Get up at three thirty, reset the alarm for three forty five and promise to get up again. And you do, you get up and reset the alarm for three fifty nine because any later than that would be four o’clock and that would be oversleeping.
You remember that there’s no water for a shower or for anything else, the Luxury Motor Home Development has driven another piling through the water main running to Dupont Island. And there’s bees in the water meter, where you first look when the water quits.
But there’s two bottles of water left in the cooler down in the boat that you can stumble out and get and at least boil some coffee in a pan. That caffeine might give you a jolt but it won’t go down easy because we’re out of cream and sugar.
John McMinn, Tom Harding and I launched a predawn assault on the bee nest, we had a field lighting detachment and a forward assault team armed with both hands full of brand new, never been fired, two and a half pound aerosol canisters of some kind of gauranteed bee destroying elements, and it was also guaranteed to squirt twentyfive feet.
The bees are dead.
My drinking water is poisoned.
And we’ve been pursuing tarpon. They’re not the giants that were around last week, these are fish from thirty to sixty pounds, and every bit as tough.
We’ve watched the few groups we had located, for three days, ‘lurking,’ to use a contemporary term, fishing too, but doing a lot of observing.
We stuck a few, got a few follows and bites as we fringed their holding spots but we weren’t able to get a really good connection.
Until this morning, today we went out with the intent to engage.