 100 miles, to fish a loosely-run, however infamous, Billfish tournament where the best outcome might be a hand-carved trophy, bragging rights, and a bad case of “Guevara’s Revenge,” we all couldn’t wait for next year. So, as each email from Marina Hemingway finds its way into my inbox, I’ll say a silent prayer that maybe this year, things will change.
.. and hopefully, I can once again be a part of the festivities!