The Worst Christmas Outing Ever

A holiday nightmare, courtesy of my brother-in-law

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s advice is unsolicited—again—because not enough of you are sending me questions.

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

As we do every year, my family will be spending the holiday at my sister’s condo in Florida.

Christmas with my sister (not pictured: Florida)

It’s been a reliably enjoyable experience for the sixteen years since I learned my lesson and banned my brother-in-law from planning any family outing more ambitious than a trip to the grocery store.

This might seem a little harsh. But if you’d been on that goddam fishing trip in 2009, you’d understand.

A Few Words About My Brother-in-Law

Even Terry—which is not his real name, but it’s close enough—agreed that the whole fiasco was his fault when I called him a while ago to confirm some of the more horrifying details of the story you’re about to read.

And I’m not trying to impugn Terry’s character. In most respects, he’s an outstanding brother-in-law. The nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Kind, thoughtful, generous.

He just has shockingly poor judgment.

You how sometimes a person’s greatest strength is simultaneously their biggest weakness? That’s the situation here. Terry’s an impeccably gracious host. Over two decades’ worth of Christmas dinners, I’ve never seen a guest drain their wine glass to even half-empty before he refills it for them, or escape dessert without having eaten at least a little bit more tres leches than they’d planned to, at Terry’s friendly insistence.

And in chartering the crew who’d eventually become our captors on the open sea, Terry was trying—much, MUCH too hard—to be a good uncle to my oldest son.

I’ll call him Nine, because that’s how old he was in 2009,¹ and I don’t want this story poisoning my kid’s search results. The same goes for Nine’s brothers, Seven and Four, along with their cousin Five, all of whom were trapped on the boat with us.

So, why were we on that boat in the first place?

In the year or so leading up to this debacle, Nine had somehow—and given that we’d been raising him on the barren concrete slab of lower Manhattan, I can only assume YouTube was involved—gotten very interested in fishing.

As Nine’s father, I’d been willing to indulge this interest up to a point. When we’d spent a week on Cape Cod the previous summer, I’d bought Nine and Seven cheap Zebco rods, along with a half-size Spongebob-branded one for Four (did you know Nickelodeon makes fishing gear? Capitalism is magical, truly).

Then I took them to a pond, baited their hooks with gas station nightcrawlers, and assumed responsibility for releasing the sad, terrified, and very stupid little six-inch yellow perch that they wound up catching half a dozen times between them.

Evidence that I’m not a bad parent: at least two-thirds of these kids are smiling

It’s possible I’m mistaken, and we weren’t actually catching the same fish each time, but rather six different perch who just happened to be identical in size, coloring, and personality.

Or, alternatively, that it wasn’t a very stupid perch but in fact a very smart one, whose decision to keep taking the same bait over and over again wasn’t due to an inability to retain short-term memories, but a sophisticated risk-reward calculation in which he consciously allowed himself to be impaled through the lip and hoisted into the air on a nylon string to endure fifteen seconds of asphyxiating terror in exchange for the opportunity to eat yet another gas station nightcrawler.

I dunno. Also, I’m digressing.

When pond fishing failed to quench Nine’s thirst for angling, I treated all three kids to a two-hour cruise on something called (if I’m remembering correctly, which I’m not) Pirate Petey’s Happy Fun Times Fishing Excursion.

I am in possession of photos that seem to prove all three kids caught fish on that trip and were happy about it.

Three for three in the smiles department!

The fact that I’ve retained next to no memories of the Pirate Petey experience, and am only sure it happened because my wife unearthed the photos, leads me to believe it was both a painless way to kill an afternoon and a fair exchange of value for money.

I wish I could say the same for the horrifying shitshow my brother-in-law got us into several months later.

The Christmas Week Nightmare Begins

Somehow, Terry got wind of the fact that Nine wanted to do more fishing. And instead of hewing to—or even minimally respecting—my own parenting philosophy that it’s character-building for your kids to want things and not get them, especially if those things are inconvenient for you, and all you really want from your Christmas week is to sit by the pool at Terry’s condo reading mystery novels while occasionally yelling at the kids to quit running on the deck, Terry took it upon himself to create a once-in-a-lifetime fishing experience for his oldest nephew, while dragging the rest of us to a watery hell alongside them.

I’ll say this: there’s no question it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

And I deeply regret that when Terry first told me he’d hired a private charter to take us kite fishing, for an absolutely bonkers amount of money that he expected me to go halfsies on, all in the service of making just one-third of my kids happy, I lacked the courage to say no.

