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provide free medical treatment for the residents of Cabo San Lucas.
He was rarely there, and when he did come he flew down in his own
plane with his friends and partied. He was hated by the residents and
the local Mexican doctor, who saw through his scam of getting a U.S.
tax deduction by pretending to be a Good Samaritan. His caretaker
gave me his Beverly Hills phone number, and I reached the doctor
through the marine radio at the Hacienda Hotel. I managed to con-
vince him to let us stay at the Clinique for the duration of our col-
lecting trip.
The place had beds, a kitchen, its own gasoline-powered generator,
and a caretaker—but a distinct lack of much in the way of functional
medical equipment, which confirmed what we had been told. Never-
theless, it was an ideal setup for us. We assembled our fish receivers
and anchored them out in the water, then quickly settled into the fa-
miliar routine of collecting by night and filling scuba tanks and feed-
ing our fish by day. By now we knew every nook and crevice where
fish would hole up, and it was not long before we had close to our de-
sired number.
One day, during one of the frequent failures of the town's electrical
power, the caretaker went out to refuel the generator. Instead of turn-
ing it o¤, he attempted to fill the tank on top of the still-running gen-
erator. You hear about these things but never expect someone to actu-
ally do it. Well, he did it. A little gasoline spilled on the hot generator,
of course, and caught fire. He dropped the gas can and ran. Within
seconds the entire generator shack was a raging inferno from the spilled
five-gallon can of gasoline. We just stood and watched while the care-
taker wrung his hands in mortification, some pain, and, I'm sure, em-
barrassment. The house was all right, but the generator was a charred
ruin.
Oh, boy! This was something we definitely hadn't anticipated. There
was nothing we could do to repair the damage, so when the boat came
down from San Diego to pick up the fish we simply packed up and
headed for home. I called the doctor when I got back to San Diego
and gave him the bad news, whereupon he angrily asked how we
planned to replace the generator and structure. Neither Sea World nor
I felt that we were responsible. The doctor threatened to sue but quickly
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