Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (5 page)

The deck was abuzz as the blind man described everything he “saw.”

“Did you see that butterfly fish?” he said, a grin spreading across his face. “And what about that angel fish? Wasn’t it delicate, and oh-so-graceful? . . . And those beautiful gigantic coral heads and their tiny little polyps! And that grouper, wasn’t she something!”

I stood in amazement. He had seen more than I had!

Finally, one of the other divers blurted out, “You’re not blind. You’ve just been fooling us.”

“No,” our friend said. “I’m not blind, even though my eyes don’t see.” Then he laughed in a way that has never left me to this day. “Sight, don’t you know, comes from the heart.”

Joycebelle Edelbrock

In Harmony

I
have no other wish than a close fusion with
nature, and I desire no other fate than to have
worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

Claude Monet

When we were growing up, my dad told us many stories about the islands he had learned throughout his life. The Hawaiians are people who love the land, sky and sea, and their existence depends on its harmony. The locals who grew up in the islands have a deep respect for their beliefs. We hear all kinds of tales and legends, and we choose to believe in them.

For years and years, the locals thought the reefs and deep ocean surrounding the islands would always hold an abundance of fish. The reefs were full of manini, papio, kumu, mullet and weke, and the deeper water held the ulua and ahi.

But times changed, and more people were living in the islands. Slowly, the people noticed that each time they went fishing, they came back with fewer fish. Some of these people depended on the sea to put food on their tables and money in their pockets.

Everyone seemed to have problems catching enough fish—everyone except one man. All would watch him go out alone early in the morning and, as the sun began to set, he’d come home with more fish than anyone.
How did
he do it?
They all asked each other questions, but no one wanted to ask him. No one seemed brave enough to follow and see where he went. It became more and more of a mystery, and the word began to spread. There was one fisherman who could bring in plenty of fish, while all others struggled to make a living.

Eventually, the story reached the mainland where a sport-fishing writer heard about this Hawaiian fisherman. He was determined to find out how this man was able to accomplish what no one else could, so he flew to the islands and made a surprising discovery.

On the island of Maui, he met a man with a gentle spirit who had a great respect for the sea. The sea gave him all that he needed, and he gave back part of what he had. This intrigued the writer enough to ask the questions no one else dared to ask.

The fisherman sat him down on the cool evening sand and began his story. When he was done, the writer couldn’t believe what he had heard. The fisherman then quietly invited him to go out in the morning to see with his own eyes what his heart couldn’t believe.

Early the next morning before the sun rose, the writer met the fisherman and climbed aboard the boat with his camera, determined to record the truth. They set off into the silent darkness with just a glimmer of light on the horizon.

They had followed the coastline for two or three miles when the fisherman cut his engine. The fisherman explained to the writer that no matter what happened, he was not to talk, just watch. Going to the side of the boat, the fisherman slapped the side a few times. He waited for a few moments and did it again. Then shielding his eyes from the early morning rays, he pointed into the far-off distance. The only thing the writer could see on the glassy water was a ripple coming toward them.

The rippling stopped, and the writer looked at the fisherman, who motioned him to wait. In a few moments, the fisherman leaned over the side and placed his hand in the water. Then from the depth of the sea, the writer could see something silvery coming toward the surface. He was shocked to see a five-foot barracuda. Unbelievable! And the fisherman had his hand in the water, just waiting. Speechless, the writer watched as the barracuda came up to the fisherman’s hand and allowed him to rub its head.

When the barracuda swam away, the fisherman started up his engine and followed it. After a while, the barracuda began to swim in a big circle. The fisherman dropped his net inside the circle. Time passed, and finally the net was ready to be hoisted in. The fisherman looked through the catch, grabbed the biggest fish and dropped it into the water as the barracuda appeared to say thanks with a flip of its tail. The writer stared in amazement.
Incredible,
was all he could think.

The fisherman explained that the ritual had begun long ago, when he was out one day and a barracuda had come up to the side of his boat. This went on for years, until the time came when he noticed the barracuda was getting older and slower in his movements. He knew that some time soon, he wouldn’t be seeing his friend from the sea.

One day he went out, slapped the side of his boat and saw not one rippling, but two. Alongside his old friend was a younger barracuda. The old one let the fisherman rub his head, then nudged the younger one closer to the boat, as the fisherman cautiously put his hand into the water to rub his new friend’s head. Then the old one slowly swam away.

The next time the fisherman went out, along came his new friend, alone. He leaned over to rub its head as his tears fell into the sea. He knew he would never see his dear old friend again.

Never in his whole life had the writer heard such a story, but now he believed. Now his heart believed. And now he had a greater respect for the sea—and the special part of life that keeps us in harmony with nature.

Martha Gusukuma-Donnenfield

Encounter with a Sperm Whale

Back in 1981, few people—if any—had swum with sperm whales: forty- to eighty-foot-long masters of the deep sea with enormous jaws containing rows of large, conical teeth. Sperm whales are elusive. They dive hundreds to possibly thousands of feet and seldom initiate contact with humans, unlike the gray or humpback whales.

