Radio put me on different frequency this week

Looking carefully at the horrible picture of me that accompanies my column, you never would think that at one time that ugly man in the photo was really into the disco scene.

Yep, me. Otherwise known as the Rubber Band Man. I loved to dance — and if it weren’t for my broken back, I would still be dancing my fool head off every chance I could.

It’s sort of weird that an outdoor columnist would be talking about disco and not fish or turkeys, both of which are red-hot right now. But if you bear with me, maybe — just maybe — I can tie things together so you don’t walk away scratching you head.

So what was my inspiration this week? It came to me as I was driving along listening to the radio and on came the disco queen herself, Donna Summer, wailing out the song “On the Radio.” I hadn’t heard that song in a coon’s age. Folks in any car that happened to pull alongside me no doubt thought I was having an epileptic fit.

As Forrest Gump would say, “I was a-dancing” and “I was a-singing” and memories of my days as the Rubber Band Man came flooding back. Believe it or not, Hilton Head actually had a disco back then called Suzette’s, and it was the place to go. And did I ever go. I could dance non-stop for hours and, in my mind at least, I was Hilton Head’s John Travolta.

So what does this have to do with anything except possibly a bit of Lowcountry history best forgotten? It was the word “radio” that triggered memories of another period of my life that I hadn’t given any thought in quite a while.

Most normal people go through life with one occupation and, though advertising and graphic design has been my main game for most of my adult life, other side occupations crept in that helped keep sitting in front of a computer day-in and day-out from getting stale.

Of course, fishing was one of these sideshows but, believe it or not, one that I miss the most was being part of a radio show called H2O Radio.

The brainchild of local inventor and friend John Bloomfield, it was a weekly radio show with the theme “If it happens on the water, it happens on H2O Radio.” More or less a talk format, John, another friend, Ted Everet, who hails from the Florida Panhandle, and I would research water-oriented stories and do telephone interviews with those involved.

Just doing the research was horribly time-consuming, but at the same time it was a lot of fun. At the height of this show, we reached an audience that went from North Carolina to the Virgin Islands.

We interviewed survivors of the USS Indianapolis, the ship that carried the atomic bomb before being sunk by a Japanese torpedo during World War II, leaving the crew in the water surrounded by packs of hungry sharks for nearly a week. Others interviewed included artists like Guy Harvey, a man speared in the chest by an angry marlin that jumped into his boat after being hooked and even musicians like Taj Mahal, an avid offshore angler who became somewhat of a regular on the show.

But it was the humor that really made the show as we created characters that would, and did, spoof just about anybody that would answer the phone.

Here are a few of my favorites: We called a noted taxidermist in South Florida and told him we had caught a 60-foot whale shark and could he mount it for us? He told us it was illegal to kill these plankton eaters but was curious how we even caught it. “Plankton balls,” I told him, but illegal or not, he really needed to get a tractor-trailer rig and come get the fish that was hanging off the stern of my boat.

Another goodie was a call to a funeral director. In this one, I told him a friend of mine has passed away and his will had specified how he was to buried. I told him that the deceased wanted to be strapped into a fighting chair on a sport fishing boat with a large rod and reel glued onto his hands, preferably using PL400 subfloor adhesive. It went on specifying that the drag on the reel be tightened to the max and then go marlin fishing.

I told him price was no object and it didn’t make any difference how long it took to hook a marlin because the internment would happen when a marlin took the bait. At that point, with the drag not giving an inch and my “friend” strapped to the rod and reel, he would be pulled overboard and into the briny depths he would go. The guy was more concerned with the legality of it all than anything else. I guess money does talk.

Another good one was trying to convince the National Park Service to let me go over a waterfall wearing nothing but the Michelin Man bubble suit. It simply couldn’t accept my theory that I would bounce like a rubber ball.

So blame Donna Summer for this week’s ramblings. If I had XM radio in my car and not plain old FM, I might have talked more about all the big wahoo being caught. Next week, my friends, next week.

This story was originally published April 1, 2017 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Radio put me on different frequency this week."