Jolly Rogers 2 - Revenge of the Jolly Dog


It’s Tuesday morning in Port Orange and my dive gear is fermenting in the garage. Out in the truck there are six empty steel tanks along with a bloodstained, 164-quart Igloo cooler, slap full of fish. My hands look like I tried to change a fan belt on a running engine, my thigh looks like someone shot me and the four-days worth of scruff on my face fought my dull razor to the bitter end. It’s the aftermath of a dive trip on the legendary Jolly Rogers II and I feel great.

The trip was planned for Chris’ 44th birthday by his girlfriend, Janice. (Kudos to Janice for a most excellent idea.) Onboard we had Chris (a.k.a. Squirrel Nutkins), Mickey (a.k.a. Captain Trickster), Nick and Daniel. Everything was conspiring against us making this trip. Nick’s house in Tallahassee burned to a total loss a week ago…along with all of his dive gear. In addition, Chris was scheduled for surgery to have a steel rod taken out of his leg this week and the weather was marginal with NOAA changing the forecast with every broadcast. We had a short window to go, or it wasn’t going to happen. It was decided to postpone the trip until Saturday and make a run for the grounds.

On Saturday morning, our mate for the trip, who introduced himself as “Chicken Legs Bob”, greeted us at the dock. Captain Jim Zurbrick arrived shortly after as we were loading all of our gear and we were underway in time to beat the tide out of the Steinhatchee River.

Our first drops were in a 100’ off Steinhatchee and everyone picked off some decent gags. On my second drop I did a quick dive/look around, but nothing was happening, so I came up with almost a full tank. On the next drop, I had a lot trouble clearing on the way down. Intent on killing fish, I pressed on to the bottom, despite my teeth feeling like they were going to explode. I ended up killing my best gag of the trip, but during my safety stop my head started spinning like I’d chugged tequila and back in the boat it didn’t let up. The next group went over the transom and shortly thereafter I sprinkled their dive site with a miscellany of a Hardees’ chicken biscuit breakfast, Jimmy Z’s, pepper cheese and crackers and whatever else was in my stomach. Through my dizzying nauseous haze I could hear the good captain remark something to the effect of, ‘he is the quietest puking person he’d ever seen’. I staggered to my feet and stumbled zombie-like to a beanbag chair and did my best to maintain. My head hurt…bad. I finally rooted around in my gear and found some old, crusty Sudafed’s and popped one along with a couple of Advil. Within an hour, that stuff kicked in and I snapped back to normal…life was good again. Just in time for a buffet of Jolly Cheeseburgers, baked beans, coleslaw and some Johnny Cash for ambience. Offshore dining at it’s finest!

The first night bite wasn’t bad even though the winds and seas had picked up and had us swinging on the anchor. We pulled up a mixed bag of cobia, mangos, grouper and Daniel caught the fish of the evening, a fat red snapper. Surprisingly, Birthday Boy had not met with any great success on the day’s dives and he was uncharacteristically quiet. We all got situated and hit the rack for the night. Jim Zurbrick has a sixth-sense, is a light sleeper or all of the above, because some dude pushing a barge decided to steam thorough the area where we were anchored. Jim woke up, saw him and called him on the radio. Finally the guy answered, says he sees us and is going to pass to the south. I guess he wanted to scare the hell out of us first. Other than almost being rolled out of the rack several times by the waves, the rest of the evening was uneventful.
Morning on the second day started with some “Jolly Road-Kill sausage biscuits” and a weather forecast that prompted us to ditch our plans to dive the Middlegrounds. It was blowing and there was nothing in the forecast indicating it would let up, so we decided to work the same waters…and it was a good call. Throughout the day it was multiple drops, more good stringers and the much-anticipated feast of the world famous “Jolly Dogs”. Mickey shot a beautiful toad of a red grouper and both Nick and Daniel consistently brought up mixed stringers of mangos, hogs and gags. Chris started to warm up and took the AJ’s to task. I lift bagged some guy named Ellis’ big anchor that he had lost a couple of years ago and added a few more gags to my total. It was a good day spearing and the wind slacked off for us nicely in the afternoon.

