Over the years, my trawler Betty Jane has hosted any number of friends with storied pasts. And just this weekend another came aboard--my buddy Charlie. And off we went to explore an in-no-wise-charted spot on the northern coast of the  Gulf of Mexico called Crooked Island. I'd never been there before. Certainly Charlie'd never been there before either. And, as luck would have it, Bill and Didi, my friends off the Viking in the the slip adjoining Betty's, were willing to give us a little rundown on how to get through the narrow pass.

Precisely because the lagoon at Crooked Island is so pretty I am not showing a picture of placed here. You gotta draw the line sometimes in order to protect your home waters from tourists. And getting in there didn't prove too difficult, although coming out got a tad problematic due to a totally air-headed thing I did.

While plugging along in water that was too shallow for Betty's own good I bumped the bottom, albeit gently. And I did this, believe it or not, without paying even the slightest bit of attention to the perfectly wonderful track on my Garmin GPS I'd established while entering the lagoon.

Anyway, here's a picture of Charlie (who spent many of his younger days working on shrimp boats in the Gulf...note the shark tatoo on the right shoulder) so you'll have his profile in mind while I muddle onward here:

So after my bumptious bump-bump episode, I got to thinking about why a smart guy like me, with seafaring credentials and experience up the ying-yang, would keep on keepin' on in dicey lookin' water, even as his depthsounder begins to pop scary numbers and his friend gets a little antsy. I mean, was I trying to save time? Was I trying to save fuel? Was I trying to do anything in particular? Was I even thinking?

Hmmmmmm...not really. 

So I cogitated upon all this dreary stuff for quite some while as we wended our way back to Panama City that evening, Charlie and I. And here's the only thing that tends to make sense about the whole deal. Charlie put his finger on it while he was talkin' about returning to port on a fantastically slow, fully-loaded shrimp boat, with the delights of civilization hanging on the far-distant misty horizon, seemingly unreachable and tantalizing as hell.

"Maybe you were just in a hurry to get home, Bill," he laughed.