“Thanks, but no thanks! The kid’s happy enough. He’s just a little pouty. He’ll get over it. I don’t need to spend four hundred bucks trying to put a smile on his face. All I want to do today is sit on this lounge chair and maybe take a nap.”

I could’ve said that. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to look like a dick.

I didn’t even know what kite fishing was.

To be honest, I’m still not really sure, except that it involves a great deal of complicated, potentially dangerous equipment, and is a wildly inappropriate activity for children under ten.

Especially ones whose boating experience had mostly been limited to the Staten Island Ferry, and who could barely recognize fishing gear as such unless it had Spongebob’s face plastered on it.

I also had no idea what sailfish were, which was what I was told we’d be catching. Had I not been too lazy to do my own research, I would’ve realized they are substantially larger than my children were at the time. Had any of us actually caught one (spoiler alert: we didn’t), it would’ve been the stuff of nightmares.

I mean, seriously. Look at this thing:

I have no idea who these people are (Source: Wikimedia commons/WIDTTF)

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that one of my kids had actually hooked one of these apex predators on a fishing line. The most likely result? It would’ve instantly pulled my child into the sea.

Had the kid been strapped to the deck and somehow managed, against all laws of physics, to land the fish on the boat, then what would’ve happened? Based on our experience with the six-inch yellow perch, I’m certain this giant, heavily armed animal (what is that spear attached to its face, if not one of nature’s deadly weapons?) would have been extremely agitated and in full fight-or-flight response, a situation that could only have ended with either its death or ours.

It is amazing to me, even sixteen years later, that I was dumb enough to pay hundreds of dollars to make this scenario more likely rather than less.

Predictably, my brother-in-law takes a different view of the situation. Terry still maintains that this trip had the potential to be “fun.” When I spoke with him about it a while back, he was positively rhapsodic about the experience of hunting sailfish.

“They put on a great fight,“ Terry told me. “They tail walk, their sails go up—they’re a spectacular fighting fish.”

That sounds amazing! If you’re Ernest Hemingway. Who, by the way, was usually drunk when he did this kind of thing.

I am not Ernest Hemingway. At best, I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wouldn’t have been caught dead anywhere near that goddam boat.

My nine-, seven-, and four-year-old sons were also not Ernest Hemingway. Neither was my five-year-old nephew, although to be honest, even at five he was closer to it than anybody on my side of the family has ever gotten.

To give Terry the briefest benefit of the doubt, his intent was not to offer my small and incompetent children the direct experience of engaging a savage animal in mortal combat, but the vicarious one.

Here’s where Terry’s poor judgment kicks into high gear.

As both of us understand the situation, Terry hired Captain Salty (not his real name, because lawsuit) not to take us kite fishing ourselves, but to WATCH Salty and his two crew members, Angry and Grumpy, as THEY went kite fishing.

According to Terry, the idea was that if they’d managed to coax one of these 200-pound savages onto a hook (spoiler alert: they didn’t), the kids would’ve somehow been involved in reeling the monster in, or at least pretending to.

I guess the best case scenario would’ve looked something like this, which I found by searching “kite fishing sailfish” on Wikipedia For Illiterates:

In fairness, there IS a kid in that video. But not only is the kid several years older than mine were, he seems very experienced in the use of non-Spongebob-branded fishing gear.

Also, do you see how many layers of clothing everybody on that boat is wearing? This will become important later.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that my kids were totally incapable of offering even token assistance in landing a sailfish—rendering the entire premise of the trip fatally flawed—Terry’s and my recollections part ways on the subject of Captain Salty’s qualifications.

The Enigma of Captain Salty

Terry maintains that Salty was a licensed charter boat operator, and his primary occupation was taking idiots like us fishing.

But the fact that Terry admits he first met Salty when he bought some freshly caught fish that The Captain was selling on the dock, right off the back of his boat, makes me suspect otherwise.

As did the captain and crew’s demeanor. At no point during the trip did Salty, Angry, or Grumpy give any indication that they cared if we were having a good time, or viewed us as anything other than an obstacle to the accomplishment of their goals.

These were not people who acted like they gave a shit if we gave them a five-star review on Yelp. These were hard men who’d spent their lives at sea.

And if they were actually in the hospitality business, they wouldn’t have gotten so mad at us when the vomiting started.

All of which leads me to conclude that what Terry hired was actually a commercial fishing vessel in the primary sense of the word: these men earned their living by catching, killing, and selling fish.