Most of us in the group started spearfishing with a guy named Rich Cain out of Crystal River who died last February. Rich is the guy who gained notoriety by having his finger bitten off by a big lobster off Ponce back in ’05. Anyway, Rich always wanted to make a spearing trip out on the JRII, but the cancer took him before he could do it. Chris brought some of Rich’s ashes along and at sunset he said a few words, we drank a toast and Chris spread them on the Gulf. It was a fitting mark of respect for our friend.

The second night consisted of extraordinary sea stories, political dialogue and thanks to Mickey’s truth serum, a revelation as to who actually fired the first shot in the great monkey massacre all those years ago. Birthday Boy, having wetted his appetite for blood, was getting brash and talking smack between mouthfuls of spaghetti and “Jolly Balls”. Little did we know, the talk had only just begun. We also found out on this fine offshore evening that Chicken Leg Bob was recently divorced and had utilized the technology and mystery of the world wide web to mend his emotional wounds. It seems for a mere pittance ($24.99/mo.), Bob is able to gain access to innumerable, lonesome women and subsequently charm them into visiting Steinhatchee to meet “The Skipper”. That’s right, Bob is officially a nationwide persona and well on his way to becoming a living Steinhatchee legend… It beats the pool hall, right boys?

The wind and seas picked up that night as predicted and I couldn’t seem to maintain my position in my rack. I finally wedged my head up in the corner on a small pillow that I swiped out of my Son’s room at the house. When a random big wave would slap the side of the boat I’d wake up and notice the pillow smelled, well…like shit. The next morning I discovered to my dismay I wasn’t sleeping on a pillow, but rather a pile of my two-day-old nasty, reeking laundry that I had neglected to bag.

The same morning found Chris alone on the stern of the boat. Seems he was out for his morning bilge pumping when a 90lb cobia rolls out from under the boat. Chris throws a cigar minnow overboard and the fish inhales it. The second cigar minnow he throws has a hook in it and it was game on. He hollered into the cabin for help and nobody would get up. So he shouted something about a kink in the saltwater wash down hose and Jimmy Z. sprung to his feet. The Captain groggily grabbed his trusty spear shooter and fired a line shaft into the fish that robbed him of his slumber, but the line wasn’t attached to the gun and that didn’t work out so well. A half-hour later the second line shaft (attached) hit home with a stone shot and the slob was gaffed and thrown on deck. We congratulated Chris…and tensed up like you do when you know your boat is going to pound down off the backside of a wave. You see, Chris gets all full of himself after killing things and he starts referring to his multiple aliases in the third person. “The Provider is taking you boys to school”. “Move over and let Daddy show you how it’s done”…etc. He was on roll and since he’s going to be dry-docked for a couple months after surgery and he was making hay while the sun was shining.

Shortly after the big cobia was onboard, a noxious odor permeated the vessel like a thick, morning fog. Seems someone whose name we won’t reveal (it rhymes with “icky”) had a little Jolly Dog revenge going on and it was more than the good ship’s head could ingest. Undaunted, our fearless captain grabbed a plunger and disappeared below decks. He emerged ten-minutes later after smiting the beast and flung the carcass on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Gunnel hunches were ordered from then on.

Then it was on to more diving with Nick diving to look for the captains line shaft and over to some rock piles before the ride in. It was another productive day as we tried to squeeze the last little bit out of our tanks with the transfill. The hogs were inshore and we hammered them, along with more mangos and scamp grouper. I don’t know the exact tally of fish we killed, but a “sh_tload” pretty well sums it up. It was as much fish as we expected and the only thing that stopped us from getting more fish were our own dumb-ass mistakes.

Jimmy Z. put us all over the fish, is a great guy and he runs a solid operation. I’ve been reading reports about the JRII for years and my expectations were high. I think I can speak for the whole gang when I say we were not disappointed. We’ll be back! Chris is probably going to be reading this narrative from his Dunnellon hideaway, post-op. So, happy birthday, you sh_it-talking, fish-killin’, lucky bastard… Get well soon, when you get healed up and haired over, we’ll go do it again.