Ride the Lightning

On a picturesque 10,000 Islands summer day drifting with the incoming tide along the Fakahatchee River, the tarpon rolled almost on top of one another. They weren’t the big bruisers that the record chasers followed from Homosassa to Islamorada for decades. Tom Evans, Steve Huff, and Thomas McGuane come to mind. These fish, dark from the tannic backwater, were around the forty to sixty-pound class.

My compadre, Hegar, and I had never seen tarpon so eager to inhale a bait. Therefore, as sportsmen, we made a conscious decision to ignore the incoming weather system. Comfortably numb to the danger among the zinging drags and snapped leaders, a thermocline settled in, and the temperature dropped. The taste in the air reminded me of when a friend dared me to lick a 9-volt battery, which I did. Thunder began to crack. The western horizon was a sinister black with streaks of grey, shards of lightning spiking at close intervals.

But the greenback shiner on the end of my line was looking sexy with his number-5 circle hook nose ring. I’d lobbed the bait up current, leaving enough slack for the live pilchard to make his way to an eddy between two mangrove lay-downs. I stood at the bow, hip against the trolling motor handle, making slight adjustments to the boat position. Unlike the aggressive strike from most gamefish of the region, a more appropriate description of a tarpon bite is to abscond subtly with unmatched speed and agility. Tense as one of those goats that faint upon varying degrees of stress, hand white-knuckled around the Calcutta 400, the water erupted around my bait. Gulp! Zzzzzzzzzz … Another fish on!

“Man, this isn’t looking good,” Hegar said as I pulled hard to the inside, trying to turn the fish’s head and stop its blistering run before I was out of line.

“Awe, it’s just a clear-up shower,” I replied as the bottom fell out of the sky. 

“Clear up shower?” Hegar said, wondering if he’d heard me right. 

“Yeah, clear up to your rear.” Our fear became all too real as the lightning strikes were no longer distant but close, real close. We scrambled, taking the rods out of the holders and laying them down on the deck. Careless we were, but not dumb enough to surround ourselves with lightning rods. We jammed the boat as far as we could into the mangrove foliage and hunkered down. I might have even recited a little prayer under my breath.

About thirty butt-clenching minutes later, the electrical storm moved to the south-southwest, but another system loomed behind it. If we were going to get the hell out of Dodge, now was the time.

I pushed the Pathfinder to its limit southbound on the serpentine tidal river. The rain felt like shards of fiberglass pelting your bare skin, stinging like a tattoo machine - bzzzzzzzzz - relentless and unforgiving. I realized how well I knew my backwater path in almost zero visibility as I felt my way across Faka Union Bay, through Panther Key, and behind Four Brothers Key. Crossing Dismal Key Pass, I looked south over the Gulf. Squinting through the rain, I saw a lightning bolt as thick as an old live oak tree spike from a thunderhead and grow four jagged legs, like a demonic Eiffel Tower dancing across the water.

We finally made it to the Goodland Bridge, rode hard, and pruned from the relentless deluge. Idling into what was, in 2002, Moran’s Barge Marina, the world erupted in a white flash. The whitest of all whites.

In Junior High School in Monroe, Louisiana, one of my chores was cutting the grass with my Dad’s Yazoo push mower, the kind with large diameter Skyway Mag wheels, yellow in color. Imagine pushing a pallet jack loaded with drywall but a little bit lighter. One day the engine began shaking and shimmying uncontrollably. I thought something looked loose, the sparkplug maybe. In my infinite wisdom, with the motor running, I decided to grab it. My hand fused to the engine block, and my arm felt as if a Russian Slap Champion wielding a cattle prod shook the hell out of it. That’s the sensation I felt when the residual electricity crawled up the throttle into my right arm.

Hegar and I lifted ourselves off the bottom of the boat, where we had atavistically retreated upon the event. The lightning strike was so close that it took us a few seconds to determine whether or not we were still of this world. Hegar looked his arms up and down, felt around on his legs and body, mouth agape. I held my hand in front of my face expecting to find it filleted with burn exits. We looked at each other in disbelief. We were fine.

I’m sure we looked like trauma victims as we tied up to the dock, having been meters away from riding the lightning on a direct train to electrocution. It was then I reckoned it might behoove me to pay more attention to thunderstorms building in the Gulf of Mexico.