The whole scenario—including the contempt-bordering-on-disgust with which the crew treated us even before we’d soiled their workplace with the contents of our stomachs—makes a lot more sense if my brother-in-law hadn’t chartered a sport fishing trip, but rather bribed a fishing boat captain to let us come aboard and watch them go about their deadly business. Consequently,

I’m pretty sure our presence on that ship was illegal.

At a minimum, there were OSHA violations up the wazoo. When you operate a dangerous work environment like a kite fishing boat, you’re not supposed to bring along half a dozen small children and clueless townies to gawk at you, eating Sun Chips and drinking Sprite while you risk your life.

There’s some disagreement as to whether it was Sprite. My oldest thinks what he vomited up was clear Gatorade. Terry says it could’ve been either one, but in any case, when he goes out fishing, “I always buy the clear stuff so it doesn’t stain the deck.”

I question whether this is still true once the clear stuff has been mixed with partially digested Sun Chips. But I’m certain they were Sun Chips, because nothing else can explain my nearly two-decade-old psychological aversion to a brand of snack food I used to really enjoy.

The trip actually started out kind of okay.

I didn’t really want to be there, and I recall thinking I was a little underdressed for the chilly weather even while we were still only doing five or ten…“knots,” I guess?

But the water was reasonably calm as Captain Salty set a course from Key Biscayne through the channel to Fisher Island.

After we came to a stop fifty yards off shore, Angry and Grumpy handed all of the kids short fishing poles with, no joke, FIVE hooks running off each line and told them to drop the lines straight into the water, wait about ten seconds, and then reel them in.

I was skeptical until the kids started pulling absolutely enormous quantities of cigar minnows out of the water, which Angry and Grumpy collected as bait for the sailfish.

This was pretty wild. I’d never seen such an enormous results-to-effort ratio from fishing. Also, it was definitely an OSHA violation, and may have transgressed some child labor laws.

But the kids loved it, so I was fine with that.

And the irony is that if Captain Salty had just dropped us off back at the pier after twenty minutes of bait fishing, it would’ve been a pretty successful trip. Definitely on the expensive side, but kind of memorable in a not-so-bad way, because my kids had just hauled in several multiples of their lifetime catch totals, and they were feeling pretty cocky about their fishing skills.

But instead of quitting while everybody was ahead, Captain Salty opened the throttle and headed for the open sea.

At high speed, and dressed only in T-shirts, the conditions quickly deteriorated from chilly to frigid. Then we left the shelter of the channel, the ocean turned choppy, and Captain Salty started bashing the waves with the prow of the ship like he was mad at them.

It was very unpleasant. But nobody (and by nobody, I mean me) wanted to seem unmanly by complaining, so we suffered in shivering silence until Salty cut our speed long enough for Angry and Grumpy to start running out the kite lines.

That was mildly interesting to watch for the first couple of minutes. Then it became clear to the kids that they had no role in the process, and they quickly grew bored. In their boredom, they ate three large bags of Sun Chips and each put away a couple of soft drinks.

Then, once the kite lines were set, Captain Salty opened the throttle again, and the descent into madness began.

Here’s where things REALLY go to hell.

All three kids, with their stomachs perilously full and wearing only T-shirts and shorts, started to get not just seasick, but hypothermic. The boat had a small interior cabin with two cushioned benches perpendicular to each other in an L shape, and I brought the kids inside to lie down on the benches until they warmed up enough for their lips to stop turning blue.

“The problem was that they went into the cabin,” Terry helpfully explained sixteen years later. “You always get more seasick in the cabin than you do on the deck.”

I swear to God, nobody told me this at the time. In 2009, it would’ve been really useful advice. Today, it just makes me angry.

Oddly enough, though, vomiting was not the first problematic bodily function I encountered.

“Dad, I have to poop,” Nine told me as he sat up from amid the woozy tangle of children splayed across the cabin benches.

At the front (“fore?”) end of the cabin was a short stairway that led down to a kitchen (“galley?”), at the far—sorry, “fore”—end of which was a tiny, cramped toilet (“head?” Jesus, these nautical terms are annoying).

I sent Nine into the whatever-you-call-it to do his business while I kept a careful eye on Seven and Four, neither of whom seemed conscious as they lay prostrate on the cushioned benches.

Several minutes later, Nine emerged with an announcement:

“The toilet’s broken.”

I did not try to correct his nautical terminology.

