A tidal change takes six hours, the moon shoving seawater far ashore before changing its mind and pulling it back out. During my final semester of college I invested hundreds of hours studying waves from atop the weathered and warped floorboards of an old wooden pier that extended from Jacksonville Beach into the sea.
Day or night, high tide or low, the ocean lives by a simple rule: eat or be eaten. The sea is relentlessly alive, a spectacular circus starring and co-starring remarkable, breathtaking performers large and small.
Wave after wave, day after day, night after night, I watched the relentless march of tides roll in and roll back out. At low tide, sleeves of encrusted white barnacles visibly painted each old piling. At high tide they vanished, hidden beneath the surface. Barnacles are tiny mollusks; they affix to a piling one by one, their colony created by patience and time. Barnacles survive one of two ways, by “swamping” or via rapid growth.
When swamping, large numbers of barnacles quickly settle in the same place. They rely on pure percentages to determine which will survive. Rapid growers sustain by physically growing above surrounding competitors, relying on their bullying size to provide life’s vital first shot at passing food.
One night, under the flashlight of a beautiful moon, my life changed. So, too, did my family’s dynamic—even though my parents were a thousand miles away.
I fished for giant sharks off the old pier with a special rod, custom-made thirty miles south in St. Augustine. I began fishing for monsters after getting the rod for Christmas, and fished whenever school, work, and life allowed. I fished all of January without success. Same with February and March. Nada. Nary a strike.
But in mid-April the stars aligned and King Neptune sent me a torpedo. Under the darkness of night the clicker on my reel exploded into a sonata as line peeled off my reel. My bait had been resting 400 yards away on the ocean floor, courtesy of a kayak paddler who’d bartered the drop for a six-pack of beer. I let the shark run for ten seconds, then quickly cranked in the slack. Feeling resistance I leaned back on the rod and thrice powered home the strike. The giant hammerhead was solidly hooked. It felt like a freight train as it headed for the Bahamas.
The battle began at 9 PM under floodlights and a star-filled sky. We fought for more than three hours, until well past midnight. When I finally reeled the massive hammerhead under the pier’s spotlights, all of us up on the deck were stunned. Her eyeballs were four feet apart, her belly five feet around. She was 11-feet-2 inches long and 650 pounds—way too big to hoist over the railing.
Beach kids raced into the surf with ropes and grappling hooks, impaling the shark behind its T-shaped head, then running toward the beach to tow her ashore. I was injured in the melee—gaffed by accident. A loose grappling hook sliced through the water and ripped deep into the meat of my right calf. The beach kids didn’t notice and dragged me up onto the beach, where I yanked the meat hook out of my leg and yelled at them to run back into the sea and stick the shark. My injury was severe. As I shouted instructions, blood gushed from a nickel-sized puncture.
Every minute of that titanic battle was unforgettably thrilling, a fire-hose of infused adrenaline.
I phoned my mother in Maryland at two in the morning from the hospital emergency room, waking her to share the news. My dad was traveling and I called the hotel number she gave me several times but no one answered. Because of that, he ended up getting gaffed, too.
It takes a lot of patience to fish for four months without a strike, just as it takes a willing determination for that first barnacle to cling to the piling and determinedly hold on. When we want something enough in life or business, and commit to its steadfast pursuit, every doubting moment evaporates (and all the effort invested forgotten) the moment success arrives.
A whole lot of good people are shark fishing for jobs now, hoping for a strike and wondering if and when their turn will come. If you know someone looking for work or wavering in self-belief, remind him or her that achievement comes first to those who try hardest. If they persist with confidence, hard enough and long enough, life will reward them. And because job searches are like shark fishing trips, encourage them to never lose sight of the battle’s reward; every angler posing for photographs with a trophy catch had the courage and commitment to keep trying.
A good life evolves slowly, events compounding over time like the barnacle colony. Like-minded folks draw strength from each other and stick together no matter what, even when the tide rolls out. Soon enough the tide will change and roll back in. You can bank on that. It always does.