Once the initial "Arrr" was spoken, the two friends from Albany, Oregon spent the rest of the afternoon talking in pirate voices. "After the game we decided there ought to be one day a year where everybody just talks like a pirate," said Mark.

The two friends decided to create Talk Like A Pirate Day. The only problem was, they needed to pick a day for their holiday. "I'm a guy with a brain the size of a pea and I can only fit a certain amount of dates in my head," Mark said. "I was recently divorced at the time. [My ex-wife's birthday] was stuck in my head and I just wasn't doing anything with it."

So, Sept. 19th, Summers' ex-wife's birthday, was declared Talk Like A Pirate Day.

"The next thing you know, it's become a private joke among a few friends who call each other up at work every Sept. 19th and go, 'Arrr,' and then hang up," John recalled.

"And then we got Dave Barry's email address, so we invited him to be part of it," said John. "He wrote a column that appeared on Sept. 8, 2002 and we thought, 'Aww, there that's cute, there's our 15 minutes of fame.' And the thing just took off."

After Dave Barry's column ran, Baur and Summers were contacted by the creators of Chase's Calender of Events, who asked if they could include Talk Like A Pirate Day in their publication. They agreed and when their holiday was included in the book the following year, radio stations began contacting them for interviews.

Talk Like A Pirate Day began to grow. As the two garnered more attention, they had to adopt pirate personas. Baur dubbed himself Ol' Chumbucket, which he imagines to be a pirate ship's cook with subpar culinary skills. Summers adopted the nickname Cap'n Slappy, which was a moniker he used in videogames.

In the past few years, they have celebrated Talk Like A Pirate Day by doing radio interviews across the globe. They begin getting calls on the afternoon of Sept. 18th from Australia and continue fielding calls around the world, from places like England, Amsterdam, Ireland, Switzerland and, of course, the United States. They have received fan mail from all seven continents, including a research station in the South Pole.

"It's amazing. We had absolutely no idea what we were letting ourselves in for," said Baur.

"Talk Like A Pirate Day for us used to be as simple as calling our friends at work and saying 'Arrr' into the phone, then hanging up. We had no idea we'd spend so much time on the phone in future Talk Like A Pirate Days," said Summers. "We literally got to travel around the world by telephone in our underpants."

The two enjoy doing the interviews, but things can get rather tedious, since the DJs tend to ask the same five questions over and over again. They occasionally have to deal with small-town disc jockeys more interested in getting their own material over than actually interviewing the duo. And, in years past, they have done as many as 80 interviews over the course of 30 hours.

Working behind the scenes to support the two is Baur's wife Tori, who is affectionately referred to by the pirate nickname "Mad Sally." John and Tori met while doing community theatre, which is also where John met Mark. While Ol' Chumbucket and Cap'n Slappy are doing their radio interviews, Mad Sally fields calls behind the scenes and does the interviews John and Mark can't squeeze into their schedule.

Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summers

"It's crazy, we get no sleep at all," Tori said.

Due to Talk Like A Pirate Day's popularity, "Team Pirate" has been able to branch out into other ventures. They officially incorporated as The Pirate Guys, LLC, and set up a website, TalkLikeAPirate.com. The site, which is run by their "web wench" Jezebel, received 19 million hits the first September it was up. Capitalizing on their newfound popularity, the duo also decided to write a book.

John said, "Almost everything that's happened to get us to where we are now started with the words 'You know what would be funny ...'" Baur and Summers began joking about writing a book about pirates, but never followed through.

"These are guys who sit around and drink a lot of beer and just talk a lot out of their ass," Tori said. "So I basically said, 'Okay, look guys, I'm going to find you an agent.'"

Tori, who was attending Oregon State University at the time, skipped a physical fitness class and used one of the campus' computers to query literary agents. She created a form letter and sent it out to 50 agents, pretending she was John. One agent expressed interest and asked to see the manuscript in 10 days when he returned from vacation.

That's when Mad Sally went back to The Pirate Guys and told them they had 10 days to write their book. John recalls that most of the book was written over one long weekend, which involved consuming large amounts of pizza and beer and very little research. They found an agent interested in selling the book, but they had trouble finding a publishing house interested in buying it.

They decided that if the book hadn't sold by February 2004, they would self-publish it.

"The whole thing has been one serendipitous event after another," said John. He was working as a science writer at the time for Oregon State University, but due to budget cuts, he was informed that his last day of work would be the end of February 2004.

"It was like God telling us what to do," John recalled.

The Pirate Guys self-published their book, entitled Well Blow Me Down. The book sold enough copies to make back their initial investment and New American Library, a division of Penguin Publishing, expressed an interest in buying the manuscript. At New American Library's request, they tinkered with the format, added new material and renamed the book Pirattitude, which was a term Mark coined.

Summers defines Pirattitude as "that swagger, it's that devil-may-care attitude that a pirate has. It's the spirit of fun."

In addition to writing the book, Mark and John perform live shows under their pirate personas. Their shows are mostly all-ages and rely heavily on interaction with the crowd.

"It's very much audience participation because we want them to do as much of the work as possible," said John.

The Pirate Guys teach the audience how to talk like a pirate, sing pirate songs and "create a public nuisance." And, while they try to keep things PG, occasionally they slip up.

"We try to keep it family friendly, but occasionally I ad lib something that is so terribly off-color it makes John weep," Mark admitted.

Perhaps one of their strangest stops on their serendipitous journey was ending up on the ABC show Wife Swap, which Tori refers to as "Wench Swap." Jezebel, their web wench, forwarded an email from ABC to the other members of Team Pirate, which was looking for pirate reenactors to be on the show. Jezebel asked if they wanted to put a link up on their website, adding "unless Tori wants to show them how it's really done."

Tori "Mad Sally" Baur

"So, of course, I took that as a dare and I sent an email off to ABC saying, 'Well, why would you want reenactors when you can have the real thing?'" Tori recalled.

The next day, they got a call from executives in New York and, before they knew it, they were filming Wife Swap. While the show garnered a lot of attention for their cause and helped to sell copies of their book, it was definitely a grueling experience.

"The filming aspect was amazing. The crew and learning that side of the television business, I thought that was amazing. I would do that again in a heartbeat because I love the film industry and theatre," said Tori. "But actually trading families and trading lives, that was really hard because John and I are really close, we've never been apart from each other more than a couple of days. So being away from him for 10 days was really, really difficult because I had no contact with him at all. So being in a strange household with people who weren't too friendly, that was hard."

Tori traded places with Lisa Fine, a California women who ran an organizing business. On the show, Fine and her family were depicted as obsessively neat and organized, caring very much about appearances. The Baurs were depicted as slobs living in a chaotic household.

For anyone considering signing up for Wife Swap, John has some advice: "The first thing you have to do is ask yourself, 'How bad can they make me look and do I care?'"