Bills to Pay
Posted by Pete Robbins on Feb 3rd 2020
In the summer of 1995, after taking the bar exam but before starting my law firm job, my father and I celebrated our respective emancipations with a fishing trip to Costa Rica. Since he doesn’t really care for fishing, I realize that it was mostly for my benefit, but I think it was a successful bonding event – made more successful by the fact that the fishing lived up to its billing.
We caught mahi, tuna, multiple roosterfish, and the ultimate prize, billfish. I landed two sailfish and a blue marlin. That wasn’t the culmination of some lifelong dream. Indeed, I’ve spent more time before and since dreaming of 10 pound bass. Nevertheless, it’s pretty damn awesome to see something like that coming up in your spread, feeling it grab your lure and then watching it vault across the horizon after realizing that it’s hooked. I can understand why some men mortgage their houses, abandon their families and otherwise give up all good sense to chase these fish on a regular basis.
For better or for worse, I did not have the funds, the time or the inclination to live that lifestyle – bass fishing is debilitating enough – but now (a quarter of a century later) we’re getting the band back together. Not only is my father making the trip with me this time, but Hanna and my mother are going as well. I hope that each of us has a chance to latch onto a sailfish or a marlin.
There is a very real chance that at 50 years old this will be the last time in my life that I will specifically chase billfish. It’s not that I won’t have the means at some point in the future, but rather that there are so many other things left to do, and after two shots at a “once in a lifetime” experience, each time you go back to the well it takes away from something else. Then again, I might just take out another mortgage on the house and go back next year.
