Story #3

Gladys

It had been one of those perfect days for coastal sailors like me. I welcomed five guests—paying guests; my favorite kind—aboard Gitana, our thirty-seven-foot Cherubini Schooner (that’s a sailboat) at about ten a.m. and showed them what they described as “The absolute best day of their vacation.”

Gitana had been on her best behavior, and the gods who send perfect wind to sailing charter captains were smiling down from above. The wind blew a steady twelve to fifteen knots from the south all day until falling off to eight to ten knots after sunset.

After sailing the waters of St. Andrews Bay and communing with too many bottlenose dolphins to count, we motored beneath the Beach Drive drawbridge into Massalina Bayou for dinner at Bayou Joe’s. We tied up alongside and climbed through the windows for some of the best grub in the area.

Joe’s offers a side of deep-fried corn on the cob that is something every tongue should experience at least once in its lifetime. After dinner, we sailed through the St. Andrews Pass and into the Gulf of Mexico to watch one of the seven wonders of the Emerald Coast: the majestic Gulf sunset. Mallory Square on Old Key West likes to brag about having one of the best sunsets on Earth, but I’ve seen more ocean sunsets than most, and I’ll put the ones just off Shell Island up against any in the world.

That particular evening’s sunset was perhaps one of the top ten I’d ever experienced. Gitana hove-to just like well-designed boats should and made me look like a master skipper at the helm.

Every sailor has something they love more than anything else on the water. For some, it’s the exhilaration of feeling the boat heel over and dance across the water. For others, it’s the precision of trimming another one-tenth of a knot out of the sails. For me, it’s the tranquility of sailing under the stars.

The best sailors are master meteorologists. They study the wind and understand why it blows and why it doesn’t. As the air cools after sunset, wind speed typically decreases, unless the wind is associated with frontal activity or squall lines. This particular night, some atmospheric magic kept the wind blowing so I could sail all the way back to the marina without starting the diesel. It was one of those rare, flawless cruises we charter captains pray for. The guests were ecstatic and tipped generously.

My beautiful first mate, who just happens to be my wife, is the hardest working deckhand, hostess, cook, chief steward, and bartender on the water. She and I had the boat secured, cleaned, and ready for the next day’s charter in record time.

She was doing whatever it is she does down below while I was having a cocktail on deck and listening to the local guitar man at the marina restaurant butchering what I think was supposed to be a Rolling Stones tune. A gorgeous, twenty-eight-foot center-console boat came motoring into the marina with a gentleman of perhaps eighty years of age at the helm. A woman of similar age, who I presumed to be his wife, stood in the bow with a length of line in one hand and a fluffy little yapping dog in the other. Like most men of the sea, I try to help my fellow mariners when it appears they may need a hand. It appeared to me that my aged friend at the helm of the center console definitely fell into the category of someone in need of a hand.

Instead of risking having my cocktail fall to its death if I were to sit in on deck, I chose to commend the remaining contents of my high-ball glass to the depths of my belly. I leapt from my boat to the dock and asked the lady in the bow if I could give her a hand with the line. Instead of voicing her answer, she tossed me the entire wad of rope she’d been cradling.

I know, I know . . . Rope put into service onboard a vessel is officially called line and not rope. In my defense, it’s safe to say that this particular rat’s nest of rope was not put into service of any kind on that vessel.

I caught the rope that I intended to turn into line and quickly shook out the tangled mess onto the dock. I made one end of the line fast about a cleat and tossed the remainder that I had neatly coiled back to the lady in the bow.

Immediately upon catching the line, she quickly thrust the yapping, slobbering, quivering furball that barely qualified as a dog into my hands. Somewhat dumbfounded, I accepted the creature and stood there on the dock wondering what I was expected to do with that . . . thing in my hands. What happened next is the reason I will never, as long as I live, forget that particular evening.

The lady began to wrap the line I had so painstakingly coiled around everything in the bow of the boat except the cleats. She wrapped it around a paper bag, a picnic basket, and a seat cushion. I’d never seen anyone secure a boat using that particular method, but I wasn’t going to get involved any deeper than I already had. Still amused with the lady’s methods, I glanced toward the stern of the boat to see the gentleman skillfully tying a perfect cleat hitch to a stern cleat. It was obvious the gentleman had spent a few thousand days on the water. After securing the stern, he turned to watch his wife in the bow doing whatever it was she was doing with the line. The look on his face made it clear that I wasn’t the only one confused by her tactics.

