Clyde's Shaggy Dog Stories
Long stories, short endings, and bad puns,
the way I told them on the San Diego tuna boats for forty years.
Get some coffee.

My name is Clyde Arruda. I'm seventy-nine years old. I fished tuna out of Point Loma from 1938 to 1978, the first twenty-some years on the bait boats with a pole in my hands and the rest on the seiners, and in all that time I was never the best fisherman on any boat I was on. But I was the one they wanted at the galley table after supper. My father came over from the island of Pico in the Azores and fished out of here before me, and he told stories the same way, and so did his father, I'm told, in Portuguese.

On Friday nights some of us old-timers still sit at the same long table at the hall, eight or nine of us, with our wives at the next table pretending not to listen. I tell a story. They groan. That's the arrangement. My granddaughter says these stories ought to be written down before I forget them or they forget to groan, so here they are.

What Is a Shaggy Dog Story?

A shaggy dog story is a long story that goes nowhere slowly and arrives, in the end, at a terrible pun. The longer you take getting there, the better. The pleasure is not in the joke, because the joke is bad. The pleasure is in the faces around the table when the men realize, too late, what you have been doing to them for twenty minutes.

A tuna boat is the right place for them. On the bait boats in the old days it could be two or three weeks running down to the fishing grounds off Mexico and Central America, and as long coming home, and there is no radio worth listening to out there. A man who could tell a story that lasted from the end of supper to the change of the watch was worth almost as much as a man who could fish.

How long they are. At our table we measure stories the way we measure everything else, in coffee:

	A one-cup story you can finish before your coffee gets cold.
	A two-cup story needs a refill partway.
	A three-cup story means somebody has to get up for the pot twice, and usually it's me.

How to Tell One

1. Slowly. Slower than that.
2. Put in everything that doesn't matter. The name of the boat. The weather. What the cook made for supper. A man's cousin. They will think it's important. It isn't.
3. Never smile. You are telling the plain truth about something that happened.
4. If somebody asks, "Is this going anywhere?" say "Yes," and go somewhere else first.
5. When you get to the end, say it quietly, look down into your coffee, and wait.
6. Sit near the door.

The Stories

1. The Man Who Bought the Net

A three-cup story · Groans at the table: 8 of 8

When I started, everybody on the Point fished with poles. You stood in a steel rack hung off the side of the boat with the sea washing over your boots, the bait man threw live anchovies and sardines over the side to bring the tuna up boiling, and you hooked them on a feather jig and swung them up over your head onto the deck. For the big ones two men or three would tie their poles to the one line and lift together. Two-pole fish. Three-pole fish. It was hard work and beautiful to watch and it ruined every back on the Point.

Now, in 1958, there was a skipper named Francis, who we called Chico like every other Francisco on the Point, even though he was the biggest man in the fleet. Francis came into the hall one Friday night and said, in front of everybody, that he was selling his poles and buying a net. A purse seine, like the sardine boats used.

Well. The table laughed so hard the coffee spilled. "You can't catch tuna in a net, Chico, they're too fast, they'll dive right under it." He said, "We'll see." Some of the older men said he'd gone soft in the head. His own brother-in-law said so, at the same table, with his mouth full of Francis's wife's sweet bread. His mother went to the church and lit candles.

He did it anyway. He spent the whole winter at the boatyard. He had one of the new power blocks hung on the boom to haul the net in, which nobody had seen before, and he had a net made so big you could have wrapped up the hall and the church and the parking lot and still had enough left over for the priest's garage.

By spring his wife was worried. So she went to see the young doctor who had just opened an office up the hill, a nice boy, just out of school, and she asked him if he would go out on the boat for one trip and keep an eye on her husband. The doctor had never been on a boat in his life, but he was young and he wanted to see the ocean, so he went. Three weeks.

He was seasick the first five days and lived on crackers. After that he got his legs, and he sat on a fish box and watched Francis. Watched him read the water. Watched him find the birds working. Watched him run that big net around a school of tuna and draw the bottom of it shut like the strings on a purse, and fill the wells in two sets.

The night they came back in, the whole hall was waiting. Francis's wife, his mother with her rosary, the brother-in-law, all of us. The doctor came in through the door, still a little green, and the room went quiet, and the brother-in-law stood up and said, "Well, Doctor? You watched him for three weeks. Is he crazy or isn't he?"

