A Best Fisherman,the old man

I worked the deep wells for a week and did nothing, he thought. Today I’ll work out
where the schools of bonito and albacore are and maybe there will be a big one with them.
Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait
was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth were
down in the blue
water at one [30] hundred and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms. Each bait
hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, tied and sewed solid and
all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, was covered with fresh
sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that they made a half-garland on
the projecting steel. There was no part of the hook that a great fish could feel which was
not sweet smelling and good tasting.
The boy had given him two fresh small tunas, or albacores, which hung on the two
deepest lines like plummets and, on the others, he had a big blue runner and a yellow
jack that had been used before; but they were in good condition still and had the
excellent sardines to give them scent and attractiveness. Each line, as thick around as a
big pencil, was looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait
would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made
fast to the other spare coils so that, if it were necessary, a fish could take out over three
hundred fathoms of line.
Now the man watched the dip of the three sticks over the side of the skiff and rowed
gently to keep the [31] lines straight up and down and at their proper depths. It was quite
light and any moment now the sun would rise.
The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats, low on
the water and well in toward the shore, spread out across the current. Then the sun was
brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back
at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it. He looked down
into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.
He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the
stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that
swam there. Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty
fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.
But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. But who
knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather
be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
The sun was two hours higher now and it did not [32] hurt his eyes so much to look
into the east. There were only three boats in sight now and they showed very low and far
inshore.
All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes, he thought. Yet they are still good. In the
evening I can look straight into it without getting the blackness. It has more force in the
evening too. But in the morning it is painful.
Just then he saw a man-of-war bird with his long black wings circling in the sky
ahead of him. He made a quick drop, slanting down on his back-swept wings, and then