Day 2 - The Boat Ride Part II

After all the shooting, Cap'n told us he was taking us to a small cove where we could swim. Foreshadowing: as we were heading to the cove, we saw hundreds and hundreds of white jellyfish in the water. So we get to the cove and the crew prepared the vessel to allow us to swim (Cap'n Tom pulled up the plywood door covering the torpedo ramp and put a cooler on the ramp as a stepstool; he also lashed a stepladder to a torpedo roller for us to use to get in and out). Cap'n was first in the water, followed by me, Nadja, Lisa, Lupe, and Kelly. Stephanie, who we now know is the smartest person on the boat, decided not to join us.

The water felt great... briefly. After about 3 minutes in the water, I started to feel some prickly pain across the tops of my shoulders and on my thumb. It wasn't very painful at the time, so I tried to ignore it. Then I heard Lisa say "Dad - what does a jellyfish sting feel like?" At that point, Nadja said she was going back on the boat and I said I was right behind her. We all ended up getting stung several places. We all got back on the boat (an adventure unto itself), and tried to laugh off the experience while attempting to identify if anyone was going into anaphylactic shock. We treated our stings with a combination of hand sanitizer and aloe vera gel with lidocaine. It actually worked pretty well. I really was happy that it worked well, because if that didn't work, our next options were snuff and/or urine. Small favors.

So since swimming was clearly out, we decided to fish some. We moved out into deeper water and tied up to a small offshore oilfield platform. When we were on our way out, some porpoises were racing the boat and playing in the wake. We were going 20 knots and they were easily keeping up with us. It was so neat.

Once at the platform, Cap'n taught us how to bait our own hooks with shrimp, squid, or mullet. We all got some experience fixing a line on an openface reel that has been backlashed. Stephanie clearly missed her calling as a pro fisher-person. She literally got tired of fishing after catching 6-7 catfish and a lemon shark. I caught 1 puny catfish (pictures to come).



^ Looked just like that one except it was ~2.5 feet long.

Lupe also caught a small hammerhead shark at the front of the boat. It was around the same size as the lemon shark. Nadja and I were strongly "encouraging" Lupe to throw the shark back when we saw Cap'n walk up with a mini aluminum baseball bat. We continued to nicely encourage them to throw it back and I finally reached over and took the bat out of Cap'n's hand. I felt like if I didn't, he would think we weren't totally serious and just brain the thing right in front of my eyes. They did eventually put him back in and he seemed to swim away fine. To be fair, Cap'n made the point that braining it and killing it instantly would be more humane than just letting it die from lack of oxygen. All other fish were thrown back with a minimum of distress.

By this point, it was getting pretty late so we started back in. Cap'n Tom let us all go into the wheel room and showed us all his gadgets like depth finders, two GPS's, his sound system, radar, etc. He also showed us how to navigate using a map along with some red signposts that were in the water.

We got home around 8:30. We took very very short showers (more on that in the Day 3 post) and went to Palacios Mexican Restaurant (PMR to the locals). Met up with the Cap'n, Lisa, and Lupe at Outrigger for a couple of drinks after that.