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toward the Mexican mainland. The keys, of course, were in the igni-
tion and it had a full tank of gas. One of the men had just hopped in,
started the boat up, and headed back to San Felipe, with the panga
planing along beside it.
That was the best two hundred dollars of someone else's money I
ever gave away! The fishermen were delighted to get this unexpected
windfall from the crazy gringos. I was delighted to keep my job and
happy that Murray Dailey didn't have to live with the lost boat on his
conscience. I never told Sea World management what really happened
and managed to conceal the missing money through some creative book-
keeping supported by indecipherable Mexican receipts.
SHARKS IN MEXICO
With that nerve-wracking event behind us we turned our attention to
catching sharks. The first project was to set up a twenty-foot-diameter
circular portable plastic swimming pool on the beach. Having already
experienced the extreme San Felipe tides, we wanted to be absolutely
sure it was well above high tide. The logical approach was to ask the
people who lived right there at the motel. They came out and pointed
to a spot where it would be perfectly safe from the highest possible
tide. Using buried plywood boards as sand anchors, we laid out the
pool and its sunshade, an inexpensive army surplus parachute that
worked well and was surprisingly windproof.
The full moon came a week later, and with it the spring tide with
its extreme highs and lows. We watched as each day the high tide crept
closer and closer to our precious shark pool. One day it was lapping
at the base of the pool, and we hadn't even reached the maximum tide.
I could have killed the man who said the pool would be completely
safe, but he made sure he was nowhere to be found.
Faced with two more days of high tides, we rallied our meager forces
and built a seawall between the pool and the incoming tide, using our
empty fiberglass shark transport boxes and filling them with sand.
Guests staying at the motel pitched in and helped shovel sand to fight
the relentless ocean. We looked and felt truly stupid for erecting our
pool where the ocean could reach it; however, we fought on and even-
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