Below by Ryan Lockwood Page B

really big fish. If she had hooked a bluefin or albacore instead of a yellowtail, she might easily have a fifty-pounder on the line.
    The yellowtail had been arriving off Southern California for a week now, in their seasonal northern migration as the local waters warmed to around seventy degrees. Every summer for the past four years, John had brought his niece and older brother, Daryl, out with him to fish the yellowtail runs and hope for an occasional hefty tuna—both were fish species that lingered off the Southern California coast for a few months each year. Yellowtail amberjacks were John and Daryl’s favorite game fish—they put up a real fight and later yielded a decent homemade sushi. Besides, fishing for yellowtails was probably Megan’s favorite thing to do, and John loved the chance to make his niece smile.
    The trio had been out all afternoon, plying the waters about five miles off La Jolla in John’s sturdy boat. He had focused on the area where the continental shelf abruptly ended and the bottom plunged dramatically to the abyssal plain thousands of feet down. Until fifteen minutes ago, they hadn’t had a bite. All John had seen on the depth finder had been smaller fish, and nothing had struck the trolling lines.
    Then their luck had finally changed.
    Just as the sun was setting over the ocean and John was about to turn the twenty-three-foot vessel for the harbor, he had located a large school of fish below them, maybe a hundred and thirty feet down. Based on the size of the sonar readings, John knew they could be over a school of yellowtails. They had removed the trolling lures and dropped John’s new jigs over the side, letting the line spool out over a hundred feet. Almost immediately, Daryl had hooked a yellowtail and handed the pole to his daughter to reel in. Megan’s excitement as she hauled in the fish had been contagious, and they were all laughing and hooting as they landed three more yellowtail as twilight darkened the sky around them.
    John had tried many lures and baits to catch yellowtail over the years, including live anchovies, frozen market squid, and chum, but this time he had brought out his new candy-bar-sized glow-in-the-dark lures. Each hollow lure had three sets of treble hooks and housed a glow-in-the-dark insert that a friend had told him drove the fish crazy. His buddy had been right.
    Now Megan and her father were struggling with something else on her line, something much larger than the fifteen- to twenty-pound yellowtails now thrashing inside the bait cooler at the stern as they fought off death. John suspected they had just hooked an albacore—that would be a real treat.
    “You guys think you can handle that?” John asked.
    “I’ve got a really big one, Uncle John! I can’t reel him in!”
    Megan’s straight brown hair hung in her face as she strained to control her fishing rod, despite the fact that her father was leaning over her and grasping the pole with his hand as well.
    “She’s not kidding, John. This one’s a real monster!” Daryl looked as enthusiastic as his daughter. John knew the feeling. The great thing about deep-sea fishing was that you never knew what you had on the other end of the line.
    Suddenly, the pole jerked downward with such force that it slammed Megan’s hands into the gunwale.
    “Shit! My fingers!” Megan cried out and let go with one hand, but her dad maintained his grip on the pole. She held her hand against her thigh and grimaced.
    “Watch your language, honey,” Daryl said. “Here, hand me the pole.”
    He took the fishing rod firmly in both hands and pulled up on it in an effort to create enough slack to reel the fish in. The pole jerked violently downward again, pulling Daryl’s portly two-hundred-pound frame into the side of the boat, then popped up again so rapidly that he staggered back into the boat and nearly fell over backward.
    “Christ, it broke the line!” Daryl shouted.
    “That’s fifty-pound test. Are you