Live Oak Blues What happens.

With all due respect to Kansas, North Dakota, and Delaware, Florida is the type of state that residents want to experience. Many hours have I spent with the Delorme Florida Atlas & Gazetteer wanting to go there and there and there. Well, I got to experience Page 76 on Sunday, which is several miles out in the Gulf Of Mexico in 4-to-6 feet of water, chasing cute, blue-eyed, snapping mollusks also known as scallops.

Everyone who does this between July 1st and September 15th every year (and there are plenty) fixates on getting their limit of scallops. But the real payoff is the world of eel grass, coral, manta rays, fluorescent fish, sea anemones, and creatures that stretch out long, thin, electric blue tentacles and then suck them back in when you touch them. I could have floated for hours without surfacing, but the current would have put me miles away from my only link back to shore. So what if I refused all sunscreen and returned with a face a hue of red you can’t find it on a color map? My “reasoning”: pirates never used sunscreen. Seriously, that’s what I thought.

After shucking these guys, I ended up with a handful of actual scallop meat, but there’s nothing quite like bringing food back to the cave, especially when you have someone who knows how to cook it. And, yes, I felt sorry for them. On the boat, as they sat in the bucket of water we used to collect them, they would occasionally go into a snapping frenzy to escape. Adorable, and delicious.