Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [60]
We took some photographs and released the fish back into the lake. Now, of course, I was under pressure. She’d caught one and I hadn’t. That bothered me for a long time. After I was no longer governor, every day when I finished golfing, I’d come home, go down to the dock, and do maybe fifty casts before dinner. One day, almost a year later, I was using a floating silver-and-black Rappala lure as bait. I threw it over by a weed bed, and let it sit until I saw all the rings of the splash disappear. Then I slowly started reeling. It would wiggle a little on the surface and had just started to go underwater when—wham!! Out of the water with it came this huge muskie!
“Now I was in the same predicament you were. I’m by myself, using the same ten-pound test line. Yet with the muskie, you can’t let them have any slack, because if they leap out of the water, they’ll spit the bait.”
“And I wasn’t even home!” Terry recalls.
“So I battled this fish in and out three times. In the interim I went over and got my landing net, dropped it into the lake, and pinned it against my waist, so that I’m leaning against it in the water. I finally tired him out to a point—I don’t know how much time had gone by—and he was right underneath the net. I took a chance, dropped the pole, grabbed the net, and scooped him.”
“And how big was he?” Terry can’t stifle a grin, I can see.
“He was forty-two inches—only three inches smaller than yours—but actually mine was thicker. Yours was more long and thin.”
I pause a moment, then go on: “The amazing thing about both fish was, I never took the hook out of either one. The minute they were in the net, they spit it out. About this time you’d arrived home, and come down there with Dexter. I remember we slid the muskie back into the lake, holding him by the back tail, rocking him slowly back and forth to get the water going through his gills again. He stayed upright, and literally sat there for five minutes right at our feet.”
“Then you pushed him out towards the dock, and he went under that, and stayed there.”
Terry had gotten her camera, and taken some amazing photographs of him breathing under the water. It was getting dark. He finally outlasted us, and we went in. Next morning I got up early, went out to check the shoreline, looked under the dock. And he was gone.
“So do you want to stop and fish here?” Terry asks now. I say no, I’m still determined to make time toward Guerrero Negro. Why, given what we are soon to face, I don’t honestly know.
Except for probably a half dozen forays across into Tijuana when I was in the Navy training near San Diego, I’ve only been to Mexico one other time alone. That was in 1986, not long after I quit wrestling and the day after I finished broadcasting for WrestleMania 2 at the L.A. Sports Arena. I’d been cast as a professional killer named Blain, playing alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the sci-fi movie Predator. It was to be filmed on location in Jalisco, Palenque, and the jungles around Puerto Vallarta.
Kill the alien. That was the basic premise of the film, which ended up making about $60 million in box office after it hit the theaters in the summer of ’87. I was part of the commando team in pursuit, chewing tobacco and carrying a machine gun into the bush. I insisted on doing my own rappelling, and got along real well with the stuntmen. Even though the alien bumped me off halfway through the movie, it wasn’t long before I uttered a famous line that Fox Studios even made T-shirts of: “I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed.” That also became the title of my first book.
The best thing about doing Predator was becoming good friends with Arnold. Who would have imagined then that we’d both end up as governors? We hit it off right from the start. We’d get up and work out together at 5:00 a.m. One day, I decided to oneup Arnold. I started at 4:45 after soaking myself with mineral water, so it looked like I was drenched