The afternoons were nearly unbearable with the blistering sun high in the sky and the temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, but the mornings were cool enough on the water, and we fished.

Capt. Frank is an old hand around Everglades City, a picturesque hamlet whose 513 residents are vastly outnumbered by alligators, and his navigational and boat-handling skills make him a much sought-after guide to the region. The scars on his fingers bear mute testimony to the fighting skills of his favorite prey, the mangrove snapper, a fish that, once hooked, seems almost eager to get into the boat for a chance at vengeance.

A set of wickedly pointed, razor-sharp teeth make getting the barbed hooks out a dicey proposition, one routinely performed by the captain himself for his more touristy clients.

"Show 'em a little blood spilled on their behalf and the tips go up proportionately," he said.

The marina was on the Barron River, named for Barron Gift Collier, a wealthy speculator from Memphis who bought up most of the land around there in the early '20s. Most everything in Everglades City is named after him, including the river, the county (Collier) and the school system. He was not, apparently, a humble man.

And neither was Capt. Frank, which was fine with me, since I distrust humble men. We got on famously.

He spoke of his brief career as an alligator wrestler and time spent prospecting for gold in the deserts and mountains of western Nevada. He thought he might write a book someday, and I did my best to convince him that there was no future in such an undertaking.

But he was good. One night, after a lingering dinner and a couple short beers, we retired to the veranda for cigars, and I told him about the shooting in Maine the season before last.

"Never killed a bear," he said. "Did bag a Boone and Crockett non-typical bull oyster one time, though. Wrapped it in a Hot Shot Emergency Thermal Shield firefighters blanket and threw it on the bonfire. It fed 16 people, two dogs and a badger. My wife had the pearl drilled and it got her average up to 225."

"That's a hell of a story, Frank," I said, dumbfounded.

I opted for an old copper-colored Makinen spoon that came in the ancient tin Number Ten tackle box manufactured by the Minneapolis firm of UMCO sometime before World War II and passed down to me after my grandfather died.

The spoon seemed to work as well on the salt-water snapper as it had 60 years ago on Lake Erie walleye, and once I had it tied on, there didn't seem to be a good reason not to leave it there. The big treble hook quickly gained purchase on the snapper's maw, and I managed to unhook the fish and return it to the water without any bloodshed.

All the Everglades City guides fished their own special waters, and for one to intrude on another's domain provoked fits of threats and cursing not unlike those of a New York City hot-dog vendor who shows up on his corner one morning to find an interloping hot-dog man positioned half a block down.

Except that the guides have knives and, very often, large pistols strapped around their waists. From the start of the big water on Chokoloskee Bay on down the Wilderness Waterway to the Ten Thousand Islands on the easternmost shore of the Gulf of Mexico, they jealously guarded their secret spots.

But the sun felt wonderful, and repeated applications of a local concoction called Bull Frog seemed to turn the skin quickly from a lobster red to a somewhat pleasing shade of brown. We'd knock off around 11 and head back for lunch. Everglades City has five restaurants, three of which are air-conditioned and all of which serve the exact same things. Frogs legs, stone crab, shrimp, grouper and fresh hamburger were all consumed with abandon, generally along with dozens of raw oysters flavored with lemon, Tabasco sauce, horseradish, cocktail sauce, or some combination thereof, according to taste.

The limited number of eateries and the fact that sometimes people get it into their heads to make a movie in the Everglades has resulted in two of the air-conditioned restaurants becoming film sets over the years.

The Seafood Depot served as the setting for "Wind Across the Everglades," a remarkable 1958 film written by Budd Schulberg and directed by the great Nicholas Ray that featured a tremendous cast, including Burl Ives, Christopher Plummer, Gypsy Rose Lee, "Two Ton" Tony Galento, Peter Falk in his film debut, and the great circus clown Emmett Kelly!

The nearby Oyster House was the scene for 1997's "Gone Fishin'," a Disney comedy starring Joe Pesci, Danny Glover, Rosanna Arquette and Willie Nelson. After seeing it, the critic Leonard Maltin said it stunk like fish, and the Salt Lake City paper's film guy said the Academy should demand Pesci return the award he won for "Goodfellas."

The gale-force winds, torrential rain and dangerous lightning strikes greeting us Friday night at that airport in Cheektowaga signaled our return to the Niagara Frontier. On Saturday morning, we discovered that the power had been knocked out at our building, and crisis quickly ensued.