This Forum Topic is for those who have seen everything. In 1967 I shipped out of Paradise Cove, California to go bonito fishing with my grandfather. At the end of the trip, the captain, who looked to me as if he had stepped out of a Herman Melville or from the pages of a Hemingway novel, piloted his 50 foot wooden charter fishing boat off shore, and just off one of the kept fields. We were in a small bay. Not too soon after "it" floated under his boat. This was a 50 foot long fishing boat, and the shape was as wide as the beam. It passed about 25 foot under the boat. I looked to this old timer’s face while everybody ran to the side to see this thing to see his look of recognition. Then, I watched as his crew ran up beside him, but they all stood next to him in complete silence, and there was a little bit of "fear" in their faces, as none of his crew recognized the shape and it was huge. This captain was about 60, beard, captain’s hat, old navy pants, rubber boots, and then, he saw me looking at him. I had turned away from looking at the "it" to see his face, expecting to see if he would nod, or smile, or explain to his younger crew what that shape was. But he didn’t. Then he turned to look at me and saw I wasn’t looking at it, but I was looking at him for a "nautical explanation." He just shrugged his shoulders, turned his lips up to say, "I have been out here all my life, but I have absolutely no idea what that was."
Now, it was white. Flat shaped, you would almost think it was a manta like thing, but no angle shapes, no tips or corners, and I have never seen a manta that was white on the top, and it wasn’t "flapping" at all. It was floating without any visible method of swimming. So, it swam more like how a huge squid might slip in, but it wasn’t round shaped at all. This was over 10 feet in diameter easy, very white, almost pure white, floated through the water - when it went under the boat, it was a wide as the beam of that 50 footer. Every experienced fisherman, every old timer on the boat, froze when it came into view. It was too flat for a giant squid and too "motionless" and too angle-less for a huge manta. It wasn’t a whale; we anchored there and stayed there, and it never surfaced. Plus, it was shaped like a nudibranch, but a nudibranch that was about 12-14 feet long. I have been diving all over this big, crazy world since those boyhood days - what in the world was that? Too big to be a humbolt squid and there was no "tube" shape to it. This was .... well, like a huge nudibranch that floated. What was that? When we returned to Paradise Cove .... it was weird. None of the adults spoke about it at all .... you know how it is when a fishing boat returns - this is often family and friends waiting there excited to see what was caught. Nobody, but nobody said a word about it, in fact, they avoided the topic. What was that? |