As it turned out, the gentleman seaman was not quite as amused as me. He was obviously frustrated. What came out of his mouth was a classic piece of communication even William Shakespeare couldn’t have penned. In total disgust, he said, “What the f***k are you doing, Gladys? And where is that damned dog?”

In disbelief and astonishment, I blurted out, “I have the dog!”

It took every ounce of strength and composure I could muster to avoid laughing uncontrollably. I helped the lady onto the dock and watched the two of them walk toward the restaurant with “that damned dog” yapping all the way.

Now, anytime anyone does anything that doesn’t make sense on my boat, someone will, without fail, exclaim, “What the f**k are you doing, Gladys?”

Moral of the story: I sure hope Gladys can cook because she’s a terrible deckhand.

Story #2

How I Met Elvis . . . Almost

They say the only difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins with “Once upon a time,” while a sea story always begins with, “You ain’t gonna believe this $#!^.” Technically, the following story didn’t happen on the sea, but it ties directly to one of my favorite activities involving salt water. No, not that one, although that one is fun, too. We’ll see if you can figure out the connection as the story plays out.

Far too long ago to remember, I took my first breath underwater, and from that moment, I was hooked. Since then, I’ve logged thousands of dives, racked certifications, and even taught a couple thousand people to breathe underwater with me. It is safe to say I am an avid scuba diver.

Scuba is an interesting word, and since I now make my living with words, perhaps you’ll allow me to share a tidbit of trivia that just might win you a free drink in some seaside bar someday. Scuba isn’t really a word at all. It’s an acronym. For those of you who slept through freshman English, an acronym is a made-up word using the first letters of several real words to make people like diving instructors sound cool. Okay, diving instructors don’t need any made-up words to make them sound cool. We’re naturally cool and groovy and far out, and all those other things everyone else wants to be. In the interest of full disclosure, even though I still hold the license and insurance to do so, I’m no longer actively teaching the art and science of scuba diving.

Now that all of you seem to enjoy the stories I write, the bulk of my time is spent creating the next story for you. Oh, my . . . I’ve wandered away from the original point of this paragraph. Perhaps you’ll forgive me now that I’ve found my way back to telling you about the word SCUBA. It’s actually an acronym meaning Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. There are a great many words in the English language I genuinely love. Apparatus is one of those words. It’s fun to say, and it can mean almost anything. The things gymnasts flop around on are often called apparatuses . . . or maybe apparati. Just because I like the word doesn’t mean I know how to pluralize it.

I’ve gotten off track again, and I blame you. If you hadn’t bought a few hundred thousand books from me over the past few years, I probably would’ve never fallen so deeply in love with language, and I wouldn’t spend time pondering why some words get an “S” while others get an “ES” and an even more select few get an “I” to make them plural. English is hard.

Okay, I’m back. We were talking about learning to scuba dive . . . and meeting Elvis.

One enormous requirement to dive safely is compressed air. Some non-divers believe we wear a big aluminum tank filled with oxygen when we dive. The truth is, the compressed gas inside that big aluminum tank is exactly the same air you’re breathing right now, unless, of course, you’re in a hospital or oxygen bar, where you may be breathing oxygen instead of air. The reason divers don’t breathe oxygen underwater is long, technical, and feels a little like high school physics when it’s explained. Suffice it to say, breathing pure oxygen underwater is extremely deadly. If you care, you can Google oxygen toxicity or ask your favorite scuba instructor.

Anyway, the aforementioned aluminum tank doesn’t magically fill itself with compressed air. There’s an apparatus for that. The machine that pumps air into those tanks is an air compressor, but nothing like the one in your garage. The compressor you bought from Sears or from that yard sale last year is a great machine, but compared to a scuba compressor, it barely qualifies as a compressor at all. High-pressure compressors aren’t cheap. They aren’t simple, either. They remove most of the humidity from the air they blow into those tanks, and they have to do their work while cleaning the nasty air around us to a remarkable standard. There are lots of valves and separators and gauges and crazy gadgets with ridiculous names hanging off of them. So, now you know a lot more about scuba diving than you did before I started this story about meeting Elvis, but we’re just getting started.

