ooooh, barracuda…..

This isn’t really a ‘travel story’ per se but I was reminded of it recently when someone mentioned avoiding going in the water in The Bahamas because of the number of sharks they saw. I don’t have much experience with sharks but I am pretty concerned about barracuda after my experience barracuda fishing on Great Inagua

How I found myself Barracuda fishing on Great Inagua in The Bahamas

Many years ago when we were still actively fighting the war on drugs, I was assigned to Joint Task Force 4 in Key West, FL. 

I was an electronics technician (I was USAF and my equivalent Navy rating was CTM for the vets who care) at the regional Ops center. Aside from air traffic control and radar monitoring of the area, part of our mission was to support communications for the various US entities scattered around the Caribbean. Satellite comms were being rolled out (this would have been 1991/1992) and a couple of us were tasked with set up and maintenance of satellite systems. That meant traveling to some fairly remote island locations. Of course, it also meant occasionally traveling to Nassua to support the US Embassy and that TDY didn’t suck since they put us up at Carnival’s Crystal Palace.

Let’s go fishing

On one trip to the Coast Guard station on Great Inagua the coasties offered to take us fishing in the canals after duty one day. (Great Inagua is the second largest island in the Bahamas at 596 sq mi (1544 km2) and lies about 55 miles (89 kilometres) from the eastern tip of Cuba.) A lot of salt was produced there (currently about a million pounds annually; literal mountains of salt) which means an intricate network of canals and shallow evaporation pans. 

I didn’t put much thought into the idea, I’m not much of a fisherman but a couple beers and hanging out seemed like a not horrible idea so I jumped in on it. 4 or 5 of us went out to one of the canals and got busy with the drinking/smoking/fishing

We might have been out there a half hour or so when I got a hit on my line. Whatever it was, it was good-sized because it hit HARD. I fought this thing for maybe 10 minutes. It was battling its way upstream and I had managed to drag it maybe halfway back to me. Suddenly, there was another, harder, hit on my line and it took off downstream just stripping line off the reel. Completely beyond my control for maybe 10 seconds and then the line went slack.

Well. Crap. I had a fish and now I don’t. 

As I was reeling in to check my lure, every now and again I would feel the tiniest little wiggle, like a baitfish. I thought that maybe what happened was that I caught something small then something bigger grabbed it and spit it out to avoid the hook.

It was worse than that. 

What I finally hauled out of the water was the front 10 inches or so of a barracuda. Just the part from the tip of the snout to the gills. It was nearly as long as my foot and as big around as my bicep. It looked for all the world as though someone had taken a cleaver and chopped it in two. I had never seen a barracuda up close before but did a quick calculation of how big it had to have been to have jaws like that and my very first reaction was “Okay, DONE with fishing. I am COMPLETELY over it.” 

The TEETH ! Holy crap. It could easily have bitten through my wrist and taken my hand off in a bite. Maybe my foot. 

One of the coasties came over to see what was going on and got really excited. They all wanted to know which way it went after it grabbed my fish. Immediately they all ran downstream 50 to 100 yards and threw their lines back in. I had another beer, screw THAT noise; I wanted no part of a fish big enough to do that. 

But How?

When we were leaving later I said that I had assumed the canals were gated or screened or something to prevent big fish like that from getting in. Petty Officer whomever said “Sure. But think about it the other way. Little barracuda comes in and gets to feed unmolested on all the little fish then he grows up and can’t get back through the gate to get OUT of the canal. He’s got no real predators in the canal soooo….” Damn. Hadn’t even considered that. They said there were rumors of a massive barracuda but they all wrote it off as a locals story meant to keep them from going into the canals. Nope. It was an actual fish and we figured it had to be close to 4 feet to have taken mine apart so cleanly.

Me and the ocean ain’t buddies anymore

I avoided water deeper than about mid-calf the rest of the time we were down there. My feelings were reinforced by a Navy dependent who, as I recall, was about 8 or 10 years old almost losing her foot to a barracuda off Key West itself. Apparently they were playing in waist deep water and she had on a shiny gold anklet. To a barracuda it probably looked just like a snack flailing about in the water.

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