ESPN  

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — With a swing of a bottle of bubbly against its bow, Melissa Fischer on Friday night rechristened an old crabbing vessel she and her husband, Chris, will lead around the world.

"Calm seas, big fish," she said, needing a couple of swings with the sturdy green bottle to smash it before a crowd of family, crew and well-wishers.

The 126-foot Arctic Eagle is now the Ocean, and on Tuesday it will head to Panama, then Tahiti — then wherever the Fischers and their crew determine the fish are biting. Their goal is to circle the globe over seven years, documenting Earth's remote fisheries for television.

"I've never had to plan on so grand a scale," said Chris Fischer, the host of ESPN2's "Offshore Adventures."

Friday night at the Miami Beach Marina was a respite between preparation and execution. One of the expedition's sponsors, Dos Equis, threw a bash for perhaps 40 guests aboard the Ocean before hosting another gathering at a posh club called La Piaggia a couple of blocks away.

Kheri Holland Tillman, vice-president of Dos Equis, explained the beer company researched its 25-to-30 male customers and found, lo and behold, that they love beer, love having a good time, and don't want to be seen as "uninteresting." Supporting the "Offshore Adventures" voyage is a way, apparently, to give dudes everywhere something interesting to talk about.

It may be a while before the Ocean sees a similar shindig. Replica trophy game fish lined a deck railing, gift bags with hats and DVDs littered the deck, glass-topped tables held beer, and a white shag carpet graced the massive forklift platform that will soon be hoisting the expedition's 45-foot Cabo in and out of the water.

Below deck, of course, beat the deafening, diesel-stinking innards of a vessel headed for the empty blue places on the globe. On a walk from the machine room to the engine room, Chris Fischer pointed out that the crew can get replacement parts "anywhere that's reasonably civilized — but we're not going to be anywhere like that for a while."

His focus in the past months has been upgrading the infrastructure on the ship, replacing not only the pipes and parts that are bad, but those that might go bad within seven years. As he passed the fuel centrifuge, used for purifying diesel, he said: "We have a spare centrifuge. That's how redundant we are. No one has a spare centrifuge."

The word of the night was triple-redundancy, or having a back-up for the back-up. That's two redundant systems. Triple redundancy, Fischer called it.

(Effective, no?)

At La Piaggia, the Fischers and their crew arrived to a true South Beach celebrities' welcome. As they stood for photos, one party-goer whispered to another: "Who's that guy?" The reply came: "The ESPN guy?"

It was not a quintessential outdoors crowd in attendance; most of the men could probably name more than two brands of hair gel and a good fraction of the women were likely either models, aspiring models, washed-up models or had been hit on with the line, "Are you a model?" in the past week. Pretty folks, in other words, and most could have stood to eat a sandwich. (More sample dialogue? A woman met two friends and said, "Oh my God, you're both blond.")

For those who didn't recognize the Fischers without rods in their hands, a video screen near the edge of the outdoor pool, ringed in sand, showed clips of some of their bluewater expeditions. At an appointed moment, the cloth walls of a poolside cabana opened, and a burly bouncer-type helped carry to the pool four brunettes dressed in bikini tops and closed dresses with a fin-like flare at the bottom.

That would be the mermaids.

They splashed around, swam in circular formations and lolled near pool's edge. Seeing this, Nick Seifert, president of Fischer Productions, tried to formulate his perfect quote for the evening. It would start with, "I guarantee you that," then include a name of another fishing show, like "Day at the Lake" or "World's Greatest Fishing Show," and then conclude with, "never had a party like this." Any way he phrased it, the statement was probably accurate.

Before retiring to the boat, Chris Fischer took the DJ's microphone for a moment and, above the disinterested din of chattering clubgoers, thanked everyone for coming, announced that his crew was intending to circumnavigate the world to educate people about what's in the oceans.

"And," he said, "catch some giant fish."