One of the people I was talking to was the owner of a 60-foot Chris-Craft from Milwaukee. He'd just arrived from Key West that afternoon, he said, and all he seemed to have any real interest in at the moment was the “Argentine maid” he was grappling with in the cockpit of his boat. She was about 15 years old, had dark-blonde hair and red eyes, but it was hard to get a good look at her, because “Cap'n Tom” -- as he introduced himself -- was bending her over a Styrofoam bait box full of dolphin heads and trying to suck on her collarbone while he talked to me.

Finally I gave up on him and found a local fishing merchant called Fernando Murphy, whose drunkenness was so crude and extreme that we were able to communicate perfectly, even though he spoke little English. “No fishing at night,” he said. “Come to my shop downtown by the plaza tomorrow and I rent you a nice boat.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “How much?”

He laughed and fell against a pasty blonde woman from New Orleans who was too drunk to talk. “For you,” he said, “a hundred and forty dollars a day -- and I guarantee fish.”

“Why not?” I said. “I'll be there at dawn. Have the boat ready.”

“ÁChingado!” he screamed. He dropped his drink on the dock and began grappling with his own shoulder blades. I was taken aback at his outburst, not understanding for a moment. . . until I saw that a laughing 300-pound man wearing Levis and a red baseball hat in the cockpit of a nearby boat called Black Snapper had hooked the back of Murphy's shirt with a 30-pound marlin rod and was trying to reel him in.

Murphy staggered backward, screaming “ÁChingado!” once again as he fell sideways on the dock and ripped his shirt open. Well, I thought, no point trying to do business with this crowd tonight and, in fact, I never fished on that trip. But the general low tone of that party had stayed with me -- a living caricature of white trash run amuck on foreign shores; an appalling kind of story, but not without a certain human-interest quotient.

On the first day of the tournament, I spent eight hours at sea aboard the eventual winner -- a 54-foot Striker called Sun Dancer, owned by a wealthy middle-aged industrialist named Frank Oliver from Palatka, Florida.

Oliver ran a fleet of barges on the Inland Waterway out of Jacksonville, he said, and Sun Dancer was the only boat in the Cozumel Harbor flying a Confederate flag. He had “about three hundred and twenty-five thousand in it” -- including a network of built-in vacuum-cleaner wall plugs for the deep-pile carpets -- and although he said he spent “maybe five weeks out of the year” on the boat, he was a very serious angler and he meant to win this tournament.