SEB HAD CHARACTERIZED HIM after several phone conversations as a salt of the earth type. Sea salt, I would suggest. We met Steve Kantner, alias the Land Captain, outside his apartment building at a humane hour, following an English breakfast. He stood a sturdy six feet, had wavy brown hair and sported a deep, indelible tan. Jeans, a button­down short-sleeved shirt, and a baseball cap. A man's man by all indications, the kind of guy you might meet in a pool hall or hire to rebuild your deck.

"Shipment of cork dust came just in time, had plenty of colorant, made a boatload of berries last night."

What strange language was this fellow speaking? I didn't know how to respond, so I started back to the SUV to gather our gear.

"No need, got everything, wife made sandwiches. Mr. Pibb okay?"

I didn't realize there was another party joining us, but I nodded and got in his vehicle, a big, beat-up cruiser that would put a hitchhiker's thumb in his pocket. We lurched out of the parking lot and onto a north-south avenue in a run-down part of town. The trip proper had formally begun, and the Land Captain was at the helm. I liked the name, I wondered if he considered this car his boat. It certainly qualified as such. I was still trying to decide if I liked him or not.

As the engine gathered speed so did the conversation, or monologue rather. The job of a guide can be as simple as giving directions and often involves instruction. In some cases it can drift into entertainment, under the broader goal of showing people a good time. It was not clear that the Land Captain was purposely trying to provide this service, but he was doing a good job of it nonetheless. I admire people who speak their mind and let the chips fall where they may, and by that criterion the Land Captain and I were destined to be fast friends.

By the time we turned off the avenue and headed west we had keen insight into his nature and his personal life. Other than his cryptic remarks at introduction, fishing was apparently not a hot topic this morning. Instead, we learned of his position as head of the co-op board which was doing battle with a tyrannical landlord. His time in the service. And of greatest interest, how he came to do what he was doing now.

"Have you always been a Land Captain?" I asked with typical understated sarcasm.

"Nope. Sat behind a desk selling insurance for twenty years."

"That sounds like fun."

"It certainly wasn't," he answered, acknowledging my tendencies. "Put a gun in my mouth one night, thought about it, put the gun away. Went in the next morning, collected my stuff and left."

"No resignation of any kind?"

"Never said a word to my boss. Twenty years. Just left."

Sometimes the people who speak their minds can appear affable and approachable at first, and eventually turn out to be insane or dangerous. Or both. I wondered if I should reconsider my friendship criteria.

Fortunately, we were now approaching territory relevant to our quest. Something of a surprise, because we hadn't gotten too far. The Captain digressed from his autobiography to remark on the conditions as he leaned across the passenger side to peer at a canal that paralleled the road. There's water all over the place in Florida, so the canal hadn't seemed like anything special. Plus, in preparing for the trip I had the inner-city gondola ride in my mind, and we were in grassy, "placeless" land, a canal-divided boulevard slicing through suburban sprawl. But I this was it and, although I was blind to them, evidently there were a host of visual clues present. A drive-by fishing forecast sprang from the Captain's mouth as we rolled along.

"Overcast, and the city's got the water running."

"Decent wind, berries should be falling."

"There's one of them right past this intersection. There! See that, that's a berry tree."

We followed his gaze to the intermittent trees that clung to the shore. Isolated trees. Tight groups. Large. Small. They looked pretty much like magnolias and all looked the same. We'd traveled hundreds of miles and paid good money to drive along a roadside ditch with an insane person.

It would not be until well into the next day, on our own, that we would finally develop an eye for what the Land Captain was seeing. There was no other choice if we wanted to catch something. But right now we had the option of putting faith in our fearless leader. We pulled up to an open stretch opposite a stand of overhanging trees that were, for mysterious reasons, very appealing.

"See, there. No, not over there. RIGHT THERE!"

It sounded like EI Capitan might get physical if we didn't catch on soon. So we concentrated harder and noticed that every few seconds, as the branches swayed, something was dropping into the water below. Berries. We didn't break out the rods, though, because nothing was eating them. If they're not surface-feeding, they're not feeding at all. Sinking berries, "wet" berries if you will, are not appetizing, we were told. Obviously.

The reconnaissance mission continued for several miles. Conditions pointed to a productive outing, but for some reason the fish were not holding up their end of the bargain.

"The water was boiling like Hell's Gate here yesterday."

