Life with a harpoon fisherman

It didn't take long for us to get some responses to the extra roommate ad we put out.  One of our potential suitors introduced himself as Australian and a lot of fun, "like an enjoyable drink."  As much I unabashedly love Australians, we crossed him off the list fairly quickly.  The next email was more promising; the guy's name was Pedro and in a very direct, cleanly written message he told us he was clean, a non-smoker, and had shared apartments with foreigners in the past, all things we wanted to hear.  The only red flag was that he was thirty, which seemed old for someone to be sharing an apartment with three 22 year olds.  Nevertheless, we agreed to meet him and show him the apartment.  My phone number had been the one on the ad, so I was the one who went down to meet him and walk him back to the piso.  

I arrived slightly early to our meeting spot and looked around for someone who seemed like a Pedro.  Within seconds, I saw a guy coming up to me.  ¿Eres Andreu? Pedro asked.  We exchanged greetings and walked back to the piso together, when I learned a little bit about what he does with his life.  He works on a boat in the port doing repair and maintenance work, but he also goes to school part-time and fishes recreationally.  I found out that he was only a semester away from graduating from university.

I had also forgotten how adulthood works in Spain.  A 30 year old here acts more like a 23 or 24 year old in the United States, and Pedro was no different.  The night after he had moved in with us, he went out at 1:30 in the morning and didn't get back until noon the next day.  The Spanish nightlife is unbelievable.  I don't know how they do it; it's so beyond me.  

But age differences aside, Pedro has turned out to be an awesome roommate.  He is, true to his message, very clean and never smoked (he has since told me that he has smoked one cigarette in his life) and is a genuinely nice person.  In addition to the benefit of having a Spanish speaker in the house to help us with our Spanish, we gained the not-inconsiderable advantage of having a native living companion to deal with the elements of Spanish household business that we didn't know or had some difficulty handling, i.e. changing the butane can when it ran out of gas (which powers our hot water heater) and dealing with any technicians.  This was both easier for us and made it a great deal harder to take advantage of us.  He is also, on top of everything else, quite a good cook.  His first weekend in our piso, he cooked me a fish he'd caught the week before.  

Sorry, did I say caught?  I meant shot with a harpoon.  It's an easy mistake.

I want you to summon up every image that you have of amateur fishing--lazy sunday afternoons, floppy hat shading the eyes as you take a nap in the twelve foot dinghy, etc.  Toss them aside; they have no place in this discussion.  Now summon all the images you have of commerical/professional fishing--huge nets hauling in loads of fish (or crabs; thank you, Deadliest Catch) among 20 foot seas, Glen Andrews' 10 minute battle with a giant bass that you saw last Saturday morning on ESPN, whatever.  Throw them all away.  What Pedro does makes them like toddlers picking through a tide pool.

Why?  Notice that all these types of fishing, whether amateur or professional, have one thing in common; they wait for the fish to come to them.  Not Pedro.  He straps on a wetsuit and mask, grabs his four foot long harpoon, squeezes into his flippers, and hunts the damn fish on their own turf.  He falls out of the boat, dives down to more than 70 feet below the surface, and woe betide any fish foolish enough to get within range of his harpoon.  Oh, and he does all this without oxygen; he just holds his breath for 3 minutes.  He's not shooting guppies, either; he got one, a grouper, that weighed 200 pounds.

What'd you say? What's that leaning against the door jamb?  Oh, that's just my roommate's harpoon gun.  No no, it's real, I swear.  What?  No, of course he's not a whaler like Captain Ahab.  Ahad stayed on the ship when he hunted his catch.  Pansy.

So yeah, Pedro's pretty cool.  We all like him and he likes us. He cooks, he cleans, and he helps us practice Spanish.

And I don't know if I mentioned this, but he's a harpoon fisherman.