I’m a numbers guy. I’d rather be catching tons of fish than hunting down that one large one that’s going to test my drag and my mettle. I’ll take action over size any day on the water. At this point in my fishing career, I’ve chalked it up to a combination of my short attention span and caffeine-fueled brain circuitry. But what happens when I manage to find both big fish that test my endurance and action so fast that it satisfies every misfiring neuron in my brain? Last week, I got my answer.

Sitting on our guide’s skiff over a small wreck about 60 feet below us in the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida panhandle, my brother, brother-in-law and I dropped the emerald-and-white cigar minnows we had caught earlier in the morning down into the depths. The water — which normally matched the color of the baitfish — under the cloudy skies was a dark gray to mirror the day’s ceiling which had facilitated earlier successful trolling for toothy king mackerel, the first two in the guide’s boat for the spring season.

“Just hold on,” Captain Shaun advised as he studied the graph on the center console of the boat as he pointed out likely grouper near the bottom and other fish suspended a few cranks up. It wasn’t a command for us to wait as he readied things, but rather an instruction for what was about to happen.

My rod tip bent slightly, so I reeled the circle hook rig tight, and the line went screaming off the spinning reel which our guide laughed and called his standard issue light tackle for the ocean. My forearm flexed and my bicep bulged, and the muscles all the way into my shoulder and neck tensed as the fish made its first run. Bracing my knees against the gunwale of the boat, it was a total body workout as I did my best to steady myself against the beast below and the rocking of the waves. Around me, it wasn’t long until the other two bright blue rods were bent over in the hands of my brother and brother-in-law.

It’s funny in the outdoors how you can be miserable for a while, and then suddenly forget all about the elements or your situation when something amazing happens. I can be freezing cold on the deer stand, when suddenly a buck comes into view and my circulatory system pumps heat back into my extremities like a volcanic eruption. I can be tired from a long walk on the prairie when the flushing wings of a pair of rooster pheasants wakes me from my shuffling trance through the countryside. With the charging fish on the line, I had forgotten all about my seasickness which had brought me to the brink of barfing and could only focus on how I was going to turn the tide on the hard-running opponent below.

Through the give-and-take of the green braided line and the spray of salt as the fish splashed at boatside — quickly identified as the Gulf’s famous amberjack, but with a mix of snapper and grouper in there as well on subsequent drops — I was able to best the brown-striped beast as my brother pulled in his fish, a red snapper an my brother-in-law boated an amberjack of his own. It was quite the battle, and we’d repeat it over and over until we couldn’t take it anymore as lines crossed, reels screamed, and the on-the-water workouts began to take their toll. The three-foot fish bit like bluegills on a summer day and fought like the biggest northern pike I’ve ever had on the line. The resulting situation was the answer to the question of “yes, but, what if you could catch all the huge fish you’d ever want?”

The way I figure it, I’m glad I work out on a daily basis, because it only took each of us five or six rounds with the schools below before we were totally exhausted. My wrists cramped, my fingers ached, and my arms shook with the ebbing adrenaline by my fourth fish, and I pressed on. While it was indeed fun angling and my queasiness from earlier in the morning had subsided from the rush of each impressive ocean fish, I doubt if sunnies or crappies were that big that I’d want to sit on top of them for an afternoon; but I could probably do it with a bit more conditioning and in the process gain a firmer understanding of the size versus numbers debate … in our outdoors.