Bad Luck Bananas and Captain Sarah

This past NBA season, my sons and their friends engaged in an all-out fantasy basketball slugfest. My third son Nathan took it to another level, employing two artificial intelligence engines to analyze matchups, injuries, and waiver-wire opportunities. He won. His prize was a fishing trip to Alaska with Dad.

Nathan and I headed north to the Kenai Peninsula. Everyone calls him the new improved version of Rich, and I cannot argue. We spent one of the days fishing for halibut out of Ninilchik on Cook Inlet, sharing a memory that will last forever and deepening a bond that matters more than any trophy ever could.

Our charter captain sent detailed instructions about what to wear, what to bring, and very prominently, what not to bring: NO BANANAS! It turns out there is a long-standing superstition among fishermen that bananas on boats bring bad luck, and Captain Sarah was serious about it.

What I discovered instead of some grizzly old Alaskan was Captain Sarah and her daughter Savannah, a soon-to-be captain herself. They were delightful, articulate, professional, and genuinely skilled. Cook Inlet has enormous tidal swings approaching 30 feet, and huge tractors literally pull fishing boats across the beach and back them into the ocean. You sit in the boat while the tractor submerges you into the Pacific, the boat floats off, and away you go.

We slayed them. Everyone caught halibut. The day was absolutely fantastic until partway through, I watched an older woman and her husband pull out an actual yellow, peel-it-yourself, maritime disaster producing banana.

I was mortified.

By that point I had completely converted to the superstition. We all watched in horror as these two leisurely ate their bananas while Captain Sarah and Savannah remained gracious and professional, their eyes the size of saucers. When the bananas were finished, they wouldn’t even touch the peels. They grabbed them with plastic, carried them to the edge of the boat, threw them overboard, and collectively exhaled.

Here is what happened: the halibut stopped biting.

Surely the lesson had been learned. It had not. Toward the end of the trip, the woman reached into her bag and pulled out another blasted banana. Captain Sarah and Savannah eyes flashed and went the size of saucers giving the unmistakable look of what everyone else was thinking, Seriously?

But somewhere between banana number one and banana number two, I realized this story was never about bananas at all. It was about respect.

If someone invites you into their home and asks you to take off your shoes, take off your shoes. If you enter another culture with a meaningful tradition, honor it. If someone’s spiritual practice differs from yours, you don’t have to believe it to treat it with dignity. And if the woman responsible for keeping you alive in the middle of Cook Inlet asks you not to bring a banana onto her boat, eat an apple.

Whether the banana superstition is scientifically valid is beside the point entirely.

Captain Sarah was responsible for us, navigating enormous tides, breaking waves, weather, fishing equipment, and a boat full of people. At the end of the day she had to accelerate that boat through the surf and place us precisely onto a trailer attached to a tractor waiting in the ocean. That is not the moment I want my captain wondering whether the banana curse is coming for us.

There is an attitude that occasionally creeps into our lives saying the rules apply to everyone else but not to me. My preferences matter more. My convenience matters more. I deserve the exception. That attitude doesn’t make us sophisticated. It makes us oblivious.

Respect other people’s homes, cultures, traditions, practices, and boundaries. Respect the person serving you and the person guiding you. Have enough self-awareness to recognize you are not always the center of the universe. And when Captain Sarah says no bananas, for the love of halibut, no bananas.

Rich Christiansen