"Do you want coffee?" the boy asked. "We'll put the gear in the boat and then get some." They had coffee from condensed milk cans at an early morning place that served fishermen. "How did you sleep old man?" the boy asked. He was waking up now although it was still hard for him to leave his sleep. "Very well, Manolin," the old man said. "I feel confident today." "So do I," the boy said. "Now I must get your sardines and mine and your fish baits. He brings our gear himself. He never wants anyone to carry anything."

"We're different," the old man said. "I let you carry things when you were five years old." "I know it," the boy said. "I'll be right back. Have another coffee. We have credit here." He walked off, bare-footed on the coral rocks, to the ice house where the baits were stored. The old man drank his coffee slowly. It was all he would have all day and he knew that he should take it. For a long time now eating had bored him and he never carried a lunch. He had a bottle of water in the bow of the skiff and that was all he needed for the day.

There were other boats from the other beaches going out to sea and the old man heard the dip and push of their oars even though he could not see them now the moon was below the hills. 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.

The boy was back now with the sardines and the two baits wrapped in a newspaper and they went down the trail to the skiff, feeling the pebbled sand under their feet, and lifted the skiff and slid her into the water. "Good luck old man." "Good luck," the old man said. He fitted the rope lashings of the oars onto the thole pins and, leaning forward against the thrust of the blades in the water, he began to row out of the harbor in the dark.

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 flour of the ocean. Here there were concentrations of shrimp and baitfish 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.