Poker at the Bottom of the Sea
Playing in an underwater poker tournament is a lot like having sex… even if you don’t last long it’s still a helluva lot of fun! Such was the case in the first aqua-tourney I ever attempted, long before poker was all the rage. Feeling burnt out from the ultra-fast paced LA lifestyle, I decided to take a year off and moved down to the Gulf Coast of Florida – Sarasota to be specific. The plan was for a steady diet of surf fishing, scuba diving, and pina coladas, preferably in that order. I was looking forward to 365 days of R&R; I truly felt that I had earned it.
A few weeks into my self-imposed reclusion, I got a call from a friend on the Atlantic Coast who persuaded me to blast across Alligator Alley for a happening shindig in Fort Lauderdale – plenty of beach babes, ice cold beer, a BBQ pig on a spit, the works. My arm didn’t need to be twisted. But when I got to the house, it was a total testosterone fest. Worse than that, it was as if the local animal pound had opened its doors and released every alpha dog in captivity, as the vast majority of the men in attendance were employed by one of the Sunshine State’s numerous law enforcement branches. Fort Lauderdale PD, Hollywood PD, Broward County Sheriff’s Office, South Florida Search & Rescue, Miami-Dade SWAT… If they had a shiny badge and they thought their privates were bigger than King Kong’s, chances are they were at that party.
Everyone was gathered around the pool, and a number of the guys were gearing up with scuba tanks and weight belts. My friend, a detective working narcotics (undercover) at the time, motioned to an extra rig and told me to get my ass in gear. A few minutes later I was sitting on the bottom of a 10-foot deep swimming pool, playing 5-card Draw with waterproof cards, using silver dollars as chips. Just as I was about to toss three cards in an effort to improve my starting pair of jacks, I found myself sucking down pool water.
What the hell?
Next thing I know, my air hose is floating next to my mask, the end cleanly sliced, and there’s a muscular guy with wild eyes and a crew cut floating directly above me, a humongous dive knife in one hand, waving “bye-bye” at me with the other. Now I had learned to swim before I had learned to walk and I had been scuba diving seemingly forever, so there was absolutely no reason to panic. I had experienced underwater equipment malfunctions before, just none attributed to a cop sabotaging my breathing apparatus! But what could I do? He had a badge, he had a knife and, at the moment, he had a good supply of air. So I flashed him the bird and shoved off from the bottom of the pool.
Fortunately, I wasn’t deep enough to require a decompression stop; the bends wouldn’t be an issue. As soon as I cracked the surface, I realized everyone topside was laughing — at me! Apparently, they had been expecting my early return. One of the landlubber cops helped me from the water, then handed me an icy Corona.
“Steve [my buddy] said you were a pretty good card player, so they all decided to get you out of there quick, using any means necessary.”
“Steve was in on it?” I asked, somewhat surprised.
“You kidding? He’s the one who suggested we nail you.”
With friends like that, who needs enemies? At least they opted not to use a depth charge. That might have been painful!
Over the years, I played in a few more underwater poker games/tourneys — and one underwater Monopoly tournament — but they were all friendly gettogethers or goofy PR gigs, nothing really serious. Then, about a month ago, I received email from a So Cal spear fishing pal of mine, letting me know that a group of experienced spearos were heading down to La Paz (Baja California not Bolivia) to attempt the world’s fi rst freedive poker tournament.
For the uninitiated, freediving is breath-hold only diving. No scuba gear, no hookah rigs, no Spare Air canisters — just you, your lungs, and the depths. It’s a truly amazing extreme sport and, in my opinion, the only way to go spearfishing. Rumor has it Tiger Woods was recently introduced to the sport and absolutely loved it. Underwater hunters who freedive — pursuing quarry such as tuna, wahoo, yellowtail, dorado, and other pelagic game fish - often refer to their variation of the sport as blue water hunting. It’s definitely not the easiest pastime on the planet and should be practiced considerably in pools or shallow lakes before attempting the open ocean. People die every year, including seasoned veterans with thousands of dives under their weight belts. Strong currents, line and kelp tangles, sharks and other toothy predators, getting run over by boats and jet-skis, shallow water blackouts — there are plenty of hazards to permanently condemn a diver to
Davy Jones’ Locker.
