Porgies and Wine

Here on the sunny island of Sicily where there is wine on every table, they’ve fished for a long time, like a few thousand years. It’s a chilly day in January and we’re hoping to score a fishing trip on the Med where certain fish, members of the porgy family (like our common sheepshead in Texas) are still being caught after all these years. The Med, being bordered by many countries, is somewhat overfished without bag or size limits. This week we have wind and whitecaps blowing across from Libya, so we’ll skip any plans for going offshore. My son here has a neighbor with a boat, who keeps him supplied on occasion with fresh fish, usually red porgy (locally called sea bream) and we were hoping to catch our own. However, while sitting on the couch sipping coffee from our town’s perch high above the water, we can see big waves marching by five miles away and 800 feet downhill.

(Many Sicilian towns were built on the high ground after being constantly invaded for 3,000 years by many armies. There are still a few pillboxes downhill from us from more recent conflicts, such as the day generals Eisenhower and Patton came ashore just east of here. The local government building, made of local sandstone blocks, has dozens of deep pock marks that look suspiciously like bullet strikes. The Germans, mostly the 15th Panzer Grenadiers and the Herman Goering Panzer Division, fought back for 43 days but soon withdrew north, anxious to cross two miles of deep blue water at Messina, then onto Italy’s safer mainland. Marching off into history).

Sicily is quiet these days, and there are just enough fish around for the locals to try their luck. A friend of the family, Bruno, fishes the jetties and harbors and provided the customary New Year’s fish dinner that is said to bring a year’s worth of good luck. (We’ll see how that works out.) The fried red porgy fillets, washed down with Prosecco, were excellent. Bruno also catches mullet, eaten in different countries and still a big favorite in Florida. One of his pictures showed a mullet so big, it would scare most Texas kingfish.

Our new-found friend Gerlando fishes the marina harbor near the jetties almost every day, a real diehard who sets out six big spinning rods. Every now and then he catches a trophy Spigola “seabass” up to 16 pounds, a fish closely resembling our striped bass back home. A real prize here. Last time Gerlando hooked one, he was so excited he had a heart attack. (Not sure if he landed that fish or not.) He’s now 74 years old and just won’t quit. Locals say his wife doesn’t like him fishing, so he keeps his tackle at a friend’s house and claims he’s out visiting friends. After handling bait each morning, you would think she’d figure it out and probably has. After he fell into a crack in the 7-foot high jetty rocks and couldn’t climb out, that must have convinced him to play it safe and fish from the marina’s bulkhead next to his car, which provides warmth on a chilly winter’s day. (Sicily is the same latitude as North Carolina.) Yes, it gets cold even in North Africa, only 90 miles away. Something keeps Gerlando coming back day after day to catch a fish. He says it’s been weeks since the last bite on those six spin rods. That’s true dedication. He would be shocked at the fish we have in Texas around our own jetties. His crowning achievement was catching a 600-kilo bluefin tuna only eight miles offshore.

A tuna like that would be worth more than a million dollars these days, depending on its fat content and if it was promptly flown to Tokyo. He says that was before Japanese longliners arrived and worked over the Med from Gibraltar to Turkey.

Just down the bulkhead, two commercial boats dock each morning and sell their catch to the locals. The boats pull bottom trawls like our Texas shrimp boats. However, we saw no shrimp here, just eight or so species of small fish and rays. The locals, including wives, drive downhill from the city, park their cars on the bulkhead and buy straight off the boats. It’s a fair deal; there is no middleman fish market. There were big-mesh gill nets on one of the two boats; probably drift nets hoping for swordfish or sharks.

Cold and wet work, but Sicily enjoys the sunniest and warmest weather in Europe each winter. A coffee shop selling great pastry is always somewhere nearby, even at the marina. With steaming cups of Cafe Americana, also their super-strong Espresso.

Ironically it was porgies, specifically Texas sheepshead, that introduced our Port Arthur fishing crew to wine many years ago. Young people that year were having these wine parties with a new beverage called Boone’s Farm, something we hadn’t tried yet. One day an old man at the county boat ramp in Sabine Pass offered money if we’d bring him a few sheepshead. This was in late summer when it’s difficult to catch these fish in warm water. However, while offshore we often snorkeled at the oil rigs, hoping to spot a few red snapper (scarce back then) and where sheepshead always swarmed. Poking a few sheepshead took about five minutes, and we were soon back at the dock at sunset, selling the four sheepshead for the hefty sum of four dollars. We then drove straight to Bacque’s grocery and bought Boone’s Farm’s Wild Mountain Grape. It was a little harsh, but at least it was purple.

It’s true the heady stuff was only a dollar a bottle, but you have to remember a dollar back then went a long ways, like buying three gallons of gas for our two stick-steering bass boats that could run around offshore. That year or the next, local gas briefly dropped to 21 cents a gallon in our neighborhood. Each of our boats burned two, six-gallon tanks on a long day offshore, where we could sling jigs and spoons out at the Phillips rigs or the 18-mile light. We’d run and gun those long and calm summer days. Mostly; sometimes it was choppy out there but when you’re 20 years old, you can take a little discomfort. Our friend Bailey brought up the issue of aches inflicted offshore, and claimed wine would “ease the pain” after a long day. And he was right. That old guy’s wrinkled greenbacks were converted into wine that tasted better and better as all discomfort vanished. In retrospect, we should have been drinking water and Gatorade.

Back then, the waters off Sabine Pass held all manner of good-sized fish not found in the Med. Plus, we seldom saw another boat. Prime red snapper were in decline even in blue water, out of reach of our boats. We fished green water around the Sabine Bank (similar to Galveston’s Heald Bank) in 30-40 feet of water. We did expect to see ling every spring and summer trip, and often did. Today there’s been a switch; snapper have bounced way back while ling have greatly declined Gulf-wide.

Getting back to the porgy population, our sheepshead in Texas have been protected for many years with a five-fish bag limit. And they’re not really a targeted fish, except by winter snowbirds patiently lowering bait around the jetties at Port Aransas and South Padre Island. Further up the coast where you often need a boat to reach bigger jetties, these fish are still thick and hungry each winter. And they’ve only been fished a handful of years compared with Roman times. While in Sicily we toured a rediscovered Roman villa (estate) an hour’s drive away, that contained the world’s largest site of mosaic art (tiny floor tiles) showing all manner of life in 325 AD, with lots of fishing and hunting scenes.

And that was long after five centuries of Greeks who fished here before the Romans arrived. That’s serious time and fishing pressure. The Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Normans are long gone from Sicily. Germans and Americans too, except for the tourists. But the fish are still here, though far fewer than those found in our Gulf of Mexico.