On a September evening, close to sunset, you'll see a stirring on the surface: for a moment, a hundred metres off, the sea seems to boil, gulls drop all at once onto that spot, and then everything settles. A boat in the distance changes course. This is not the sign of fishing in the cove, but of a shoal passing through. The sea is carrying news you can see with your eyes.
Fishermen wait for that stirring. For them, September is the month the year really begins.
The Shoal from the North
The bonito spends its summer in the north, in cooler water; when the air begins to cool it starts down toward the south, toward warmer seas. This migration becomes clear most years with September and carries on through the autumn. The bluefish follows a similar road. The shoals thicken as they pass through narrows, straits, places where the current quickens; and that is the moment the fisherman waits for. When exactly they'll come through, no one can quite say — it depends on the water temperature, on the wind, on how that particular year is running. The old fishermen watch not the calendar but the colour of the water and the behaviour of the gulls. "If the gulls have gathered, there's fish," they say; more often than not they're proved right.
The Signs That Read the Season
The return of the fish is not an event on its own but part of a chain of signs. The water begins to cool, the days shorten, the evening light draws back early. The surface of the sea no longer ruffles as late in the afternoon as it did. All of this happens at once, and the fish feels all of it before we do. A shoal crossing the mouth of a cove is, in truth, the most concrete sentence there is for saying the season has turned. To sit on deck and watch it gives a truer measure of time than turning a page of the calendar.
There is, of course, a side of this plenty that turns toward the table. September bonito, even if not yet fully fattened, is fine on the grill for its very plainness; it gathers its true oil in the weeks that follow. But the point isn't only the eating. To see a shoal pass is to be reminded that the sea is a living, working thing with a rhythm of its own. Even at anchor in a cove the sea doesn't stop; beneath you a journey continues, whether you notice it or not.
When the gulls scatter the water goes flat again. The shoal has passed, and gone. For a moment the sea showed you the season, and then turned back to itself.
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