Although I owned a perfectly good compressor that did a beautiful job of squeezing air into tanks, I wanted another one . . . just in case. Okay, I’ll confess. I’m a guy who likes gadgets, and if one gadget is good, two have to be better, right? Fate and Facebook Marketplace smiled down on me and delivered a beautifully written ad for the second compressor I’d been dreaming of owning. If I remember correctly, the wordsmith who created the ad wrote something like this:

“4-Sail: one really big, noisy, black air compressor of some kind that sounds like it’s doing something when it runs, but I don’t know what. I’ll take a thousand dollars for it, unless you don’t think it’s worth that much, and then I’ll probably take less, especially if you know what it does. Don’t call before noon or after eight. I’ll probably be sleeping or something.”

Well, how could I not call the number? I had to own that wonderful machine. Unlike most writers, I’m a social animal. I love people—especially interesting people. I’ve discovered the people who sell things online are often the epitome of interesting . . . or weird. I make a living writing stories about weird people, so I consider it research, and I do it for you, so I made the call. To my great disappointment, the guy sounded perfectly normal on the phone. He was rational, well-spoken, and articulate. He and I agreed I would come take a look at his big, noisy, black air compressor of some kind.

He gave wonderful directions to his home off Beal Parkway, near Destin, Florida. Before you start jumping to conclusions that this is turning into a “Florida man” story . . . Oh, never mind. Go ahead and jump. You’re right.

My lovely bride and I absolutely treasure any excuse to take a road trip of any distance, so we loaded up and headed for Beal Parkway, a couple of hours from our house. The drive was delightful. We sang a bunch of songs we didn’t really know, ate some fantastic barbeque, and saw a wreck involving a VW Microbus, a horse and buggy, and an ice cream truck. (Okay, maybe that part isn’t true . . . maybe.)

When we arrived at the house off Beal Parkway, a gentleman—yeah, we’ll call him a gentleman for now—bounded out the door and down the cinderblock steps onto his carport, wearing mismatched socks. Notice I did not mention shoes. There were no shoes. The other thing that was missing was the ability for the gentleman to point both eyes in the same direction at the same time. When he looked at me and at a squirrel well to my right, I felt the sudden urge to hold up three fingers and ask how many he saw. The first words out of his mouth were, “You must be here for the compressor . . . or is it the Crock-Pot?”

I’ve never bought a used Crock-Pot, so I gave some thought to claiming no interest in the compressor, but before I could come up with the words, he said, “No, you don’t look like no Crock-Pot kind of fella, so you must be here about that loud, old compressor thing.”

I’ve spent the last several years of my life trying to figure out what a Crock-Pot kind of fella looks like, but I’m not having any luck at all. I like Crock-Pots, and I like to think of myself as the kind of fella who enjoys a good slow-cooked pot roast with potatoes, carrots, and onions. An ice-cold glass of milk and some cornbread with a big plate of Crock-Pot roast sounds delicious, but I still have to tell you about meeting Elvis . . . almost.

As any gentleman raised in the South will tell you, it’s rude not to shake a man’s hand, so, even though I really wanted to take a look at that Crock-Pot, I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. Most people would’ve shaken my hand and said something like, “Nice to meet you,” or “Why don’t you like Crock-Pots,” but not this guy. He thrust his hand toward me, palm-down, showcasing a bright red stone set in what appeared to be tinfoil that had been painted gold. It was the gaudiest, fakest ring I’d ever seen. It wasn’t like he was reaching for my hand to shake. He was clearly showing me his ring as if he wanted me to take a knee and kiss it or whatever one does when presented with such an opportunity. Not knowing the proper protocol or etiquette, I chose to simply drop my hand and pretend like we’d shaken. I hoped he would do the same, but no! He was proud of his gold tinfoil ring, and he was going to show it off. He pointed toward the precious jewel with his chin, but definitely not both of his eyes, and said, “I bet you ain’t never seen nothing like that, have you? Nope, I’m sure you ain’t. Go ahead and try to guess where I got that ring. Go ahead, guess.”

I didn’t want to guess. I wanted to hear the noise the compressor made, but I was caught in some sort of terrible episode of Candid Camera or Practical Jokers. I turned back to my lovely bride, who was waiting patiently in our vehicle. I don’t know why I needed her moral support at that moment, but I was running out of ideas and conversation starters. As if she knew I needed her help, she looked up, but her eyes didn’t meet mine. She stared wide-eyed past me and pointed as if trying to jab her right index finger through the windshield.

