Portola Bay was inspired by a single moment and a very large fish.
In 1998, the State Bar of California held its annual convention in Monterey, California. While
attending a cocktail party at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, standing in front of the massive fifty-
foot window of the Outer Bay exhibit, I noticed that the room—heretofore teeming with
talkative and tipsy lawyers—had fallen silent. An enormous disc-shaped fish had slowly sculled
into view. Weighing 800 pounds and resembling a giant head with fins, this was the aquarium’s
ocean sunfish, or mola mola.
I wasn’t aware at the time how fortunate I was to be there that evening—for, only a few short
weeks later, the mola mola was returned to the open waters of the Pacific. The aquarium staff
had concluded that the mola mola had become too large and unwieldy to be able to be handled
safely. (The National Geographic later took note of this event in a little sidebar article entitled,
“Fat Fish Eats Its Way to Freedom.”)
In that moment of staring at this unusual fish a story idea came to me, of a man who returns to
his hometown and is forced to confront his past.
In the end, the aquarium airlifted the mola mola out to sea, in a sling carried under a helicopter.
Somewhere in the Pacific there’s an enormous fish with its own story to tell of being held in a
million-gallon water tank with homo sapiens types staring at it from the other side of the glass—
but that’s a fish story for another day.
about portola bay
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