And the doctor took off his hat, and he looked around at every one of us, and he said, "Gentlemen, I have examined him from every angle. The man is perfectly seine."

Inside of four years nearly every boat on the Point had gone over to the nets, including mine, and not one man ever apologized to Francis. Elizabeth says I've been telling this one since 1959 and it was bad then too.

2. The Cook's Garden

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 6 of 8

Just after the war we had a cook named Alfred, from Madeira, who could not cook without fresh herbs. Parsley, mint, bay, cilantro, and thyme most of all. Alfred put thyme in the fish stew, the beans, the rice, the eggs, and I would not swear he didn't put it in the coffee. The trouble is that on a trip of six or eight weeks nothing green stays green.

So Alfred built a garden. He nailed together six wooden boxes, filled them with dirt from his own backyard, carried them down the hill one at a time, and lashed them to the roof of the wheelhouse. He watered them out of his own ration of fresh water and covered them with a tarp when the spray came over. The skipper, Howard, said the boat looked like a flower shop that had run away to sea. Men from other boats rowed over just to look at it. And it grew. The thyme especially. By September he had thyme hanging down over the side of the box like an old man's beard.

Then one trip we're loaded and ready to sail on the morning tide, five o'clock. The night before, Alfred discovers he is out of garlic, and garlic you cannot grow on a roof. So he goes up the hill to his cousin's house to borrow some, and his cousin has a bottle of wine open, and the cousin's wife has made a pot of beans, and the long and short of it is that Alfred falls asleep on his cousin's sofa with a sack of garlic in his lap.

Five o'clock comes. The tide turns. Howard looks at the dock, looks at his watch, and says, "We go." And we go, without a cook, but with all of the cook's garden.

Alfred wakes up at six. He runs down the hill with his garlic and gets to the end of the dock just in time to see the boat going out the channel past the point, and all his herbs on the wheelhouse roof waving goodbye to him in the breeze.

We were gone six weeks. We ate very badly. But we watered that garden every single day, because we were afraid not to. When we came in, Alfred was standing at the end of the dock. He climbed up on the roof before he said hello to anybody, and he went through every box, leaf by leaf, and then he climbed down and stood in front of the skipper and said, "Howard. You left without me."

And Howard, who was a man of very few words, pointed up at the roof and said, "Alfred. Thyme and tide wait for no man."

Ray says he saw it coming from the first box of dirt. Then why didn't he leave?

3. Stone and Moss

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 7 of 8

In 1949 a young fellow named Roberto came down from Bakersfield looking for work on the boats. He was a good worker and a good kid, but he had never been on the ocean, and his first week out he could not keep his feet. Every time the boat rolled, Roberto rolled. Port to starboard, starboard to port, across the deck like a barrel. We tried everything. New boots. A rope around his middle. Ginger from the cook. Nothing.

The first time he went over the side, in the bay, before we'd even left, he went straight down like a rock, and when we fished him out the crew started calling him Stone. It stuck. Stone rolling across the deck became a regular sight, like the sunrise.

Now, that boat had a cat. A big gray tom, the color of the green stuff that grows on a dock piling, so of course his name was Moss. Moss had lived on that boat longer than most of the crew and he did not care for any of us. That trip Moss had a sore paw, and the skipper wanted him taken to the animal doctor the minute we got in. But if Moss knew you wanted him, you would never see him again. So the skipper put up a prize: a bottle of good Madeira to the man who could catch that cat before we made port.

Everybody tried. Nobody tried harder than Stone, because he loved that cat, and the cat, as far as anybody could tell, almost liked him back. Every day Stone would creep up on Moss sleeping on the hatch cover, and get his hands right around him, and the boat would roll, and away Stone would go, rolling to the rail, and Moss would open one eye and watch him go by. Port. Starboard. Port. Six days.

On the last morning it was flat calm, calm as a bathtub, and Stone got closer than he had ever got. He had Moss by the scruff. And just then the only swell of the whole day came under the boat, and away Stone went, rolling across the deck, empty-handed, for the last time. The engineer, Wayne, scooped Moss up with a dip net while he was watching Stone go by, and walked him up to the wheelhouse.

The skipper handed Wayne the bottle, and then he looked over at Stone lying against the rail, and he said, kindly, "Sorry, son. A rolling Stone gathers no Moss."