I really wish I were making this part up, but unfortunately, this is the god’s honest truth. When I turned around, the man was gyrating his body through something that must’ve been a fit brought on by some terrible medical condition. I momentarily considered grabbing his tongue to keep him from swallowing it, but before I could move to save his life, he sent one hand flying over his head and his hips shooting the opposite direction, and he froze in place like a statue . . . a damaged, terrifying, possessed statue.

As the years have passed, I’ve thought of a thousand things I could’ve said at that moment, but what came out of my mouth was a mortified, “What the hell was that?”

He looked hurt—way down deep in his soul hurt—and said, “I’m an Elvis impostinator.”

I promise you the man said “impostinator.” I’m not a good enough writer to make that up. He really said it.

Before I could react, he stuck his ring toward me again and said, “Now this here ring makes sense, don’t it?”

I stood in dumbfounded awe, devoid of words, and desperately wishing somebody were recording the scene. I opened my mouth in a wasted attempt to say something, but the man came to my rescue before I could say anything logical.

He said, “Yep, this here ring was gived to me by none other than Elvis’s daughter, Lisa Marie. I met her in the parking lot at McDonald’s one night when my car was broke down and she gived me a ride. So, to pay her back for the ride, I did my show for her, and she said right directly to me, ‘Your name from right now on is Rock-Pop-Elvis because you’ve got my daddy’s moves and Michael Jackson’s moves all at the same time. So, you’re the king of rock and pop, and I want you to have this ring.’”

I was suddenly deeply concerned about his broken-down car in the parking lot of McDonald’s somewhere near Graceland, but the excitement wasn’t over. No, sir. Not by a long shot. Rock-Pop-Elvis looked me square in the eye, with one of his eyes, and said, “I ain’t gonna tell you Elvis is inside my house, but I’ll tell you one thing for sure, buddy. I ain’t lettin’ you go in there to find out.”

I was still in stunned disbelief, but that fruitcake wasn’t finished. He sealed the deal with this phrase: “I guess you know now why I live off Beal Parkway. Elvis himself told me to move here ’cause it was just like Beale Street in Memphis, and that’s a fact.”

I bought the compressor and spent the two-hour drive home singing “Love Me Tender” and “Blue Suede Shoes.”

And the moral of the story is . . .

I have no idea, but I’ll never eat another pot roast without yearning to break into that guy’s house off Beal Parkway just to see if Elvis is in there.

Story #1

Great Bird Poop Island

Everybody wants to be the captain until it’s time to do captain stuff.

The life of a sailing charter captain appears glamorous to the uninitiated. Guests arrive to a sparkling clean sailing yacht with red carpet on the dock and their favorite cocktail waiting on a polished mahogany tray. The captain (that was me) is clad in his perfectly clean, brilliantly white linen shirt, sailor’s cap, and blue shorts, looking a bit like Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island. The beautiful first mate (that was my bride) is dressed similarly, but somehow, she makes it look sexy. Every piece of equipment on the vessel functions flawlessly, and the crew makes everything look easy while the guests lounge, drink, eat, watch dolphins, and snap pictures of everything in sight.

This is what the guests see, but it’s all a lie. Sometimes, things go horribly wrong, and this is a story about just such a time.

Gitana, our 37’ Cherubini schooner, was shipshape — or so I thought — for an overnight charter from Panama City, Florida, to Destin. The plan was to depart Panama City on Friday morning, overnight in Destin Harbor, and sail back home after sleeping in on Saturday morning. Ah, the best laid plans o’ mice and men.

We departed just before 0900. (That’s 9:00 a.m. for those of you who only have twelve numbers on your watch.) The sailing was superb, with fifteen knots of wind out of the southeast. Gitana loved sailing on a beam reach. If you don’t know what a beam reach is, there’s a glorious description in The Opening Chase, book #1 in my Chase Fulton Novels series . . . or maybe it’s in book #4. The westbound leg was perfect, but the homebound journey was best described by a collection of words I’m not willing to try to spell.

We awoke on Saturday morning to a summer storm. Rain poured in sheets, and the wind howled for two hours. We enjoyed ourselves in the dry, protected confines of Gitana’s roomy, climate-controlled interior. That was one time I was thankful I’d spent the extra money for central heat and air aboard. By the time the storm passed, it was early afternoon and far too late to make it back to Panama City while the sun was still on our side of the planet. Our guests needed to be back in PCB no later than Sunday morning, so our options were to hire a driver for them and let them ride for an hour in the back seat of a Town Car or weigh the anchor and sail into the night. They chose option two.

