"Fuck this, I'm retiring! Apprentices on a mowin' machine…" S.W. Dempsey said while standing on the front porch watching the atrocity occur.

"They say it'd do the work of twelve horses, or at least three apprentices," Captain John Michael Bellamy Senior added, giving everyone a chuckle.

"Week by day, change is coming," Dempsey laments.

And that is the beginning of how they knew a new generation had truly arrived, that the twenty-first century had fallen upon them with furious vengeance. Putting all drama and sensationalism aside, this is a tale best told by one aforementioned captain, Captain John Michael Bellamy Senior period. The 'period' is obligatory, but that's how he gives his name when he meets people.

"Oh, it was quite a spectacle, it was. I remember the day it changed. The summer of two thousand four, I recall. Late summer. I believe. You could hear the strange hum coming up the boardwalk towards the station. Then it appeared, a green contraption pulling the stores cart.

"Stores is groceries and we always make stores on Thursday, unless it's a holiday. Well, usually them apprentices push that cart up the boardwalk, all hunched over and prostate with pain."

Captain Bellamy takes a pause to give himself a chuckle.

"That's how it used to be done, that's how it's always been done and I reckon that them there apprentices ought not bother with them there contraptions. But, it's been a comin', it has. Why, the pilots next door got a mowin' machine to pull the groceries so maybe it's right time we do too.

"I can tell you what they're sayin' now in the front room- that the apprentices are spitting in the face of a hundred and fifty years of tradition. Yes sir, them pilots are a fickle bunch. They got to have fifty-seven varieties of sauce and all 'em got to be carried on someone else's back.

"Builds character, I heard some say. Makes a better partner in the long end of things. You can tell who's gonna be carryin' their weight in anno domini who knows when.

"But these are treacherous waters, outside in the Gulf and all and up around the bends, so you got to have somebody who ain't fearin' it. Somehow they know that the man who didn't much like pullin' on the cart is the same breed as the one who fears the sea.

"I reckon if you look back, it's an easy one to see that them that didn't carry the weight as an apprentice, don't much carry it as a pilot. And if you fear the sea, you also fear the fog and deep draft and you'll always dodgin' some kind of bullet.

"You know, come to think of it, these guys are the best critics too, 'cause they don't do nothin' but sit back in the front room and point out other people's faults so that no one see theirs. I'm supposin' it's easier to do nothin' than it is to do somethin' yourself and bear the brunt of criticism. Yes sir."

With that, Captain Bellamy pauses and gives a thoughtful look to the distance.

"Yep, this place is full of criticism and it's a cryin' damned shame. It's so beautiful and peaceful until you step inside that there door. Some say it's the politics of the place, but I call it pilotics - the art of wreckin' a man to make another look good. But what's fair and just and right in the real world, ain't the same here.

"One of the old timers told me, shortly before he took his retirement, that the rules of the world don't apply here. You can take your rights and shove 'em 'cause there's only the court of popular opinion. Perception is everything here. Everything.

"I don't much like the game. No sir, but it's one that you gotta play sometimes to get along. Let me tell you one thing, I'd 've gone a long time ago had I not could of fished near anytime I wanted.

"Fishin's part of my wages as I see it. I can make me the paycheck for me and my boys and feed 'em on what I catch. Say what you want one way or the other, but that's how I see it. May as well use the resources the good Lord gave us, all these waters and all these fish.

"That's what I do to get a little peace in my life when I'm down here away from my family for two weeks at a go. I sure do miss them boys.

"Anyhow, 'bout that mowin' machine them boys used. Well, it was a stir as most things are down here that signal change. This bein' the type of place where things is so clear that people choose not to see. It didn't last that long, that machine, but not for lack of want on the apprentices behalf.

"We had ourselves a storm. A category four hurricane, no less, that passed just here to the east of us. Most everything was fine, but as the critics will tell, God himself did in that machine. Yes sir, he came along and ripped apart only one house and that's the one the mowin' machine was at. Ripped the front porch, where it sat, clean off the house.

"The defeatist rally cry of "Oh Lord, change is here" has been vindicated by an act of God. Them apprentices can go on pullin' that rickety cart up and down the boardwalk without the accompanied sideways glance. Builds character, they say.

"That's about what I can rightly recall of that day. All that and it was sunny too."