Ah, mackerel season. Say you are a sailor. Naturally, you are sailing on a Thursday evening, enjoying a beverage as the sun sinks below the skyline of Tampa.

Then, zing!

A meaty torpedo of fishiness flies out of the water. Then another! And another! 

​It seems impossible that no one is brained by the piscatorial hailstorm.

It seems impossible that the near victims often don't even notice it. (Ah, the power of enjoyable beverages and picturesque sunsets on a Thursday evening on Tampa Bay!)

The Spanish mackerel, scientific name Scomberomorus maculates, which does –– seriously –– translate as "silly spotted mackerel," is back in town.  Sharply pointed and oily, iridescently dotted and foolish enough to sometimes bite the hand (or toe) that tries to unhook it. 

​I don't even need to write fiction.   

I looked up the word "simulacrum" a while back for a story I was writing, and I keep wanting to put it into wider circulation. It's defined as a copy or an imperfect image of a thing.  Likewise the word "brace" means a pair. I'd thought it was more, as in "a brace of partridge," which seems like a small bag for a day's work.

Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, a brace of angular angler simulacra.

We'll camp in the Everglades National Park. It's not our first venture into this wilderness. It's a place less full of shady Spanish moss and swampy mud than one might expect.   

​It's pretty darned pleasant, actually: we pitch a tent on the sandy beach, maybe catch a few fishes, play with driftwood.

In general, the hazards that are most worrying on this venture off the map are, oh, I dunno –– mosquitoes, sunburn, getting stranded and having to be rescued.  

​THIS is not what I expected:

Mormon Key is our favored camping spot. George was almost 10 feet long last time they checked, and weighed in at 700 pounds. Good lawsey day. 


​

More Everglades Challenge?
Okay, here's a story about the adventure race by the late great Meade Goudgeon. We'll miss seeing him on the beach this year.  

​The Challenge starts on March 3 off Fort DeSoto Beach. 
​

We spent a month in Ecuador. 

We went to the lovely seaside town of Salinas, west of Guayaquil for the Lightning Masters World Championships and the Lightning World Championships. The Lightning we sailed is Steve Davis's boat.

​We jump onto a Lightning with Steve from time to time, and as a bonus, we've been able to travel with Steve and his wife Jan. Sometimes we get to hang out with additional Davises, which was an extra treat this time. Hi Stephanie! Hi John!  

Steve and Jeff share an unshakable and insatiable interest in hunting fish. Luckily, they have a Lightning friend in Ecuador, Paco Sola, with just the right big boat for such an interest. The boys took a day between races to search for fishes.

Shall we say "bucket list"?

After the racing was done (3rd and 12th respectively. Respectable!), we split tacks with Jan and Steve. They went home to Colorado, to work on the Bosler House, while we went swanning off to the Galápagos.

Also iguanas –– both land and marine versions.

We swam a lot.

We had some encounters.

And hiked some trails.

And had some other encounters.

The time just flew by. But we never got our fill of sea-lions.  

It was a long offshore voyage that included a lot of adventures, beginning with Pappa Joe having decided it was time to quit smoking.

A few peevish days into it, and having scrounged every fleck of dried old tobacco from the bilge, I believe they made a foray into Key West for smokes.  

Later in the voyage, they nearly sunk off the coast of Venezuela. Spent the night holding Island Woman off the rocks and had to limp into shore to effect repairs. 

​Which led to a midnight bunk, dodging commercial traffic out of –– was it Maracaibo? to avoid having to hire the required but extravagantly expensive harbor pilot. They returned home with both passports, which was a bit of serendipity.

Also, Pappa Joe nearly got pulled overboard by a billfish. He wanted to boat the fish; the fish wanted to ocean the man. 

Two men on a stout 36-footer with a damaged rudder making their way upwind from the lower reaches of the Caribbean? Of course some song was going to get stuck in someone's beezer. Why not that most appropriate of lyrics: "The weather started getting rough/the tiny ship was tossed"?

Any sailor with the slightest lick of whimsey has chanted those words from time to time.

Of course, with the Google these days it's a cinch to get the rest of the words. Offshore, back in the day, sleep-deprived and salty?  Upon reaching shore, I imagine these were his first words to the nice fella at the gas pump in Marco: "Hey, you know Gilligan's Island? Yeah, what comes after 'Sit right down and you'll hear a tale/A tale of a fateful trip'?"

