But,he thought,I keep them with precision.Only I have no luck any more.But who knows?Maybe to day.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.
Sometimes someone would speak in a boat.But most of the boats were silent except for the dip of the oars.They spread apart after they were out of the mouth of the harbor and each one headed for the part of the ocean where he hoped to find fish.The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. He saw the phosphorescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean.Here there were concentrations of shrimp and bait and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them.
The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it.The water was a dark blue now,so dark that it was almost purple.As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now.He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish.The strange light the sun made in the water,now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land.But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized,iridescent ,gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat.It turned on its side and then righted itself.It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water.