You just Can't Make This Stuff Up !!

[Captain Rich]

You just can't make this stuff up ! Today two guys walk up to the boat and ask me if I could help them recover a balloon from the ocean. It seems that as part of an advertising campaign for coconut water, Derrick took a styrofoam cooler with 3 Go-Pro cameras and a GPS transponder, threw in a coconut for good luck, mounted their product bottle on the outside and hung it from a helium balloon. They launched it in Miami 2 and 1/2 days ago and when the balloon popped, the parachute opened and we had touchdown in the Atlantic ! I found the little sucker 8 miles offshore of Jupiter, about 90 miles from launch. The balloon got up to 10,000 feet and the video is pretty incredible, you see the bottle hovering in space with the earth and clouds going by underneath. I'll attach the video when I get it. Couldn't let a perfectly good trip go to waste, so on the way back in I threw in two trolling lines and got them two nice mahi for the victory celebration tonight. More wacky stuff coming, in two days I have a trolling charter that wants to deposit some ashes offshore... of course they have been sitting on the living room shelf for 18 years. See- you just can't make this stuff up.