My two best friends and I ripped along the rippled water at fifty miles-per-hour, trying to outrun the black mass a quarter mile to our left. Anyone familiar with Biscayne Bay or the surrounding ocean in South Florida has seen the wall before. It’s a dark gray wall beneath a thunderhead, a distinct wall of driving rain.
It was closing in on us fast and we weren’t sure if we’d make it to the Black Point Marina before we were engulfed in torrential downpour and life-threatening lightning bolts. The last place you want to be in a lightning storm is on the water because your head is the quickest route for the lightning bolt to connect with the earth. We could see the bolts flashing high in the clouds, their corresponding thunderbolts booming almost immediately after each flash. I actually remember being told in boater safety classes that if you absolutely had to be on the water in a lightning storm, bend over and stick your ass in the air since you had a better chance of surviving if you got struck there.
We had stayed out a bit too long because the fishing was that good. We crushed the snapper and had a cooler full of them, 3 of which were the biggest we’d ever caught. They came out of a tidal creek near Elliott Key where the water was rushing through, tricked by chunks of squid on a hook below a heavy weight.
We narrowly escaped the wall, and as we docked the boat in the marina next to the restaurant, the rain overtook us just as we took cover in the outdoor restaurant. Perfect…except we were hungry and had no money, as is often the case with thirteen-year-olds.
We wondered if we could trade the snappers we caught for some food, and spoke with the manager. He took one look at the fish and said if we gave them to him, we could eat whatever we wanted. Score.
Thinking back, it was definitely a good deal for him since he could make ten times as much from the snapper as it cost the restaurant for our three meals. At the time, we thought we were getting the deal of the century – mangrove snapper was easy for us to get ahold of. I’m also pretty sure he whole transaction was less than legal.
I’ll never forget the warm, delicious conch fritters, the three or four Cokes, and the grilled grouper sandwich with fries. It’s funny how circumstances can literally make food taste better or worse. Although the meal was objectively just a decent meal, the fact that we earned it with the fish we worked so hard to catch made it one of the most delicious, satisfying, and memorable meals of my life.