The house has no straight lines left in it. It was built from the ribs of old dhows, the wooden trading boats that have worked this coast since long before anyone thought to write it down, and every plank in it has already had one life at sea. You feel it the moment you step inside. The walls are hung with rods and gaffs and photographs gone the colour of weak tea, men holding fish that no longer swim in numbers like that. My father has stood in rooms like this his whole life. I grew up in the back of them.

We came to Pangani for the oldest reason there is: because a bigger fish lives here than anywhere we had been, and because of a man we both admire, who understood better than anyone that the sea gives you nothing you have not earned. The point of Hemingway was never the itinerary. It was the posture. Sit with the thing. Want it enough to suffer for it. Then be gracious when it comes, or when it doesn't.

The first morning the ocean was a sheet of glass, so still it felt rude to start the engine. Captain Benny took us out anyway, past the mangroves and the reef edge where the water goes from milk to ink in the length of a boat. We trolled. For an hour nothing happened, which is the part no one photographs, the long, bright, empty patience that the whole sport is actually made of.

Then the outrigger snapped and the reel screamed and the sea, forty metres back, opened up. A sailfish came out of it the way a thought arrives, all at once and taller than you expected. My father was on his feet before I was, forty years of it in him, calling the drag, and for the next thirty minutes the boat forgot every argument it had ever had about dead writers.

We will go back for the Marlin. Of course we will. That is the other thing the old man taught me without ever saying it: you always leave one fish in the water, so that there is always a reason to return.