The Great Beer Fight

Theft and equity on the water

It all started on the deck at Soul Fly Lodge just over three years ago. My fishing buddy and business partner, Earl Harper, he of notable status in professional photography circles, came out of the lodge’s bar with a cold, bright Kalik — the Bahamian brew that really only tastes any good when you’re drinking it in the Bahamas. 

The beer, bubbly and chilled and served in a small-ish glass (the lodge offers it up on tap, so smaller beers work best if you want to drink cold beer) looked so damn good on this particularly hot and oppressive September day, that I just couldn’t take my eyes off of it. We’d spent the day under the relentless, late-summer sun chasing everything from bonefish and permit to triggerfish and snappers in the many hidden nooks and crannies of the Berry Islands, and my own glass was bone dry. I could readily find another — the bar was steps away. But for some reason, Earl’s beer hypnotized me.

Image by Alexa. Pixabay

As he set the glass down on the table next to me and then plopped into an adjacent chair, I became mesmerized by the little golden bubbles sprinting to the top of the glass, only to get caught in the appreciable foam head. More little bubbles lifted off from the bottom of the frosty glass and I realized that I had to drink that beer. 

It looked over at Earl, who had turned his back on me and was in a conversation with our guide for the day — the incomparable Travis Sands. We’d come oh-so-close to landing a permit that day, but the fly I cast ended up snagged in the back of sting ray, and we were all laughing at the odd misfortune that only permit anglers can appreciate. As I pulled tight on what I thought was a permit, Travis was the first to realize that I’d inadvertently hooked a 50-pound ray and that the two permit that were following it were busy dive-bombing the stuck crab fly so perfectly attached to the ray. Earl was laughing. Loudly. 

So, as he giggled at Travis’ admittedly comical retelling of the story, I reached over and grabbed that ice-cold draft of crisp and light Kalik and downed it in three gulps. I slyly replaced the glass at Earl’s elbow. A few seconds later, Earl turned around and grabbed the now-empty glass, still cold and showing the leavings of a mighty chug. He looked at the beer. Then he looked at me. 

“What did you do?” he asked, completely serious. His face went from a happy grin to an annoyed grimace in mere seconds. He looked at the empty glass again. Then back at me.  

“Yeah, that’s a funny story about that ray, huh?” I asked. I’m sure there was a bit of foam on my mustache as a little beer burp found its way out into the world. “Yup. Funny shit.”

The barracuda

I don’t think Earl ever really forgave me for the shameless beer theft. And it was base-level burglary at its finest. Smooth and without remorse. Like that asshole in college who stole all my Jimmy Buffett cassettes from the glove compartment of my 1980 Toyota Corolla while I ran into the convenience store for a six-pack of 3.2-percent Olympia. Earl started guarding his beer around me like an orphan protecting his gruel. 

When I look too longingly at a beer in his possession, he’s quick to engage. 

“Don’t even think about it.”

Then, about a year later, Earl and I were in Mexico, where the beer of choice stocked into the lunch coolers by the lodge staff was Sol — or, as we put it, the Kalik of the Yucatan. Light. Crisp. Best served stunningly cold. But, as Earl and I joked, it was cold when it went into the cooler. By the time we could reasonably drink it without looking like a couple of back-alley drunks, the Mayan sun had beaten down on the cooler and turned those useless “cold packs” into moderately chilled containers of water. And the beer? Well … 

It was here that I learned that Earl isn’t opposed to me drinking beer. But he is opposed to me drinking more beer than he drinks. He has a beer abacus in his head, and it’s all about equity. Me? I grew up with two brothers. I literally fought over food. To hell with the other guy.

So, by the third sultry day on the flats, I’d taken to having an “early beer,” or, as I explained to the guide, a cold beer before it’s not cold anymore. And, Earl, ever the stickler for equity, kept a meticulous beer count in his head. 

As Earl stood atop the casting platform while our guide poled us closer to a nice school of Yucatan bones sometime around 8:30 a.m., I reached stealthily into the drink cooler and dug deep to the bottom for the coldest can I could touch. Slowly lifting it out, I quietly replaced the lid. As Earl loaded his rod for his cast to the fish, I flipped the tab on the beer and watched as his cast fell apart. 

He looked back at me sitting on the bench seat, mid-panga. Retrieving his dropped haul and shaking his head as if to instill shame, he just glared at me. I shrugged my shoulders, and tipped the beer his way. 

“Cheers, brother,” I said. 

“OK, that’s one for you. You’re gonna be sorry when we’re heading back and I’m the only one drinking beer.”

