Could we win? Never in hell. But nobody connected with that tournament would ever forget the experience. . . which is almost what happened anyway, for different reasons. By the third day of the tournament, or maybe it was the fourth, I had lost all control of my coverage. At one point, when Bloor ran amuck and disappeared for 30 hours, I was forced to jerk a dope addict out of the island's only night club and press him into service as a “special observer” for P layboy . He spent the final day of the tournament aboard Sun Dancer, snorting coke in the head and jabbering wildly at North while poor Oliver struggled desperately to maintain his one-fish lead over Haugen's manic crew on Lucky Striker.

Thursday night was definitely the turning point. Whatever rapport Bloor and I had developed with the Striker people was wearing very thin after three days of increasingly strange behavior and the antisocial attitude we apparently manifested at the big Striker cocktail party at the Punta Morena beach bar was clearly unacceptable. Almost everybody there was staggering drunk by nightfall and the ugliness threshold was low. Here were all these heavy anglers -- prosperous Florida businessmen, for the most part -- snarling and snapping at one another like East Harlem street fighters on the eve of a long-awaited rumble:

“You potbellied asshole! You couldn't catch a fish in a goddamn barrel!”

“Watch your stupid lip, fella: That's my wife you just stepped on!”

“Whose wife, fatface? Keep your fuckin' hands to yourself.”

“Where's the goddamn waiter? Boy! Boy! Over here! Get me another drink, will ya?”

“Let me just put it to you this way, my friend. How 'bout a goddamn fish-off? Just you and me -- for a thousand bucks, eh? Yeah, how 'bout it?”

People were lurching around in the sand with plates full of cold macaroni and shrimp sauce. Every now and then, somebody would jerk one of the giant turtles out of the tank on the patio and thrust it in the face of some bleary-eyed bystander, laughing wildly and struggling to hang on to the thing, big green flippers clawing frantically at the air and lashing a spray of stale turtle water on everybody within a radius of ten feet. . . “Here: I wantcha to meet my friend! She'll do a real job on yer pecker. How horny are ya?”

It was not a good scene to confront with a head full of acid. We drank heavily, trying to act natural, but the drug set us clearly apart. Bloor became obsessed with the notion that we'd stumbled into a gathering of drunken greedheads who were planning to turn Cozumel into “a Mexican Miami Beach” -- which was true, to a certain extent, but he pursued it with a zeal that churned up angry resentment in every conversation he wandered into. At one point, I found him shouting at the manager of the hotel he was staying in: “You're just a bunch of goddamn moneygrubbing creeps! All this bullshit about tourism and development -- what the hell do you want here, another Aspen?”