Inside the Dangerous, Secretive World of Extreme Fishing

Photographs by Peter Fisher

The wave comes, throat-high and hungry. The last thing I see before it sweeps me off the rock and into the ocean is a man in a wetsuit leaning his shoulder into a wall of water. When we swam out here around 2 a.m. and hoisted ourselves onto the algae-slick face of a boulder, he had warned me: “If you go in here, it won’t be fun.” And he was right.

I manage to keep hold of my fishing rod, and I’m reeling in lost line and treading water and trying to forget...