Free Flotilla by Daniel Haight Page A

colony bums and the Pac Fish people a little tense.

    I approached her tentatively thinking that maybe, she wasn't up for company. The search was immediately forgotten and she was as nice as she could be. "Hi, Jim," she said. "How's your Dad?" She had a soft spot for Dad, I realized.
    "He's good. What am I doing today?"
    "I got some new bags of fertilizer," she said, "and some chum work." 'Chumming' was a miserable job and didn't hunting sharks. She would take dead fish from other boats, put them through a wood chipper and use what came out to feed her fish. It might sound interesting but she never cleaned the chipper out and as a result it smelled like the world's worst outhouse.
    I groaned about the chipper - it was my least favorite job. I was pleasantly surprised not to get the lecture, though. "I got a cure for that," she said. She went to the sink and pulled out a small jar. Opening it, she held it out to me and said: "Take a dab and smear it on your upper lip".
    "What is it?" I asked. It smelled strongly, like eucalyptus or something.
    "Vicks Vap-o-Rub," she announced. I'd seen it before in the store. I took a smear of it on my lip and the overpowering scent made my eyes water. I couldn't smell anything else, though. "Get to it," she said - waving me toward the back porch and the waiting fish.
    I left the boat and started navigating the docks toward her pens. Some places were more intricate than others - we were satisfied with large, football-field-sized pens but others thought smaller. Gramma Alice had dozens of smaller pens that she used to grow different varieties of fish. Her dock system was huge - maybe fifty yards from the boat and the rest of the colony. It had taken her years to get things where they were and it wasn't likely she would ever leave. The pens were organized by the size of the fish that lived in them. The larger, carnivorous fish were in pens farther from the boat and it took a few minutes to reach them.
    It was far away from any boat and for good reason: The stink from the chipper would have caused complaints if it was any closer. It ran on biodiesel and always took a minute or so to start up. I used that time to slice open the shrink-wrapped bales of fish and get them ready to go in. She had whole bales of rotted fish that were shrink-wrapped for transport and came apart in your hands when opened. Absolutely disgusting ... not much of a surprise that she didn't want anything to do with it. My feet were sliding on rotted fish guts and bird poop - the seagulls always visited on days we were chumming. I was feeding her stock of tuna with this junk and they boiled to the surface as the food splashed in. In seconds, seagulls were landing on the surface of the water and squabbling for anything that floated to the surface.

    I finished the chumming in time to see that girl on the Jet Ski scream by on her way to another 'practice run'. She was close enough to smell the chipper and made a face as she went past but she still waved to me. I still didn't understand what the practice runs were all about but she was seriously hot. Anytime she wanted to run by here was fine with me.
    After the chumming, I had to haul those bags of fertilizer in from the dock. The 50-lb bags of fertilizer were really bags of coir - peat made from coconuts. It was still miserable lugging them up her tiny ladder-like stairs. She was filling over a hundred identical terra cotta pots with the fertilizer and then hanging them from some cool little wooden holders. She was using the side of the Green Thumb to make more room to grow. Between trips, I remembered a question I wanted to ask.
    " HMS Green Thumb ", I read aloud so she would overhear me. "What's 'HMS' mean?"
    "Normally, His Majesty's Ship," she replied, "in the Royal Navy. "But I'm the duchess of this yacht - so it stands for Her Majesty's Ship. Me." She tossed me a cold bottle of water that she had brought out and disappeared again. I took the opportunity to sit down with my