As luck would have it that very afternoon Clarence, who had been leaning against the mast most of the day looked up from his book on famous pirates and noticed a giant container ship lumbering through the ocean not so very away.
    "Pull in that main sheet and prepare for boarding!" barked Captain Bunting.
    "How in the world are you going to pirate that ship?!" Billy asked. "It's a hundred and eight times bigger than our boat."
    "I've got a plan," the captain said as the humungous ship sailed a little closer.
    The captain steered the Golden Butterfly straight at the container ship and when it was close, far too close in Billy's opinion, Clarence grabbed a rope with a hook on the end from the deck and threw it as far and high as he possibly could. But the hook hardly made it a quarter of the way up the impossibly tall ship before it bounced off the metal hull and fell back into the sea.
    "That was pathetic, " Billy said as the never ending ship raced past them, tossing the tiny Golden Butterfly in its tremendous wake.
    "Do you think you could have done better?" the captain said sharply.
    "Anyone could have done better than that!" Billy said. "And what do you think you were going do if you had managed to get on board?"
    "Pillage and plunder her gold, of course, and then scuttle her to the ocean floor!"
    "You can't be serious," Billy said.
    "It just takes practice, " Captain Bunting said, "And besides, we learned a lot from our mistakes."
    "Like what?"
    "Like the need for longer ropes, for instance."
    "It'll never work," Billy said.
    "Look, Mister," the captain said sternly, "the last thing we need around here is a nay-sayer like you, so mind you attitude or else you'll be sleeping in the hold with the rats again."