The Captain: Buddy Vanderhoop

Charter captain Buddy Vanderhoop has an old rusty hatchet in his boat that he calls his tomahawk. He has no qualms about playing his Indian heritage to the hilt (even though his last name, which is Dutch, is a clue that his native blood is diluted by generations of intermarriage).

In July and August the water around the island is thronged with boats, and the competition for prime real estate is fierce. One day he was forced to wave the tomahawk around and do a wild-eyed Wampanoag routine. Some jerk from Virginia squeezed his boat between Buddy’s Tomahawk Too and the Femme Fatale, piloted by a friend of his. They’d been catching fish and this guy was “jumping” them.

“No, no, no,” Buddy said he told the man. “This isn’t going to happen. You’ve gotta move.”

The guy looked over at Buddy. “What’re you going to do about it?”

That’s when Buddy brought the corroded ax out from its spot next to the captain’s seat. He’s pretty sure he could put the thing in a dock post from fifty feet. No doubt he could bury it in this Reb’s skull from about that distance. But he happened to have a lawyer
on the boat with him and counsel advised him not to unleash the tomahawk. So instead Buddy poked a hook through an oily pogy head with the guts hanging off and cast the thing as hard as he could at the offending boat. “It probably was doing a hundred and fifty miles per hour when it hit the pilothouse of his boat.” The bait bounced off, whizzed past the shirtless guy, and splattered blood and gore all over his deck.

Then Buddy reared back as if he were setting the hook and missed snagging the guy by millimeters—millimeters, he swears. In the end, it was probably for the best that Buddy didn’t hook the dude, drag him overboard, reel him over to his boat, and beat the living crap out of him, as he had wanted to do.

No two ways about it: that would’ve been bad for business.