Seriously, Mark, use your head!!  What have you learned from all your days in the woods? That Nature has endowed its creatures with their own special strengths and gifts- right now yours is SPEED!  Does the box turtle try to out run the fox?  no!  A turtle will pull itself into its shell and wait out the attack.  Does the Hare stand still when being attacked? No! it RUNS!!

And what do you have to show for all your guile (or lack of)?  Bullet holes in your back-end and probably in your engine, which will now allow yourself to be captured and well, who knows what-all… Well, it’s probably for the best as this story line needs to include the real villain, monologuing about world domination… and a hefty bill going back to Woods and Wildlife Magazine Editor Bill Ellis for yet another destroyed boat!!

Is that Ken squealing like the pig in the GEICO commercials?  or is is the final hench-man about to go under??  OK that’s a stretch… the pig goes “WEE, WEE, WEEEEE all the way <home,> and someone here said, “AAAHHH…” but it’s the best I can come up with before the coffee kicks in…

But really?  that boat is heeled over so far I doubt the prop is even making contact with the water…  but no matter, the laws of physics and naval architecture mean nothing in this world…

Oh, Mark, never content (anymore at least) to run away from danger, you are now facing it head on and won’t be happy until you have knocked all the bad guys off their “vehicles…”  I get your challenge with finding the rights words, Mark, I don’t know what to call them either…

With all the red-necks on sea-ATV’s dispatched, will Mark turn toward the mother ship?  Is he that crazy??  Can Ken talk some sense into him?  Ken has a lot to be worried about- he only has a river in his name, not like Mark who has a comic strip named for him… One of you is disposable, the other not… besides it would seem that Mark has no compunction about leaving angry women in his wake…  and would not find it difficult to break the news to Kelly that her man is down!

Such action has never been witnessed in the annals of Mark Trail!  Never has Mark been allowed to utter an unbridled “WOO HOO!” twice in one story arc…

I am waiting now for the helicopter(s) to take off from the yacht and engage… Given James Allen’s love of drawing modern, carbon-based conveyances, they can’t be far off…

Good thing Mark popped for the model with the bullet-proof hull!!  Sort of like opting for the “never-lost” unit in the Hertz rental prior to smartphones and Siri helping us all get around…  All this excitement might have left a scratch or two on the clear-coat, but heck, it’s all for a good cause!  As Mark rams into ATV-2, we see the driver losing saliva in copious amounts as his automatic weapon goes flying and his craft is reduced to scrap…

Sorry for the delay, kids… out of town for the weekend…  Back to work tomorrow and more bone-crushing action in the Trail-verse!!

Strafing fire with a fully automatic Israeli submachine gun/pistol (Uzi 9mm, I am thinking…) and they are not even stopping the Trail!!  What the…?

But OK, we’ll go with it…  Mark needs to run Mr. Aqua-ATV over and get the heck outa there!  For the record, yes, Mark IS getting attacked this time, unlike the encounters he had down inthe deep, where he was the aggressor.

On a watery note, I watched a movie the other night, Pressure, on NetFlix.  It was actually really good.  Starred Danny Houston, recognizable as the saxophone playing, jazz and catfish loving Ax-Man in American Horror Story- Coven.  Called upon my two greatest phobias- enclosed spaces and getting trapped underwater with seemingly no way to escape…  introduced the topic of Full Saturation Diving… really interesting.

Stop pussy-footing around, Mark! Drop the hammer on those twin screws and get out of there!  Unless the rental agency gave you a boat that is all show and no go… No way you shouldn’t be able to out-run a fleet of all-terrain/water vehicles…

Ever wonder why the steering wheel of a powerboat tends to be on the starboard side?  Well, here are a bunch of ideas, the most compelling of which dates back to the Vikings…  That the tiller was on the “steerboard” (right) side of the boat and they would dock on the “port” (left) side so as not to mess up the steering mechanism…

Well isn’t that fancy!  These bad-guy-mobiles can go from sea to land and back again!  And Mark, what are you going to tell the rental agency when you return the boat? “How was everything, sir?”  Oh, just fine…  “I see you ran into some stray gunfire… we see that a lot in these waters- were you drug running or smuggling radioactive material??”

These guys don’t mess around!  Clearly they want the cache of Cobalt-60 to remain a secret… their secret…  World domination can come at a terrible price…

Poor Ken.  He doesn’t realize that this is all in a day’s work for Trail…  Getting, kicked, punched and shot at…

So nice that the bad guys are wearing the blaze orange personal flotation devices…  this will aid in recovering their bodies when things don’t go their way…

So fire up that ride, Trail, your life is depending on it!  Mark, you have the pumped-up kicks, but can you out-run their guns??

