PlanetCatfish.com

Bas Pels wrote:Now you made me look up ineptitude. Are you certain you used it correctly? My dictionary translated it as a synonim for absurdity. languages....

Viktor Jarikov wrote:BTW when I was reading the article I caught myself thinking this sounds like something Bekateen would write up

Ben Goldfarb (the article author) wrote:To find out, I hiked down to the sandy floor of the Grand Canyon one diabolically hot morning this past June. A mile below the rim, I rendezvoused with a blue rubber raft as long as a minke whale, stocked with mesh seine nets, sonar-detecting headsets, and bottles of chemical preservatives. A spiderweb of straps cinched a heap of dry-bags tight to the frame, rigging that would soon be tested by monstrous rapids. I clambered aboard and settled atop a metal crate, inadvertently sitting on eight days’ worth of granola bars and beef jerky. “You may not wanna cover that snack box,” the pilot, Carolyn Alvord, called as she motored us into the current. “That wouldn’t be a popular move.” The precious snacks would fortify Alvord and five fish biologists as they scoured more than 200 miles of rapids, eddies, and backwaters in search of larval razorback suckers...

The days blended together, an infinite loop of cold water and searing sun and purple shadows. Our little crew... and Alvord, our fearless pilot manning the tiller—settled into a routine. We seined all day, gradually filling our canisters with bagged larvae. In the evenings, we sank a semi-circle of folding chairs into the sand and watched bats swoop over the river. We slept on cots beneath a moon luminous enough to read by, and awoke to the pink blush of each new day.

Then it was back on the river, our indomitable raft bucking through the canyon’s famous rapids—the plummet of Horns, the stacked waves of Hermit, the frothy churn of Crystal—en route to our next seining site. Bighorn sheep picked their way along the slopes, and peregrine falcons plunged down cliff faces in pursuit of songbirds. I rode up front, next to the tomato-red poop box (dubbed the “groover,” for its habit of wearing tracks into bathroom-goers’ derrières before someone had the bright idea of outfitting it with a toilet seat), getting soaked by wave after wave. In the absence of outside communication, a pleasant solitude settled over us, the feeling that anything—a World War, the arrival of aliens—could have happened at the surface without our knowledge.