I also didn’t attempt to inform Salty, Angry, or Grumpy, as they seemed very busy with their day jobs and had given me no indication that it’d be okay to interrupt them with plumbing issues. Or any other issues, up to and including the loss of life.

I was also worried that I might get charged extra for whatever my kid had just done to their “head.” So I grudgingly descended into the “galley,” swapped places with my kid in the “head,” and set about trying fix the situation.

I was just starting to achieve a remedial understanding of naval sewage disposal when I heard Nine call to me from the top of the stairs:

“Dad?”

I poked my head out of the—screw this, it’s a toilet—just in time to see Nine projectile vomit off the top of the cabin stairs and onto the floor of what common sense demands that I call a kitchen.

Now I had two problems: the poop in the toilet behind me, and the barf on the floor in front of me. Nine had created both, but the look on his face made it clear he was in no condition to help solve either one.

I was trying to decide whether the poop or the puke was the more pressing issue when I heard Seven call out to me from the aft (I guess?) of the cabin:

“Dad??”

By the time your kids are that age, even a parent as inattentive as I was can diagnose specific forms of bodily distress just by tone of voice.

And the subtext of Seven’s “Dad??” was unmistakable:

I’m about to puke.

What added real urgency to this situation was that—for reasons I will never understand—the cabin floor was carpeted. Already anticipating a broken-toilet surcharge on top of the four hundred bucks I was never going to see again, I had no appetite for piling on a carpet-cleaning penalty.

Had you been there to witness it, I think you would’ve been pretty impressed by the speed at which I hurdled over the spreading lake of Nine’s chunder on the galley floor, vaulted up the stairs, dodged Nine’s swaying body, gathered up Seven, and burst out the door with him to the gunwale, where he could safely puke without costing me money.

I have a vague recollection of seeing Grumpy roll his eyes and shake his head as we passed him on the deck.

Miraculously, once I got Seven’s head over the gunwale and his mouth pointed down at the sea, he didn’t puke.

Or maybe it wasn’t miraculous, it was just the fact that he was no longer lying flat on his back inside the cabin—which, again, nobody had fucking told me would make him more likely to throw up.

I held him over the gunwale for at least a full minute, until Seven declared that he didn’t think he was going to be sick anymore. I’d just released my grip on him and was congratulating myself for such swift and decisive action when I heard a voice behind me utter the final repetition of what had become a mantra of imminent horror:

“DAD???”

It was Nine again. As I turned around to face him, I already knew from his tone that the situation back in the cabin had somehow taken a turn for the worse.

Even so, I was totally unprepared for what I saw next.

Nine and Four were standing at the open cabin door. And Four—who, last I’d clocked him, had been lying unconscious on the cabin bench—was dripping, I mean DRIPPING with vomit, from the crown of his head down to his chin.

The first coherent thought I managed to assemble was, “How the hell did he throw up on his own head?”

I can’t remember if I figured out for myself or had to have it explained to me that the barf running down Four’s face actually belonged to Nine. In my absence, he’d staggered back to the cabin bench and collapsed head-to-head next to Four, only to subsequently discover his stomach wasn’t empty yet. At which point he rose up just high enough to evacuate the remainder onto his little brother’s skull.

Since Four claims—for psychologically understandable reasons—to have no conscious memory of this entire episode, it’s impossible to say whether he suffered more from the injury to his dignity, or from the force of the high-pressure hose we had to use to power-wash the barf off of him.

But the biggest mystery—and the strongest evidence for my case that this wasn’t a standard charter operation, but some kind of side hustle gone wrong on the part of the crew—is why the trip didn’t end at that point.

Notwithstanding the damage to both his ship and his passengers, my recollection is that Captain Salty didn’t admit defeat and turn back to port for at least another hour, long past the point at which a sane man would’ve realized the sailfish just weren’t biting that day.

And I can’t help thinking that somewhere out there, a kite fisherman with a Substack just published an essay about how his idiot boss once let six yokels puke all over their boat in exchange for eight hundred bucks.

So what’s the Bad Advice here?

There isn’t any. I just needed to get this off my chest.

Also, kudos to my wife and my sister, who spent the entire time we were on the boat enjoying a leisurely brunch in South Beach.

Well played, sister

Happy holidays, everybody! In lieu of a gift, please send more questions. I can’t keep this advice column going without you. Literally.

1. Nine’s current pseudonym is Twenty-Five, and her pronouns are no longer he/him. But since that wasn’t the case in 2009, for the purposes of this story, I’m sticking with the Obama-era nomenclature.