Shelter from the Storm

Patrick Orth, a Marine combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient, had never sat in a fighting chair. Few of the Marines on the 51-foot sportfisherman that day had.

But you couldn’t tell by watching him. Orth looked like a natural, sitting with knees slightly bent, leaning forward, throwing his weight back with each rhythmic pump of the rod. A vast expanse of ocean stretched in every direction.

Up came the mahi-mahi. The mate leaned over the side of the Forbes, gaffed the fish and sent it wheeling into the fishbox.

“That your first mahi?” the mate asked.

“This is my first time being on a sportfishing boat,” said Orth, a 31-year-old former Marine Corps lance corporal from Asheville, North Carolina.

Orth got up from the fighting chair and joined the other veterans, who were relaxing in the shade of the flybridge overhang. He sat on the gunwale. Someone handed him a beer. “That’s badass,” Orth said after a moment’s reflection.