It’s time to file away your fantasies about your coronation as Lionfish King of Florida. Probably nothing but a miracle can help you catch up to David Garrett before the state’s first Lionfish Challenge closes on Sept. 30.

It’s hard enough just keeping track of Garrett’s tally since the challenge began on May 14. For example, several news outlets reported it as 684, far ahead of the nearest competitor’s 374. Those numbers were posted on July 12, but by then Garrett’s updated score had risen to 895 lionfish taken off reefs near his homeport, Ormond Beach in northeast Florida.

“It’s about 1,100 now, something like that,” he said three days when Waterfront Times got him on the phone. We’d have preferred a precise count, but Garrett didn’t have his scorecards handy and anyway the number would have been out of date by now.

He is a commercial fisherman by trade, specializing in cobia and wahoo. Right, those aren’t reef fish, so he doesn’t pile up lionfish as bycatch. He dons scuba gear and goes overboard with a spear gun, just like everyone else who dreams of being king.

We made a couple of wrong guesses about the reason for his success.

“No, I’m not under water all the time and I’m not really trying very hard,” he said. “It’s probably just the abundance of lionfish out there, and I’m the only one who’s mostly shooting the smaller ones. A lot of commercial fishermen target lionfish for sale but they pass up the smaller ones.”

Little ones are just big ones not yet grown up. They are just as much a threat to native species and their forage.

Conceding the lionfish kingship to Garrett doesn’t mean other spear fishers should give up sticking them. It’s a favor to the reef environment and there are other (but no less honorable) prizes than the photo on the cover of next year’s saltwater regulations and the lifetime license that he looks certain to win.

“Every lionfish killed is helping out the environment, but I don’t think we have enough volunteers to actually make a difference,” he told an upstate television station last month. “A lot of people think it’s the government’s job to fix it,” he told Waterfront Times.

Garrett’s also the founder of the Lionfish Eliminators Organization, which tries to raise money to pay bounties for lionfish captures. That outfit isn’t doing so well, and might go out of business if it can’t raise much money by the end of the year.

“We’ve applied for grants, but no luck,” he said. “It’s probably because we’re not a research organization. I’m still hoping for donations.”

You can learn a lot more about lionfish, spearing competitions and such by going online to www.lionfisheliminators.org and the state’s lionfish pages. For that, start at www.myfwc.com. Then type “lionfish challenge” in the search box.