I was waiting for that one. "Were they jumping in the boat?" I muttered to myself, getting antsy and irritated. It was now mid-morning and we hadn't even taken our rods out of the trunk yet. Captain Crunchberry sensed our growing unrest, particularly mine, so he switched gears and started on Peacock Bass, another inhabitant of the canal system. The Peacock Bass is brightly colored and although small­ and largemouth are technically members of the sunfish family, the peacock really does look like a larger, elongated pumpkinseed. We got a brief report on their tendencies and whereabouts and started scanning the shores. The canals receive influxes of water throughout the day at the discretion of the city. A supply line lay nearby and the Captain confirmed it as a good spot to try. The water was much deeper and the flow was churning up tons of debris from below in a lively boil. I threw out a streamer and started drawing it across the manmade current. I had lapsed into the stultified state that accompanies an outing marked for doom, when from the depths rose a fish such as I'd never seen. It was so big, so oversized for this body of water, and so close to me as it rolled over on the surface that I jumped back from the edge in fear. It was about the size of a human body and, based on what we'd seen thus far of modern-day Fort Lauderdale, I didn't doubt that's just what it was.

"Eighty-pound tarpon," announced the Land Captain. He dead­panned his proclamation, but there was an undertone of intense excitement. Now he was flying down the bank to see about hooking him.

"Cast again, CAST AGAIN!" he yelled at me as I stood there like I'd seen a ghost. I carne out of it and tried to move my arms. "Oh my God!" I kept repeating as fear turned to determination. I must catch that thing. Or rather, I must hook that thing. I couldn't dream that I would actually land it. Who could, for that matter, using the puny fly rod I now held. Without warning the contest had shifted weight classes. It wasn't the first time, but nothing quite like this. What exactly would happen if by some miracle he got hooked? At the very least a pile-up on the street behind us as passersby watched the behemoth tail-dance his way down the canal.

Speculate though we did, it mattered little because we never saw him again. I cast into the roiling water over and over and over, replaying the encounter and wondering if there was something I could have done differently, even though I honestly don't believe he was going for my fly in the first place. Amid my disappointment there was a fresh, almost crazed twinkle in my eye. A heightened state of awareness about the wonders of Florida fishing. Peacocks? Grass carp? Offbeat or no, I didn't care where, how, why or who was or wasn't fishing for tarpon, this was a fish I wanted to get to know better.

The Land Captain, it turned out, is an accomplished tarpon fisherman. An accomplished fisherman period, for that matter. He was only too happy to oblige my sudden obsession. The canals may turn up a few strays, but as far inland as we were it was quite unusual. Hence his surprise and excitement over our earlier encounter. The Everglades were more popular stomping grounds for these prehistoric titans and it made sense, given our current location and shoreline limitations. It meant a decent hike cross-state. We bid farewell to the Sew-erz Canal for the time being and declared, "Go West, young men!"

Our guide revived his entertainment gig as we decompressed along I­75, an uninterrupted ribbon of desolation commonly known as Alligator Alley. The political incorrectness still flowed freely but he had ratcheted down a notch, perhaps owing to the fact that it was now past noon and our hands didn't smell. His content turned topical, first noting with disdain the collection of debris lining the fences and then the fences themselves, that flanked the highway. His interpretation was that they were erected to keep the "undesirables" from fishing, the side effect being that upstanding citizens of the fishing community such as ourselves were likewise barred. To us it seemed reasonable that if there had to be a highway cutting across, it need not be paved with alligator. Not to mention that having carloads of fishermen pulling off and on along this tropical autobahn was probably inadvisable from a safety standpoint. But we kept our opinions to ourselves as he switched his focus to Indians and then, at an inquiry from Seb, the sugar manufacturers.

"Sure, Big Sugar's screwed this area big time." I thought this might be a high-octane relative of Mr. Pibb (the South's version of Dr. Pepper I had learned), or possibly a rap star. It turned out to be a pejorative akin to "Big Tobacco." The sugar growers were conducting their business somewhere north of the highway and the Everglades, as they had for decades. Their practices had drawn increasing scrutiny from environmental groups and the issues had grown to statewide and national prominence.

"See those aqueducts headed north? That's for run-off, but there isn't much because Big Sugar's sucking the area dry. And what water does come this way is loaded with so much fertilizer it might as well stay where it is. Either way, it can't get through this freakin' highway­slash-dam, can it?"

As I learned more, I could see that this was not necessarily another conspiracy theory. Highway and Big Sugar both functioned to the detriment of the Everglades. Yet man had arrived and he wasn't leaving, and here we were using the highway to our benefit to reach the tarpon kingdom. I had sweetened my coffee this morning. And Mr. Pibb well, he's probably responsible for any number of endangered species. Again I opted to zip it.

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