Behind the storm, winds were light at around 7 to 10 knots. Sailboats aren’t speed demons in 20 knots, and at 7 knots, they’re downright sloths. We lumbered our way eastward, making 4.5 knots. As the sun sank over the western horizon, the radar showed another storm approaching from the southwest, and the National Weather Service predicted winds up to 40 knots and seas greater than ten feet. Ten-foot waves aboard an aircraft carrier are meaningless but reduce that thousand-foot-long warship to thirty-seven feet, and things get weird. My beautiful first mate isn’t afraid of anything and never gets seasick, so I had no fear of briefing her on the coming conditions. The guests, on the other hand, weren’t seasoned seagoers. I briefed the situation and said, “It’s going to get a little windy, and the waves may get a little rough, but don’t worry. Gitana is a sturdy boat, and we’re a competent crew. Have another cocktail, and enjoy the ride.”  Behind my confident smile, I was thinking, I’m having a cocktail and jumping overboard now. Good luck.

The weather guessers got one almost right. The wind picked up to a steady 28 knots, with gusts up to 42. It was dark, so I couldn’t see the waves well enough to judge their height, but ten feet would’ve been a conservative estimate. The wind was on our stern quarter, so our sails became kites, and Gitana became a twenty-thousand-pound surfboard. Conditions were too uncomfortable to sail, so I furled the sails and motored onward at a blistering 7 knots. We occasionally made better than 10 knots while surfing down the front side of what felt like a mountain of water, but needless to say, we were still a long way from home without much in the way of speed on our side.

The rain never came, and for that I was thankful. The wind and waves made the autopilot useless, so by the time we reached the buoys marking the entrance fairway to Saint Andrews Pass, I was exhausted from hand-steering for hours in the dark in storm conditions. I was, however, relieved to be almost home. The protection of the bay was less than two miles away. All I had to do was make a ninety-degree left turn and follow the lights straight through the pass, just as I’d done hundreds of times. I shot a glance into the heavens and silently thanked God for bringing us safely back to the channel markers, and then I turned the wheel hard to port and waited for the stern to come around. Instead of a nice, leisurely turn to port, Gitana let out a horrific crack that sounded like a shotgun going off inside the hull, and she darted to the right as if yanked by a gargantuan beast of the deep.

There was no beast, but that’s not all there was none of. There was also no steering. No matter which way I turned the wheel, she continued her turn to starboard. I pulled the throttle back and the transmission into neutral, thinking I may have picked up a piece of commercial fishing net in the propeller and wrapped it around the rudder, causing the steering issue. I quickly decided that was a ridiculous thought because the wheel was spinning freely with no resistance, and the engine hadn’t complained from a fouled prop. The instant I realized we were broadside to the waves, I reengaged the transmission and hammered on the throttle. I could only turn right, but that was better than having a ten-footer come crashing over the starboard rail. I was a few seconds late, and that wall of water came. When I could see again, I began searching for my guests, who, in seconds, had gone from charter guests to potential victims. Thankfully, they were still where I’d put them with their lifejackets snuggly fastened and looks of terror on their faces. My first mate was drenched but also safe and still aboard. I gave the order, “Everyone stay in your seats and brace your feet against the gunwale. We’ve lost steering, but I still have control of the boat. We’re going to be all right. Is anyone hurt?”

No one was hurt—just scared and wet.

A thousand things run through a captain’s mind in a moment like that. My first thought was to drop the dinghy into the water, send my first mate and guests aboard the rubber boat, and watch them motor into the bay while I wrestled the ten tons of fiberglass in the waves well over my head.

Ooh, waves over my head and a twelve foot rubber dinghy. Nope . . . that’s a terrible plan.

What I failed to mention was the rocks. The jetties at the entrance to St. Andrews Bay are made up of automobile-sized, fiberglass-boat-eating rocks. I had to keep Gitana off of them. As terrible as things were at sea, they would’ve been much worse on the rocks. As panic pounded on the door to my head, I suddenly experienced a moment of lucidity. (Lucidity is a good word, right? I hope it means what I think it means.) I heard a small voice saying, “Work the problem, Captain.”

