Uh-oh, almost lobster season again

Shhhhhhhh.

Keep it quiet.

Lobster mini-season is less than two weeks away.

Every year I tell myself that I won’t go out and get in the mess. I’ll wait until season opens on Aug. 6.

And every year I break that promise to myself and head out real early Wednesday trying to bag a limit before I come to work on deadline day.

It usually works.

But this year, I’m not going out during mini-season.

I’ll get out and shoot some pictures of folks as they dive and snorkel our waters chasing the elusive bug. But I will not get in the water.

There have been many reasons in the past why I have promised myself I will not get out during mini-season and deal with the chaos. Most of them are good reasons. But not good enough to keep me away come Wednesday morning the last week of July.

But last year’s fiasco finally convinced me that it’s better just to stay home and wait until the madness passes.

I hope we get 30,000 people in town chasing bugs. Lots of friends and fellow business folk in these parts could use the economic shot in the arm that is sure to come during mini-season. We could.

I hope the water is loaded with visiting boats. I hope the bait shops and marinas make a ton of fresh money during the two-day event to get them through the lean months of August and September.

But I hope no one local has to deal with what we dealt with last year.

Last mini-season we headed out back toward the Contents to a spot a friend of mine knew where there were some discarded human apparatus that shouldn’t have been there but was.

You can reach the Contents easily enough using the wide channels and doubling back for the best bug holes. We didn’t use that route.

We went through the cut.

This thing, like so many other barely known channels in the shallow waters out back, is only about 10 feet wide. And it twists like a snake until it opens into the broader expanse of double-digit-depths closer to the Contents.

We made the trek with about four other boats. They all seemed to know where they going. Two decided to use the broader channel off No Name Key. We took the cut.

We followed a larger boat through the cut, backed down at our location after we cleared it and hit the water.

I was with some really good divers, not fat boys like me who find it harder and harder to hit 15 feet every year because of the added buoyancy of my ever-increasing posterior regions.

They had our limit in under 45 minutes and we were headed back to shore.

We went back through the cut.

In the cut were two boats parked along the edge, in the channel, leaving barely enough room for us to get by and we were in a smaller boat.

The pilot backed down so we could creep by without dropping the other divers off the side of their anchored boat.

We shouldn’t have been so nice.

A boat about our size with six largish guys in it, obviously out of towners by the stark whiteness of their exposed skin, took our move as permission to gun the throttle and get to the spot where the other boats were parked in the channel before we did.

Large boats can’t make the cut with anything else in the way. It’s simply not wide enough. And two boats cannot pass each other on plane, or perhaps off plane, unless the tide is up a little bit to keep one or the other off the rocks.

They didn’t know that.

Our slow speed and their faster speed would have put us at the anchored boats at about the same time. We couldn’t back off all the way because the wind would have blown us into the anchored boats.

So we idled forward. They threw the throttle all the up.

The folks in the anchored boats were waving frantically at us to inform us that they had divers in the water. We saw the flag and were respecting it with as much distance as we could.

Our head-on nemesis apparently didn’t know what a dive flag meant and came ahead at full throttle.

It takes longer to tell the story than we had time to react really.

The oncoming boat had one guy in the bow busily wringing tails and tossing the carcasses into the water. Not the approved method. In fact, not the legal method.

We inched over as far as we could get toward the rocky outcrop that marked the narrow channel. It was going to be close

The oncoming boat remained at full throttle. They swept past the smaller boats at anchor with divers in the water. A snorkel-bearing face popped up in the wake. A close call.

They swept past us, doing their level best to toss us up on the rocky outcrop that marked the edge of the channel.

Just as the wake was due to strike, our pilot hit the throttle and brought the nose up to cut the wake, get some control and move us out into the middle of the narrow cut. The snorkel-bearing face still in the water was wearing an expression I can only describe as pure fear as our raised bow bore down on him.

The pilot cut the throttle all the way back and the raised bow brought us to a complete stop almost immediately.

It was a very ballsy move, but effective, and got us past a bad situation with no damage done to any party involved, although if we could have reached the transom plug on the offending boat, we would have quite gleefully pulled it and watched with large smiles as they sank to the bottom.

What other passengers in our boat didn’t know was that as the offending boat passed us at full throttle, the clown in the bow tossed a tailed carcass over the side. My side.

My head was just high enough to be visible above the bow of the flats boat in which we rode.

The tailed carcass smacked me right in the forehead.

I’m not one to show a great deal of emotion to idiots (yeah and I’ve got waterfront property in Arizona I’m itching to unload cheap) but this time I couldn’t help myself.

I whipped out the single-digit salute.

Both hands.

Never had another boat driver deserved a double-barrel more.

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