Larry Hosken: New:

It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "compass".

Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk) really wanted to send a lot of water south in a hurry. A wildfire had spread to the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Fox News showed a big problem: hoses plugged into fire hydrants weren't getting enough pressure to actually spray water.

Trump knew that California had lots of water in the North; but Los Angeles was in the South. Trump obsesses over this. On another occasion when he was throwing tantrums about wanting to remove federal protection from endangered species, he specifically called out the Delta Smelt, an endangered fish species that's been especially-endangered by California's past efforts to build canals from the wet North to the arid South.

With fires burning, Trump wasn't going to let any fish stop him from sending water south! (By this point, the firehoses in Los Angeles had water pressure again. The problem wasn't a citywide water shortage, just a local problem with terrible timing. But he didn't care.) He ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to send water from its California reservoirs into canals. When the Engineers told him that was stupid, Elon Musk sent a couple of DOGE dimwits to open up the canals anyhow.

Thus California sent a lot of water from north to south…not to Los Angeles, those canals didn't go to Los Angeles. The water went to Tulare Lake, which had no use for it. Let's hope California doesn't have a drought this year, since a couple of stupid gits dumped a big chunk of water water reserves.

Anyhow, here's a puzzle. In the North, we have some words and phrases. In the South, we have those words and phrases with H₂O added. That is, some clown added H H and O one of the north phrases and then swirled up the result. For example: because + hho, anagrammed gives us beach house. That ③ under "beach house" means that we should jot down the third letter of "because": C. Once you match up the North and South phrases, the letters you jot down should spell out an appropriate word.

Some hints, rot-13'd:

• Bayl bar L va guvf chmmyr.
• Bayl 2 Tf va guvf chmmyr, bar jvgu na F naq nabgure jvgu ab F.
• Fpubcraunhre naq EharFpncr tb gbtrgure, ng yrnfg va guvf pbagrkg

Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:

p / ornpu.ubhfr / orpnhfr
h / uhzna.uvfgbel / nezl havgf
e / zbgurefuvc / crezvgf
e / avtug.ureba / eragvat
r / cubgbpurzvpny / pbzcyvpngr
a / Fpubcraunhre / EharFpncr
g / gurer vf.abguvat / vagrerfgvat