My latest hobby-and one that is ideally suited for the Gulfshore-is windfishing. It combines two activities at which I do not particularly excel: fishing and windsurfing. And it thus creates a recreational diversion at which I can fail in truly spectacular fashion.

Witness a recent outing on Estero Bay. I had been windsurfing (badly) for about an hour when the wind, as it so often does, simply died. I was stuck outside of the Sanibel Causeway, dead in the water. No problem. I was on a slow drift landward. Plus, my spinning rod was strapped to the stern with a bungee cord. I sat down on the board and started fishing. This is the beauty of windfishing. If there's no wind, you can fish. And if there's no wind or fish, then what the heck, at least you're out on the water. Serious fishermen and serious windsurfers might snicker at the sport, but since I am neither, I don't really care.

A boatload of serious fishermen had already heckled me. "Seen a lot of big sharks in here," hollered one of them, as he watched me fishing on my board.

"Sharks are supposed to be here," I hollered back.

"That may be," he said. "But what you gonna do when you hook up with one of them?"

There are, I admit, some kinks in the sport of windfishing that still need smoothing out.

I sat there, thinking: What if I really did hook a big shark? Not to worry, just cut the line. Problem solved. Back to windfishing.

The boatload of fishermen cranked up and left. And things were going just swimmingly until, maybe a half hour later, I heard a peculiar sound in the distance.

Those lucky folks who have survived tornados report their first clue that something was about to go wrong came from the awful noise. Like a freight train, they say.

What I heard sounded more like a faucet running full blast, but it was still plenty terrifying. Especially when I looked out on the not-so-distant cloud bank and saw the spiraling gray funnel that had speared the Gulf of Mexico, a wicked umbilical seeking earthly attachment.

A waterspout.

There wasn't much I could do. The wind had picked up, but the squall was sucking everything its way. I just sat there and watched.

The waterspout sliced in from the Gulf, its tail retracting as it approached the tip of Sanibel. I relaxed. But no sooner had the churning squall line crossed over the island to the bay than the dervish came whirling down again.

It came closer and closer. That running faucet was now a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner. And it was heading my way.

You know how it is when you go to the fair and order cotton candy and the vendor sticks the cardboard tube into the machine and twirls it while the wispy fluff keeps growing bigger and bigger and bigger? That's sort of what it looks like staring into the maw of an approaching waterspout.

I've read that many good people in ancient Pompeii turned in their escape from raging Vesuvius and, frozen by the horrendous spectacle, became lawn ornaments for the ages. Not me. I jumped off the board and got under it.

That's when I started thinking about those sharks again.

Cut to the chase: I survived. The waterspout touched down a quarter-mile beyond me, siphoning up who-knows-what from the bay.

A few minutes later, some unsuspecting soul in Bonita Springs was probably standing in his back yard when the sky offered a shower of mullet, jellyfish and some really ticked-off blue crabs.

As for me, I lived to windfish another day.