Freedive poker tourney, eh? Now that’s gonna be interesting. In a flash, I was scouring the internet for cheap airfare to La Paz. An overgrown fi shing village that still exudes some of the old Mexican charm, La Paz (“the pearl” of the Baja) is nowhere near as “Americanized” as Cabo San Lucas, although developers are doing their best to spoil it. Once my plane ticket was secured, I booked a room at the La Concha Beach Resort, my favorite place to stay in La Paz and the only beachfront hotel in the city. And since I had a few weeks to spare before the adventure, I called my contact at Mares (www.Mares.com), makers of some of the best diving equipment On the planet, to see if they had any cool new gear I could demo. Three days later, a big box arrived containing their impressive Quattro Excel fins, an incredible Liquid Skin X-Vision Mask, and a snazzy Nemo dive watch. Not freedive gear by any means, but I would probably get in some “normal” scuba time, too. But now that I was all geared up with no bubbles to blow, the waiting was painful. Hopefully the weather would cooperate and there would be no postponements.
A month later, I was standing on Mexican soil. Word to the wise, DON’T ever travel south of the border with me; at Customs, I always get the “red light,” requiring a search of my bags. There could be a squadron of well-armed guerilla fighters ahead of me, followed by an equal number of bouncing-off-the-walls, red-eyed junkies holding giant clear plastic bags filled with white powder, and all of them will get the green light, leaving me the red light. Of course, I wasn’t carrying any contraband — although the officials made a big to-do about my wicked Mission MPK dive knife — and I was soon on my way to the hotel on the outskirts of La Paz.
After a relaxing two-hour-long snorkel session off the beach of my hotel, during which I saw a massive truck tire (not swimming), a strange-looking jellyfish that vaguely resembled a lawyer-turned-poker pro who represents Absolute Poker (then again, many spineless creatures resemble that guy!), and an enormous grouper (black sea bass) that looked like a Volkswagen Beetle with fi ns, I showered and dressed and met the guys for an early dinner at Las Brisas del Mar, a seafood restaurant favored by La Paz locals. Between the five of us, we ate enough fresh pescado to deplete the Sea of Cortez for a month. Ice-cold Pacifico flowed like flood water in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and so did the stories, most relating to my dining partners’ most recent undersea adventures. These guys were all seasoned blue water hunters and the more beer they drank, the taller their tales became; the fish they missed grew larger and larger. In one case, I was pretty sure Darryl — the most accomplished freediver/blue water hunter in our crew — was talking about a submarine instead of a fish. Sadly, I didn’t have any new spearfishing stories to tell — it had been a while since I had done any underwater hunting, largely because I was still nursing a knee injury courtesy of my new literary gig with BLUFF Media’s latest imprint, FIGHT! Magazine — so I just regaled everyone with a funny story about a “perfect-10 hooker” that a friend of mine had picked up at Pure at Caesar’s Palace in Sin City, only to discover “she” was actually a dude. Thank freakin’
God “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” It was a fish story of a decidedly different nature.
We rendezvoused early the next morning at the marina, before the sun decided to roll out of bed. Scott was a no-show. Apparently, he had met a sexy senorita — knowing Scott, she undoubtedly had a face like a mule but had a killer rack (Sorry, Scott, but we all know your taste in women!) — at a cantina across from their hotel and, after a late-night tryst, decided to sleep in. Scott had the waterproof cards and heavy poker chips, meaning we wouldn’t be playing poker that morning. No worries. We were down there for three days and we were all anxious to get a little underwater action time in, anyway. The poker tourney could wait. Miguel had brought his uncle’s well-equipped 32-foot Sea Ray Amberjack fishing machine up from Cabo so, after loading on all our gear, we were making wake for the fishing grounds.
The sun was just beginning to rise. Glorious morning, postcardperfect. Little wind, virtually no chop — a far cry from the tumultuous weather the Baja had experienced just a few weeks prior. We weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the conditions, either. More than a dozen local fishermen, some working as guides, were heading out in their pangas, all hoping to reel in “the big one.” That’s the beauty of spearfishing — you have the ability to be proactive in your quest, not to mention selective about your catch. Of course, by hunting fish on their turf you also willingly become A part of the food chain and, believe me, in the ocean you are DEFINITELY NOT at the top of the pyramid. But that’s all part of the allure. At least, it is for me. I still get goose bumps every time I’m about to slip into the brine: I never know what’s waiting for me. And uh, for the record, if you spot any six-foot-tall, redheaded mermaids with big boobs down there, keep your dirty paws off — I got first dibs!
As we were all pretty familiar with La Paz and the best fi shing/diving areas, we decided to visit a tried-andtrue spot roughly fi fteen miles offshore to see if we could score breakfast. But midway to our destination we happened upon a huge fl otilla of kelp and Miguel quickly killed the engine.
