Thousands flocked to South Beach Sunday to test their wits with puzzles and nearly impossible riddles. They featured mermaids in drag and an actor portraying Francis Scott Key, all part of the quest to win South Florida's strange scavenger hunt.
It was the 17th Herald Hunt, a massive, community brain teaser created by Herald humorist Dave Barry and former Tropic Magazine editor Tom Shroder.
This year, about 5,000 came to see if they could unravel the riddles woven around Lincoln Road and 17th Street.
The winners went home with the promise of a four-day cruise to the Caribbean. Everyone else went home with a headache.
''Tell Dave it was just right,'' said Chuck Yribarren about Barry. ``It wasn't too hard, wasn't too easy.''
Well, maybe it was a little too hard.
Yribarren's group couldn't solve a two-part riddle that involved a golf tee with ''fore'' written on the side that sent hunters from the Miami Beach Community Church to a tournament leader board posted on 17th Street. The answer: Eliott Tarantino (a name with four t's.)
''That golf clue was diabolical,'' said Yribarren, whose team overanalyzed the puzzle.
Participants looked to different clues and performances and wrote down notes on special Hunt handouts that came with their Miami Herald Sunday editions. The answer to the riddles is always a number, which can be linked to the same number in the pamphlet for an answer.
AMAZED TOURISTS
For once on South Beach, the tourists watched with amusement as everyone else ran around, heads in a map, with no idea where they were going.
''What are all these lunatics doing here?'' said Tony Crushan, from Manchester, England. Crushan, sitting just off Lincoln Road by the beach, didn't understand why so many people would want to watch a game of volleyball played with inflated animal balloons instead of a ball.
For some, the thought of being the first to decode Barry's mad puzzle drove some to consider less-than-noble means in order to win. One team jokingly offered a Herald employee a bribe for any suggestions; another threatened torture.
''I'm not out here to make friends,'' said Andrea Johnson as she scrambled away from the Hunt Main Stage just after noon, when Barry read five numbers that corresponded to grid locations on the Hunt map. ``I want that cruise.''
But the Hunt is a tradition for many.
For Andrew and Jeff Gordon, this year's winners, the Herald Hunt has been a family affair since the first Hunt in 1984.
It only took the brothers 17 tries to win the Hunt -- which has not been held every year. But the wait no doubt made the victory sweeter, considering the Gordons live in Miami Beach.
''I've been doing this longer than I've been married,'' said Jeff.
UNSHARED PASSION
Jeff's wife doesn't share the same passion for the Hunt that he does -- she joined him once and told him never again, he says. But he did manage to pass the tradition down to Zack, 15, who first attended in 1994 as a toddler in a stroller.
The brothers, along with Jeff's son Zack, won because they were the first to place an order of PB&J with a witch on the beach, the final solution to three-and-a-half hours of absurdity.
They were nearly fooled, however, when they sent Zack to the location of an actual sandwich on the Herald Hunt map, instead of first heading to the location of the witch in the sand (or sand witch).
''I went to the wrong sandwich,'' Zack said.
For other families, nothing can stop them from hunting together. Not thousands of miles, or even death.
''There's nothing else like this in the world,'' said Neil Schneider, from Albuquerque, N.M.
Schneider flew in to join his mother Elaine, who brought her husband Allan along -- in her purse.
With Allan's ashes in a black film canister, Elaine introduced her husband, who she said loved the Herald Hunt.
''I just want him to be a part of it,'' she said. ``He's going to wind up in the ocean when this is done.''
