But he could not find a spoon and his sardines were rotten.
So he hooked a patch of yellow gulf weed with the gaff as they passed and shook it so that the small shrimps that were in it fell onto the planking of the skiff.
There were more than a dozen of them and they jumped and kicked like sand fleas.
The old man pinched their heads off with his thumb and forefinger and ate them chewing up the shells and the tails.
They were very tiny but he knew they were nourishing and they tasted good.
The old man still had two drinks of water in the bottle and he used half of one after he had eaten the shrimps.
The skiff was sailing well considering the handicaps and he steered with the tiller under his arm.
He could see the fish and he had only to look at his hands and feel his back against the stern to know that this had truly happened and was not a dream.
At one time when he was feeling so badly toward the end, he had thought perhaps it was a dream.
Then when he had seen the fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it.