MANy YEARS ACO, while I was vacationing in Northeast Harbor, Maine at the home of John Adams (the most wly-humored barber that yachting village has probably ever boasted), I went deep-sca fishing off Bar Harbor in Frenchman's Bay with a guy named Davis, who owned an old gray tub. We started out after lunch. Bar Harbor rolled behind us and disappeared around a point, and we saw the Porcupine Islands in the bay. The sun, glancing off the water, seemed to shower our faces with glass splinters. I asked Davis if we were going to veer southeast toward Schooner Head. He said he didn't know the fish over there whereas he knew them pretty well over here and we'd slow down and try for a spot. He anchored the tub and got out a keg of clams, which he and I shucked while the others readied their drop lines--heavy cord with hrge double hooks and huge lead sinkers. The clams stank. Davis cursed the man who had sold them to him. Davis was about thirty, with a lean figure in his basque shirt and dungarees, and his face and neck had been seamed by the sun. It was lovely in that stinking old tub. Cormorants flew by close to us, and as I paused in my work to watch them I was aware of theintensely blue water and the spines of the green and lavender moun-tains on Mt. Desert Island. We dropped our lines. Soon cod andhaddock started to take our bait, big fat pink and gray fish, oily andcold, which I gaffed onto the deck. They flopped noisily in the stem,the gulls watching them, first one eye and then the other. We tossedthe small fish high into the air, and the large Arctic gulls (whichDavis called attic gulls) swooped and tore them out of the beaks of vii