Ambush! The Bliking and Wapol the Blik

Out on the open water a lone figure is balanced atop the waves, and Zoro alerts the others. Up surges a strange craft, the Bliking, and its crew pours over the rail of the Going Merry, cornering Luffy, Zoro, and Usopp before Sanji steps out to round out the group. Their leader, a man named Wapol, chews on a skewer of meat and then casually swallows the blade that had been serving as its handle. One of his crew explains the trick: Wapol carries the Baku Baku no Mi, granting him the power to devour absolutely any material.

The moment Wapol takes a bite out of the hull, Luffy snaps and the fight begins. Everyone but Usopp piles in behind him, and a stretching rocket-punch hurls the captain into the distance, scattering his raiders while one of them screams that the gang must never be forgotten. The story then rewinds several days to a Marine ship, where a subordinate tells Captain Smoker that a transmission has been intercepted. With Tashigi beside him, Smoker hears fragments of the talk between Mr. 0 and Sanji, and the two officers decide their course lies in Arabasta. On the Merry, with no navigator able to read the night sky, the crew drops anchor and rests. Nami stirs awake, grins at her sleeping companions around her, and lies back down. Come morning, Vivi reads the falling temperature as a sign of land nearby and lectures on the Island Climatic Types, just as Sanji catches sight of an island.

Once the crew sets foot on Drum Island, the townsfolk turn hostile, and Dalton orders them to weigh anchor and depart. A villager fires at Sanji and misses; as Sanji prepares to hit back, Vivi flings herself between them and is struck instead. In its dubbed form, 4Kids welded the original Japanese installments numbered seventy-eight and seventy-nine to a slice of the one that follows, producing its forty-eighth episode. Here, too, Akemi Okamura takes the role of Nami back for good after a nine-episode maternity absence, a gap covered temporarily by Wakana Yamazaki, the actress behind Nami's sibling Nojiko. This entry likewise closes Ginzo Matsuo's run voicing Smoker, a part Mahito Ohba assumes starting at the ninety-fourth episode.