The bird has no chance.
The flying fish are too big for him and they go too fast.
He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual movements of the bird. That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are moving out too fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick up a stray and perhaps my big fish is around them. My big fish must be somewhere.
The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it.
The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple.
As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now.
He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish.
The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land.
But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat.
It turned on its side and then righted itself.