The tuna,the fishermen called all the fish of that species tuna and only distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to trade them for baits, were down again.The sun was hot now and the old man felt it on the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down his back as he rowed.
The sun was two hours higher now and it did not 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.
If they don't travel too fast I will get into them,the old man thought,and he watched the school working the water white and the bird now dropping and dipping into the bait fish that were forced to the surface in their panic.
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.