You’d be amazed at the oceanic food chain that develops beneath a tiny piece of floating debris, let alone a monster patch of seaweed. Within seconds, three of us — Miguel would man the boat on the first dive — were fumbling with the zippers of our camouflage wetsuits, each wanting to be the first into the water. My fucked-up MCL transformed my maneuverability into a spastic dance that had the others in stitches and I was the last one to plunge into the Sea of Cortez. As I was diving down, my tri-banded Riffe No Ka Oi speargun still uncocked, Darryl — once again the best underwater hunter in the group — was already headed back to the surface with a nice 20-plus pound dorado
(dolphin fish, also known as mahi mahi) that he had stoned with a gill shot. Jason, Darryl’s younger brother, also scored a chunky dodo. I stayed down for about 90 seconds — roughly half of my fairly consistent breath hold — and scanned the area, expecting the fish to come barreling back at any second, as was usually the case. The current was strong but manageable and there were some finned shapes on the far edge of my sightline — visibility was in the 25-foot range — but I couldn’t positively ID any of them so I never squeezed the trigger. Then I caught a fleeting glimpse of two medium-sized dorsal
fins mulling about not too far below me, no doubt responding to the blood in the water, and I elected to abandon the hunt. Even if they were just foraging reef sharks and not accredited man-eaters (tigers, great whites, etc.), they’d probably pose a problem when I nailed a fish. Spearos were known for having to fight off sharks to pull in their catch!
Back on the boat, everyone’s spirits were soaring. There’s nothing in the world like ultra-fresh sashimi at 6:30am on the Sea of Cortez. A Denny’s Grand Slam or an IHOP pancake combo simply doesn’t compare. Miguel impressed the hell out of me with his filleting abilities, not to mention the fact that he had low-sodium soy sauce, wasabi paste, and chopsticks stashed on the boat (although he gave his uncle credit for those provisions). After a hearty breakfast, Darryl elected to stay topside as Miguel, Jason and I ventured back into the blue.
We headed off in different directions — spearfishing is a relatively solitary sport — but were all cognizant of each other’s general location so as not to unintentionally spear a friend. A few moments later I heard the unmistakable THUNK! of a high-powered speargun being fired and could see that Jason had whacked another one, although I couldn’t see what it was. I lined up on a monster yellowtail, about to take a shot, when the blare of an outboard spooked my prey, sending it shooting off into the depths. Back at the surface, a trio of clueless, beer-guzzling, Hawaiian-shirted gringos in an 18-foot walk-around had encroached on our little slice of serenity. I seriously considered swimming over and blasting my razor-sharp spear through their boat’s fiberglass hull but I ultimately decided against it.
Miguel had connected with a whopper of a pargo, as did Jason, and after just two dives we already had enough fish for a full-fledged sushi banquet. Granted, I hadn’t contributed to the kitty but the spearos I’ve encountered over the years adhere to this mindset; it’s a valuable lesson many other sportsmen could learn from.
Frustrated with the idiotic American interlopers, Miguel fired up the Amberjack and we headed off for our original destination, Espiritu Santo, one of two islands (the other being La Partida) roughly fifteen miles from La Paz. Besides being beautiful, it’s a fantastic place to fish and dive with a wide variety of game fish. Unfortunately, the current was really swirling, like a washing machine on Permanent Press. After a few submersions, it was brutally obvious that diving in those conditions was pointless. Regretfully, we headed back to terra firma.
We ultimately made our way to the Caliente Race & Sports Book to enjoy a little OTB bangtail action. Scott eventually showed up with his “trophy” from the night before. YEESH! She was even worse than I thought! And while she was in the bathroom, he confided to us that she was a lot like a barnacle: nearly impossible to get rid of using conventional methods. Fortunately, Jason solved that problem with a few choice words in Spanish. I’m far from fluent in Español, but the gist of his commentary compared her smile to a rake and her overall visage to the ass of a goat. She left in a Latina huff and we were free to be obnoxious Americans, swilling beer, cracking jokes, and betting on the ponies.
The next day on the water was a polar opposite from the previous outing. The seas were rough and unfriendly and there was a sharp chill in the air. Gung-ho idiots that we are, we headed out anyway, knowing there could easily be a world of difference in the conditions below the surface. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The current was roiling and the visibility was akin to cave diving without underwater kinetics. Not exactly the conditions you wanted when you were armed with insanely powerful spearguns and swimming in water that held fish that could swallow you whole.
For the conclusion of this story, don’t miss PART II next month!