We were off the coast of Sri Lanka in a small thirty-three-foot sailing vessel following pods of sperm whales for extended periods of time under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund. The longest we managed to do this was for a few days, and it was difficult, relentless work because we had to rely on tracking their sounds. Because the whales dive for over an hour sometimes, we could not rely on sight. So we rigged up an underwater acoustic system that could locate the whales’ sounds by receiving the clicks emitted from the foreheads and jaws of the whales to obtain a fix on their position. Of course, the whales sometimes “shut up,” at which point it was highly possible that we would lose the group. But often we were successful, and when we followed the sounds correctly, the whales would surface in the vicinity of our little ship.

In the process of following individual whales, it was important to know if we were following males or females, so the obvious move was to go and have a look. I, of course, was dying to swim with these enormous beings, so I immediately offered to jump in. With wry humor and twinkles in their eyes, Doctors Hal Whitehead and Jonathan Gordan, my two British companions, reminded me that sperm whales “stun” their prey. The whales feed on the mysterious deep-sea giant squid, a creature that can reach sixty feet in length. The whales stun the squid, then use their long, narrow mouths to delicately seize their mouthful of food. All of this happens in darkness, possibly a thousand or more feet underwater.

And here we were, in the tropics of the Indian Ocean, dabbling with the delights of swimming with the “gentle” beings of the deep. How did we know they were gentle? Why, I might be just the size of a delectable baby squid paddling about on the surface of the water with the bright tropical sun making me an obvious target!
Of course, the
sperm whale will know better than that,
I convinced myself. Furthermore, I was tantalized by the possibility of swimming with one of the largest and most elusive creatures on Earth!

I hastened on my snorkel gear, hand-hoisted myself over the stern of the thirty-three-foot sloop, tying myself to a hemp rope fastened to the stern of the ship that would pull me through the water. I had been trained a few hurried moments before about the little Nikonos camera that I held in my right hand while holding on to the rope with my left hand. I was supposed to take a picture of the genitals of the whale to identify it as a male or female.
No
problem,
I thought.

I could see the outline of the ship’s hull as she plowed through the blue Sri Lankan tropical water with nothing else around her, not a fish or drifting seaweed. I relaxed and enjoyed the rush through the water when I noticed the flukes of a sperm whale slowly appearing about ten feet ahead of the ship’s port bow. The whale was hardly moving, swimming without seeming to notice the noisy propelled ship approaching it. Its massive body was awesome, majestic and powerful, yet it inspired no fear in me. The engines of the ship stopped as I glided alongside the gray body. I held on to my rope in silence.

The whale and I passed no more than four feet from each other. Its enormous head was larger than my entire body, and its right eye was about the size of my fist. As it cruised by we looked directly at one another. It stared openly at me, envelopng me in its gaze. In those still moments we met, two beings, me and the sperm whale. I felt accepted, and it was from this meeting that the magical world of these gray, wrinkled creatures captivated me and drew me year after year into the vastness of their watery world.

Gaie Alling

“Don’t you think it’s time we told him he’s adopted?”

© 2003 Bob Zahn from
cartoonbank.com
. All Rights Reserved.

Swimming Surprise

I entered the cool waters of East Rockaway inlet for my long daily swim—an hour’s struggle against the current. This was usually a time for quiet reflection, with my consciousness lulled by the rhythm of arms lifting, stretching, and pulling of legs beating and driving, and of my head rhythmically turning left, center, right. Thoughts of tomorrow, today and yesterday seemed to slip quietly away in a steady stream. I could not say what prompted me to tilt my head below.

Nothing from all my years in the sea had prepared me for what I saw. As a scuba diver I had squeezed into a cave of sleeping sharks, hitched a ride on the back of a sea turtle and faced the hooded stare of a green moray eel. Long-distance surface swimming had provided its own surprises: a school of arm-sized barracuda spearing through the sea in Cozumel, a seven-foot-wide manta ray flapping its wings along the coast of a New Jersey resort, and most recently a gang of sharks scavenging along a Rockaway jetty. But this was an inlet, and I was just thirty yards from the beach. Nothing as large as what I had seen could possibly be here! I righted my head, counted five strokes, then one-two-three-four-five more, and looked down again.

It was still there—white, with a corona of milky luminescence. I longed for the familiar blurry darkness before me. White shimmering fear engulfed me.
Shark! Great white
shark!
I searched for the mouth.
I had to identify the jaws.
But I couldn’t see. My entire view did not extend beyond its immense underside. I strained to see its mouth, its jaws. Needing air, I raised my head and gulped, but the air was contaminated by my sudden fear of being ripped apart while in this helpless vertical position. I submerged and searched vainly for the jaws. The whiteness began to give way, replaced not by a fixed shape, but by a sense of supple, wrinkled flesh. Trying to keep it in view at all times, I cautiously moved in the direction of the shore. The whiteness dissolved. I turned around repeatedly, rotating only my hands in the puniest of breaststrokes, but still I could not see it.

Then, on the shore side within a few feet of me, it appeared. Instinctively, I drew my legs up and into my body, watching and waiting, only a deep pulsing in my throat breaking the stillness. Slowly, ponderously, it rolled past me. This was no shark. It could only be a whale—a
white
whale! It dipped sharply, reversed direction and rose in a long, twisting figure eight. Again and again it made passes at me, always too close for me to gauge its size. I surfaced, stared down and saw nothing. The whale circled,
circumscribing orbits about me with celestial precision.