For improbable example, a remora attached itself to our boat.  My skipper and I were racing on Sarasota Bay, in our rotund Flying Scot*. 

Going downwind, I usually nip back to the stern and give the rudder a quick wipe, in case we are trailing seaweed or we've picked up some other slow debris. Sliding my hand along the slab of metal in the water, I really was not expecting to feel a live, swimming, wiggling fish. A remora.

 *(Full Disclosure: all Flying Scots are rotund)


Though I grabbed the fish –– knowing it would be the Best Sailing Story EVER if I could land the nightmarish creature with my bare hands –– it wiggled free and re-attached its creepy suction-cup head to the boat.  

I took another swipe at it, and then another: eight seconds of piscatorial rodeo. 

Whether because of the yanking on its slippery hind-parts or by virtue of my powerfully girlish shrieking, the fish came loose and swam away after while...one hopes it found a more peaceable commensal partner. 

I expected that the ruckus might have caught the attention of my favorite skipper. Surely he'd glanced back to see if I had fallen overboard or lost a limb or something, even if he couldn't fully participate in the battle. But when I scrambled to my usual spot, he replied with a simple, "Huh," after I told him what had transpired.

A fish that can suction its bony head-plate onto boats (or sharks or humans) in roughly the manner of a party-goer applying an Solo cup to her chin? Okay. But it finds our boat? During the selected 25 minutes of that race when we were going downwind? 

The universe may tend toward randomness, but maybe there's a far shore of random that looks like order, or perhaps intention. Or not.  

When TwoBeers (the WaterTribe name for my husband) first decided to transform an elderly, mild-mannered Flying Scot sailboat into a vehicle suitable to the Everglades Challenge adventure race, he never guessed that the project would siphon up two and a half seasons' worth of fishing time.  

That's a lot of weekends and evenings.  While the fish have enjoyed their vacation, our house has been a hive of activity: preparing, building and rebuilding, plotting routes, and thinking about what might go wrong when pointing a small boat away from shore. 

We are not the first to ponder and worry. The organizers of the Everglades Challenge have an extensive list of required safety gear -- and it includes a cell phone. (Those who know TwoBeers can take a moment to nod wisely and chuckle at the irony.) So like it or not, my favorite captain has been venturing into the 21st Century.

Although TwoBeers spent many of his childhood summers cruising the Bahamas with his pappa and brother, and he put in plenty of long-distance miles delivering boats in the years since, the Everglades Challenge IS a different kind of race.

Luckily, his crew, Moresailesed (aka Jahn "Wild Card" Tihansky), coaches the Navy off-shore team. He's also an amateur pilot. This means he practices navigation, preaches navigation, and has a keen appreciation for the value of safety gear. 

So while TwoBeers has been focused on boat-speed and design, Moresailesed has been leading the charge on navigation, with EnsignRumDown (Mark Taylor) as expert IT director. On the advice of a cruising friend R, we are trying out Navionics electronic charts. We even found a folding solar charger with a pair of USB ports for charging the hand-held electronics.  Frankenscot's progress will be tracked closely by satellite.

At the other end of the technology spectrum, I bring you...FIRE.

All the high-tech gadgets in the world are well and good, but if it comes to making a rough landing on a dark and cold shore, the thing that will keep a body alive is very basic indeed. 

The Campmor catalog has provided a lot of cool gear (cozy sleeping bags, mylar survival blankets, water purification tablets, a snake-bite kit, and waterproof stuff-sacks), but the coolest of them all? The sheath-knife with a magnesium fire-starter stick built right into the handle. 

Strike the steel blade along the magnesium and you get (kettle-drums sound off here: Dun-Dun! Dun-Dun!) fire! 

Well, not quite fire: more exactly, sparks of molten magnesium at around 1200 degrees that -- after a number of practice attempts as you get the hang of it -- will create flame in a bit of tinder. 

Stone Age high technology.  It's our hope that Frankenscot will carry the crew safe to the finish, but they'll have a hand-line (Hey, fish, wake up!) and the means for fire, just in case. 

Also:
Infinitive form of verb synonymous with struggling, stumbling, or making awkward mistakes.

As usual, answer below for the chance to win a fabulous prize. And by fabulous, you know I mean "figuratively" fabulous.