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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Out There
Gettin' Jiggy
In the dark of winter, monsters lurk near the glow of Seattle. And man, that's when the jigging's good.

By Steven Rinella


	Maria Beppu, co-proprietor of Linc's Tackle in Seattle (Photograph by Brian Smale)

NIGHTTIME COMES IN THE FORM OF LIGHT rather than darkness when you're hanging around the waterfront in Seattle. Airplanes crisscrossing overhead turn into flashing pinpricks of green and red, and the Space Needle, at the foot of Queen Anne Hill, blazes alive like a desert casino. Soon the lights from ferry terminals, souvenir shops, and clam chowder joints glitter across the surface of Puget Sound, and the waterfront's numbered network of piers becomes a meeting ground for skate punks, panhandlers, yuppies, cops, drunk students, random passersby, and tired tourists dragging their crabby kids.

Sometimes, though, around December, when the solar calendar and the lunar phase align with the earth's rotation just so, an entirely different kind of nighttime meeting occurs here, and all hell breaks loose. Millions of creatures rise out of Puget Sound's depths and look to the emerging lights of Seattle with hungry eyes. Each slimy and voracious predator is armed with ten sucker-bearing appendages, a jet that shoots an inky substance to confuse its enemies, a sharp, pointy beak used to gouge hunks of flesh from prey, and the ability to dodge forward, backward, sideways, or in a 360-degree turn with lightning speed. No anchovy or crustacean is safe from Loligo opalescens, otherwise known as the Pacific, or market, squid. And no squid is safe from the Seattle squid jiggers who flock to the docks at dusk and stay into the wee hours of the night, hoping to catch a few.

I first heard about squid jigging from my longtime buddy Matt Drost, a 30-year-old graduate student and bluegill-fishing Midwesterner who's lived in Seattle for five years. His message on my machine—"We're seriously missing out, man; we should be squid jigging"—had the urgency of someone recently hooked into a pyramid scheme. I live in Montana, where fishing becomes nauseating in its predictability: white people in brown fishing vests, all catching trout. The opportunity to outwit a close cousin of the notoriously crafty octopus and the vicious giant squid was very tempting. Plus, killing a squid and eating it isn't looked down on like whacking a trout is, probably because trout seem serene and gentle, whereas a squid looks like it would kill you if it had the chance.

When Matt, who by now had gotten a taste of jigging himself, phoned again to announce that the peak of squid season would coincide with his winter break, I bought myself an insulated one-piece mechanic's suit for 20 bucks at a pawn shop, figuring I'd wear it over my styling duds to keep them free of squid ink. I threw it into the trunk of my gray '87 Subaru and took off.

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