What’s with the blue highlights?  And the fact that your helmet would have supposedly kept your head dry and every hair in place…  are you perspiring??

So what are you waiting for?  Fire up that cigarette boat!  Let’s see what she can do!  Certainly these hovering/ jet powered personal water craft are no match for 8 cylinders worth of displacement and propeller power!

These are not your mother’s and father’s bad guys!  There has been an upgrade to the evil that stalks the Trail-verse…  The kind that has a payroll, offers benefits and a retirement plan!  The kind that invents its own technology… like the over-the-water conveyances seen below… what the hell are they?  No doubt the bad guys are aware that they are down three in the first inning of play and are plenty mad about it!!

Like angry hornets that have had their nest tampered with, out they come… How prophetic is it that Bill Ellis suggested that Mark “get a fast boat…”

Probably a good thing that the divers couldn’t talk anyway since they probably only spoke Español… and among all of Mark’s considerable talents, pretty sure speaking Spanish isn’t one of them…  and where is the big boat that made Ken all wide-eyed??

But let’s be really clear, here… no one attacked you, Mark.  They might have been lurking menacingly, but I believe that you are the aggressor here…  but no one will ever know anything but your version of the truth…  What is it we say?  History is written by the victors?

I guess that’s what happens when you leave no witnesses… you can make up your own version of the story and there’s no one to challenge it… Mark, let’s be clear… no one attacked you…  these could have been three people out for a leisurely dive and you dispatched each of them, with extreme prejudice…

And Ken, let’s be honest about why you want out of there…  the humidity is really getting to your hair!

The propulsion device is already winging its way out of the frame… it would come straight out at the audience and cause everyone to flinch!

With all three supposed henchmen dispatched, Mark will now go to the surface and find that his boat has also winged its way out of the picture…  hope you have saved a little energy for the swim home!!

OK, so it took me a while to catch on to Mark’s plan…

“Very clever, Mr. Trail, very clever… (he says in his best Dr. Evil voice…)  But you haven’t finished me off yet!  I still have the high ground aboard my luxury yacht!”

Poor Schlub… did not realize that signing up for evil was not going to pay- In fact it was going to cut short what might have been a productive life!  So many lessons we can learn in the Trailverse- Keep your nose clean boys and girls!  Hard work and dedication to good lead down the real path of righteousness and success.  That, and marrying well…

Well, here we are at the Humpback Plane…  KONK, KLUNK…  Oh…  of course!  It’s the home of the spam-colored Moray Eel!  Knock, knock!  “Who’s there?”  Moray!  “Moray who??”  Moray’s gonna get you!  That’s who!

OK, that was terrible.

Love how Mark is using his luck and special dominion over the animal kingdom to save his ass!  Remember how the Moray was two sets of jaws? An inner one to pull prey into it’s mouth- that’s as gross as the alien in Alien…

OK I get the reference now…  a little thin, but we’ll go with it…  causes the mind to race, though…  what could this old wreck of a plane have to offer Mark in his time of need?  And did the Author have all this in mind before we started down this path?  Impressive, since I have always supposed that these story arcs were left to chance…  At least it feels that way sometimes.  But on second thought, I do recall the Indian Artifacts story that introduced, in a very random way, Maple Syrup… only to have that be what cracked to case!

Still, we wonder what is going on above the surface…  last we knew, Ol’ Mississippi Ken was face to face with a Luxury Yacht…

…and is gaining.  But never fear, boys and girls, Nature always finds a way.  Never fails the Trails.  Because they are on the side of GOOD, as opposed to EVIL.

So as Mark prepares to wrangle the whales and have them do his bidding, he’s about to make Mr. “I’m cool because I have the propulsion device” look a little foolish…

…harpoon guns don’t kill people… People kill people. Or is it cut air hoses and pierced air tanks that kill people?  I am so confused.  So Mark is now avoiding the third henchman, who is dutifully standing (floating?) guard outside the sunken freighter…  a fellow who apparently has very limited peripheral vision- especially with his underwater breathing apparatus on… and I wonder how he rates- he gets to use the one propulsion unit while the other guys, now dead, had to swim there under their own power…  makes me wonder, too, whether the two ‘bad guys’ are still inside the ship, since there was no apparent attempt to climb to the surface and breathe the clean fresh Gulf air.

So Mark, just keep swimming, real quite-like and maybe you can get away…

Yes. Compressed air can have an acceleration effect on an-otherwise un-tethered body, I suppose, but to send a full grown man “spinning wildly out of control?”  OK, we’ll go with that…  Count him as dead.  No way he makes it out of the freighter and to the surface without blacking out…

So is that two down and one to go?  And we still don’t know who they are and what they are up to!  No chance to assess guilt or innocence, even in the Trailian sense of the words… Wrong place, wrong time, I guess…