I looked around, hoping to find someone who suddenly wanted to be the captain. No one volunteered, so I worked the problem.

Sailing and flying have a great many similarities. In the cockpit of an airplane, the golden rule is to “aviate, navigate, then communicate” . . . in that order. Never stop flying the airplane; nothing is more important. Second, don’t get lost. And third, talk about it with people on the ground. I figured since I’d applied that rule for thirty years in cockpits, maybe it would work in the dark, flooded cockpit of my beloved, albeit broken, boat.

Aviate!

Believing the steering linkage had failed, I grabbed the emergency tiller handle from beneath a seat and shoved it into place. Just like the wheel, the emergency tiller had no effect on the rudder, so I managed the boat with the only tools I had left: the engine and transmission. With the engine running and the transmission engaged, I could turn the boat constantly to the right, so that’s what I did. As we continually turned right, I pulled the power off while pointed away from the rocks and reapplied full power as the bow turned back toward the boat-crushing mounds of granite. This made the boat spend more time pointed out to sea than toward the rocks. Coincidently, it slowly propelled us farther from the deadly shoreline. I liked that.

Navigate!

My GPS chart plotter was still functioning, and I could occasionally catch a glimpse of a lighted buoy, so I wasn’t lost. I took a breath and tried to remember what came next.

Oh, yeah . . . Communicate!

I was definitely in need of help, so I keyed the mic and said the phrase no captain (or pilot) ever wants to say: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

I wanted to hear the voice of some brave Coast Guard captain saying something like, “Have no fear”—insert trumpets blowing fanfare—“the Coast Guard is on its way to save the day (or night).” But that’s not what happened.

Instead, a Sea Tow captain’s sleepy voice crackled through the radio. “Keep her out of the surf and off the rocks, Cap’n, and turn on all your lights. I’m on my way.”

Some captains would’ve been disappointed that a Coast Guard armada hadn’t been launched, but I would’ve been happy with a Boy Scout troop of kids working on their seamanship merit badges. I just wanted somebody with a rope and a boat strong enough to pull mine.

The bright yellow Sea Tow boat came roaring out of the St. Andrews Pass five days later (okay, it was probably ten minutes). Help had arrived, and I was happy to see him.

He laid his powerful boat alongside my crippled, much larger boat, and handed up a nylon bridle. I rigged the bridle, and he motored forward. When the line came taut, my knees felt like noodles. I wanted to be the brave captain and proclaim how I’d kept my word and everything worked out just as I’d planned, but instead, I plopped my butt down on the closest horizontal surface I could find and offered up another “Thank you!”

As we entered the Pass, the water, wind, and my heart rate calmed. The looks on the faces of my guests said they were just as happy as me. I suppose, technically, the skipper of the Sea Tow was the captain at that point, but I still felt I owed my guests the entertainment they’d paid for. Also, I wanted them to forget about how close we came to dying in a pile, because I was still working for the tip, baby. Okay, honestly, I just wanted them to feel relaxed and safe for the remainder of the trip, being dragged sideways behind the powerboat with our rudder stuck hard over. There was very little for me to do nautically, so I turned into Captain Storyteller.

I told the story of a tiny island, just a couple hundred yards off the commercial port of Panama City, with brilliantly green grass, and how a small-town sheriff during the Great Depression planned to use that island as a place to hold prisoners who’d clogged up his small-town jail. I told horrifying stories of how the sharks patrolled the waters around the island the sheriff called “Little Alcatraz.” I went on to describe the multitude of aquatic birds that called the island home, and how the ruthless criminals would capture, torture, and eat the birds on Little Alcatraz until the Audubon Society claimed the island, forcing a lawsuit against the sheriff, and ultimately ending the terrible confinement of those poor, mistreated prisoners on Little Alcatraz. After the prisoners left, the birds consumed the island, depositing massive amounts of . . . uh, well, you know . . . excrement, thus the brilliantly green grass.

I was able to drag out the story long enough to end with a mighty moment of revelation as we were being dragged (still sideways) behind the Sea Tow, past the island of my fictional story, and I declared with a mighty voice and arms outstretched toward the source of the nastiest smell in Saint Andrews Bay, “And today, the sheriff’s beloved Little Alcatraz is affectionately known as Great Bird Poop Island!”

And the moral of the story is . . .

There is no moral, and you don’t really want to be the captain.

COME ABOARD FOR ADVENTURE

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