Fair point. But, by the time Earl was drinking his beer, I knew it would be consumed at that ubiquitous “tepid cooler temperature” — that temperature that makes you think twice before putting the potato salad on your picnic plate after an hour of sitting in the sun. And light Caribbean beer served at that temperature is the equivalent of eating cold green bean casserole. Bleck.

An hour or so later, Earl and I were out of the boat, taking pictures of another typically handsome Yucatan bonefish. After I released the fish, he handed me his camera gear and I placed it carefully in the boat. I turned around and realized that Earl was taking a quick break — the sound urine hitting the water was unmistakable. I made a predictably snide remark and Earl turned and splashed me from the bay he just peed in. 

“What did you do?” I asked, legitimately annoyed. “Did you just indirectly pee on me?”

He smirked, and got back in the boat. 

A few minutes later, we spied a respectable barracuda. From the casting platform, I made a cast with a Tarpon Toad, and I’ll be damned if the fish didn’t turn on the fly and just absolutely savage it. I wasn’t anything massive, but, ever the photographer, Earl thought it might be good for a macro shot. He climbed out of the boat, camera in hand, and I proceeded to wrangle the fish closer so he could get a solid photo. 

As I brought the two-foot-long toothy flats monster closer, I kept a close eye on Earl. Fishing with a photographer takes self-awareness, and sometimes you have to be aware for the photographer, too. As he dialed in the long lens, eye to the viewfinder, the barracuda erupted on a final run, and seemingly lunged right at Earl. In hindsight, I might have been able to redirect the fish, but I didn’t. Predictably, Earl let out an appreciable string of swear words as he jumped back out of the way of the flying predator.

“What the hell, man?” he asked from the water, holding aloft his camera and watching the still-hooked barracuda circle in front of him. “Did you just throw a barracuda at me?”

Of course I didn’t throw a barracuda. But I was OK with him thinking I had.

“You peed on me!” I replied. 

“You drank the coldest beer in the cooler!” 

Ah… again with the beer. And that’s when we knew this battle would never end. Not ever. 

The solution

As we wandered the aisles of the surprisingly respectable liquor store in far-off Whitehorse earlier this summer, Earl and I were pretty picky about the bottles of brown liquor we’d be taking with us to the lodge. Had we been shopping at the duty-free store in Cancun, we’d have most certainly bought nice bottles of rum and tequila. But in the Yukon? Canadian whisky, for sure. Maybe a little rye, too. 

What we were less picky about was the beer. Having shared boats for a few years now, and still in the throes of the mighty beer fight I’d instigated that steamy day in the Bahamas, the solution was simple. Earl would be less interested in keeping tabs on his internal beer abacus if we just had a lot of beer on the boat every single day. 

And, in Canada, Kokanee beer comes in 355-milliliter cans (just a hair over 12 ounces) sold in giant packs of 48 cans. We got two of them. Over the course of a week, we might drink 96 beers, I thought. It gets plenty hot in Canada in the summer. It could be done. If we didn’t, we’d donate the leavings to the lodge staff. Nobody throws beer away. 

And, we figured, Kokanee is the equivalent of Kalik or Sol or PBR — perfectly delightful on a hot summer day and easy to drink, so long as it’s served ice-cold. So, when we got to the lodge, we procured a big cooler from the kitchen, and dumped one whole “suitcase” of Kokanee into it. We topped it off with ice. Lots of ice.

And, as we motored around Aishihik Lake or down the Kathleen River on a mission to catch the region’s rare native rainbows, we both took comfort in a cooler literally bursting with ice-cold beer. I remember one day, as we beached the boat and were enjoying lunch on a sandbar, mid-river, Earl opened the cooler and just looked at all those ice-blue cans of Kokanee. I chuckled a bit when he nodded appreciably. 

“I gotta say,” he said, “nothing is more assuring than a full cooler of beer.” 

I nodded. “I agree. Gimme one.” 

It’ll never end

A couple of days later, and some serious boat fishing for lake trout and pike under our belts, the level of beer left in the cooler began to noticeably subside. And we’d already tapped the second box of Kokanee. 

As our guide motored us across the lake, I reached for the cooler, realizing that Earl was glaring at me. I felt like Frodo Baggins must have felt when the Eye of Mordor homed in on him.

“How many is that for you?” he asked, the abacus clearly kicking in.

“I have no idea,” I said. He kind of smirked. Then, I could tell that a wave of acceptance kind of washed over him. Not surrender. He’ll never surrender. But sometimes, you can tell when someone finally comes to terms with an issue. 

“Well,” he said, looking out over the lake, “you better give me one, too, then.”