Roberto got his sea legs that fall and fished twenty-two years. He still rolls a little when he walks, but only on land. He groaned with the others.

4. The Gift

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 5 of 8

Glenn and Roy were rival skippers from the time they were boys in short pants throwing rocks at each other on the beach. If Glenn came in with forty tons, Roy came in with forty-one. If Roy bought a new compass, Glenn bought two. They went to the same church and sat on opposite sides of it.

Glenn had a secret spot, a bank off the coast of Baja where the fish always seemed to be, and he never told a soul where it was. Not his crew. Not his wife. When he got near it he sent everybody below. He also had a lucky feather jig his father had tied for him in 1925, white feathers with one red bead, and one day out on that bank a big fish hit it and broke the line, and the jig was gone. Glenn was so upset he didn't eat for two days.

A week later, back in port, here comes Roy down the dock, smiling, which nobody had ever seen, with a big fat horse mackerel on a string. He holds it out and he says, "Glenn, a present. For your wife. She makes the best escabeche on the Point."

Glenn's wife was standing right there, and she said, "Glenn, say thank you, don't be rude." And Glenn said thank you. But he could not stand it. Roy never gave anybody anything in his life. So Glenn took the fish, and right there in front of everybody he opened its mouth and looked down inside it.

And there, way down in there, was his father's feather jig with the one red bead.

Which meant Roy had been fishing on Glenn's secret bank. They didn't speak for a year. And that is why, to this day, the old men on the Point will tell you: never look a gift horse mackerel in the mouth. You might find out where it's been.

Glenn sits at our table. He did not groan. He said, "That's not how it happened," which is what he always says. Roy has been gone since 1991, God rest him, and he would tell it differently too.

5. The Fado Singer

A one-cup story · Groans at the table: 8 of 8, and one from the singer

For the young people: fado is the sad song of Portugal. Songs about the sea, about the ones who went away on it, about missing something so much it aches. There's a word for that in Portuguese, saudade, and no good word for it in English.

At the hall we had a fado singer named Michael who sang so sadly that grown fishermen cried into their soup and didn't care who saw. He sang at every festa, every wedding, every anniversary, and a few christenings where, honestly, it was not called for. Fifty years he sang. He is ninety-three now and he still comes on Fridays, but he can't hold the long notes the way he could. Every year he sings a little softer. Last year you had to lean in to hear him. This year you have to lean in and hold your breath.

The other night one of the young fellows from the cannery days asked me, "Clyde, what's going to happen to Michael when he can't sing at all?"

And I told him what my father used to say. Old fado singers never die. They just fado away.

Michael groaned louder than anybody. Then he stood up and sang one, and you could hear every word in the back of the hall.

6. The Sea Lion

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 7 of 8

Anybody who has ever tied up in San Diego Bay knows the sea lions. They lie on the bait barges and the buoys and bark all night, and they will take a fish right off your deck if you turn your back, and look at you while they eat it.

In 1955 we had a young deckhand named Ray, a good boy, hardworking, and every time a fish went missing from the deck while we were tied up, Ray said a sea lion took it. "Skipper, I had a beautiful yellowfin right here, and a big bull came up over the rail and took it." Every night in port, another fish. The cook was missing fish for supper. The skipper was missing fish from the tally. That was a very hungry sea lion.

Now, there was a café at the foot of the dock, and a pretty girl named Virginia who worked the counter, and I will tell you that Ray had been eating there every night since we got in, and that the café had been serving a lot of very fresh fish.

So one night the skipper hides behind the bait tank with his coffee and waits. Around ten o'clock he hears the barking. Ark! Ark! Ark! Loud, right there on the deck. He looks out, and there is Ray, barking like a sea lion with all his heart, with a yellowfin under each arm, going down the plank toward the café.

The skipper steps out. "Ray."

Ray freezes. "Skipper! You won't believe it, a sea lion just..."

And the skipper says, "Ray. I have been on the water for thirty years. I know a sea lion when I see one."

Ray and Virginia have been married forty-two years. Ray was at the table, and instead of groaning, he barked.

People who have sat through these stories:

since Kristi put them up in March 1999

Send Grandpa your own stories, or your groans. Kristi reads him every letter:
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Last updated Friday, September 24, 1999