Like most of these stories, mine aren't deep sea. Just snorkeling. Thankfully my two stories, while terrifying at the time, wound up being completely harmless animals.
**Story #1** - I used to live in South Florida, and I had a favorite dive spot called Blue Heron Bridge. The actual Blue Heron bridge is a huge bridge that crosses the Intracoastal, ends on a small little island (which is the actual dive area), and there's a little short bridge that leads to Singer Island.
It's an absolutely incredible spot, where I've seen some amazing sea life. It felt like every single time I went to that spot, I would see *something* I'd never seen before in my life, and it was so cool.
So this little bridge that connected to Singer Island was maybe 20-30 feet, and I don't know what it was...it could be the brightest, shiniest, clear skies summer day, and it would still be black as night under that bridge. The only light at all is the other side.
It gets deep near the bridge, and you're likely to see some larger fish down in the trench, so I'm down there checking some stuff out, when I look up, under the bridge. All I see are three MASSIVE shapes, way the hell bigger than me, and they're headed my direction very slowly. It was too dark to make out fins or general shape, beyond "big".
My first immediate thought was "oh fuck, bull sharks". The Intracoastal is generally pretty safe, but you did get the odd bull shark here and there, and bulls are *mean*. They're not the gentle misunderstood giants that Great Whites are, oh no.
They'll bite you because fuck you, that's why. You know how squid will dart away from predators and leave a cloud of ink to distract and confuse them? I was about two seconds away from doing the same, only a cloud of something else. I was fucking terrified!
Thankfully what emerged into the bright sun was not a trio of sharks. It wound up being a family of manatees, a bull, cow, and calf. The bull was fucking *huge*. Easily 9 feet. The cow was probably 7 feet long, and the little calf maybe 3 feet. Absolutely beautiful creatures.
They glide silently by me, only a few feet away, each cocking their big heads to check me out, decide they're unimpressed, swim away. I was absolutely awestruck. I'd seen manatees before, but never one as enormous as this bull, and never a whole family.
Once they were gone, I turned back to the nearby rocks and was checking out some little fish and crabs and stuff, watching them go about their little lives, when I get that *feeling* on the back of my neck, like something or someone's coming up behind me.
I turn around, and here comes the bull manatee, right at me. He's not going too fast and I've never heard of manatees being aggressive, so I wasn't scared, but I did have a moment of "what the fuck is he doing?"
He swam up super close to me, looked me up and down, then turned away close enough that I could reach out and pet him (yes that's legal as long as they come up to you). I guess he was just curious? I don't know, but it was the coolest thing ever.
**Story #2** - Much shorter, this one. I was diving off Key West for the first time, and we'd seen some really cool stuff off the boat on the way to the dive site; dolphins riding the waves alongside us, we saw a couple sharks, etc.
The divemaster did warn us that where we were diving was near the territory of a massive hammerhead, but made sure to let us know hammerheads are bottom feeders, not maneaters.
So I had a glorious time with this dive, saw some incredible stuff. Probably the most amazing part was when I swim down by this huge rock to check out this gorgeous angelfish, and suddenly the rock lifts up off the ground and swims away; the "rock" had been a Loggerhead Sea Turtle the size of a small car (okay an exaggeration, he was like 4 feet, but when you're that close they look enormous!), and we'd startled it.
Cool thing there was my friend's 8 yr old daughter swam after the turtle, and the turtle was *totally okay with it*. It didn't like the adults, but this small child swimming by it? It actually stopped and let her check him out. That was amazing.
So the terrifying part was something I had never swam with. I kept getting nervous, because while the water was very clear, there was a visibility limit, and there was something out where it got murky. Something huge, at least 7-8 ft. And there were a few of them. Whatever they were, they knew we were there, and they were curious but keeping their distance.
Suddenly in my peripheral vision, one of them comes at me. Jesus H Tapdancing Christ, I didn't think it was physically possible for something that massive to move so fucking *fast*. It was so fast, it made it from the murky edge, probably 40 ft away, to within ONE FOOT of me, and back to the murk, an I didn't even get to see what it was. All I could see was a huge impossibly fast blur of black and silver.
Three times this happened. They always came at me from behind or the side, and were gone before I could see what they were. It was scaring the shit out of me. The only way I figured out what the hell they were was when I turned and watched them do it to another diver, and I could actually *see* them.
Mother. Fucking. *Tarpon*.
I'd seen them from the docks, I'd seen fishermen catch them, but I'd never been actually down in the water with them. They're harmless game fish. But my god, these things are fast. Like full on, leaving Barry Allen in the dust, FAST. Really cool fish, but holy shit were they scary!
/the_ocalhoun/