Steve Zissou and the Star of India

     On a recent trip to San Diego we stayed a few blocks from Harbor Drive. The Star of India, whose description can be read here, became a pleasant fixture at the start of any walk I took along the water. 

     I'm not sure why I was so taken with her. Perhaps it tied me again to my fantasies about being on the water and living off the bounty of the sea, dreams that I fostered in my short time as a child in Rhode Island. One thing was conspicuously absent from the experience though, the smell; the Pacific just doesn't carry the same intoxicating nostril filling scent of salt and sea that the Atlantic does. Still, it is an ocean and I found myself moving nearer to it at every opportunity. 
     On our last morning there I met a kindred soul who shares my yen for the ocean, none other than Steve Zissou himself. He was there filming his latest foray over the deep and stopped in to do a bit piece on the very ship that greeted me each morning. We chatted for a spell and posed for a photo. He let me call him Stevesie. And before we departed, his assistant handed me a red cap and a Speedo. With a pat on my shoulder and a skip in my step we departed, he to his next adventure and me to mine as the happiest member of the Zissou Society that day.