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discharge in these bouncing turbulent seas. He holsters his pistol.

Looking over, the big Viking is now about 200 yards away and they're still chumming like crazy. They have a kite rigged up, the line stretched over our boat and its hook bait just passed about 100 yards down our far side. It's then I notice that no one in our crew wanted to pull up the stinky chum buckets so I get to swim in not one, but two chum slicks. This really could be good TV!

Diving back under I spend 40 minutes hacking and clearing all of the line and cable from the running gear. Handing up pieces with every breath, I dive again and again hanging on to the propshaft and cutting and tearing away the cable a foot at a time. As I work, I can see how close the wire is to the strut bearing and cutlass bearing. By the time we made landfall that wire would have cut deep into the stuffing box requiring a haul and at the very least removing the entire starboard side running gear, repacking the bearing and reinstallling the propshaft, prop and rudder. Worse case, let's not even consider the worst case.

The worst case was that I spent an hour swimming in a chum slick, 40 miles offshore in a tropical storm and ESPN caught the whole thing on camera.

I wish I could report we then went on to win the tournament, but we didn't. We spent the balance of the day trying to make up for lost time, and didn't end up catching anything that would put us in contention so there was no point in keeping them. But we did make it back to Oak Bluffs in one piece and with all of our fingers and toes so it wasn't a bad day of sharking, just not worthy of making it onto the little screen.

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Learn more about this author, Robert Strayton.
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