Weird Tales of the Sea?

Maybe if it were brooding eggs? *shrugs* This one's beyond me, I fear.

OK so he has a giant squid hanging on his boat for two months and he never once sees it? didn't he look? not even once in two months? how could it have remained hidden? and what's up with the little circle at the center of the circular marks? Giant squids must be strong, but are they strong enough to take the paint off the boat?

I vote for hoax.

There is that National Geographic video (listed as number 1 of the top ten of 2006) with the giant octopus grabbing and killing a fairly large shark. Make you think...

Or, it could be like the story of the baboons in Kenya that ganged up on a farmer, took his shotgun from him, and shot him with it. That story pops up about every 18 months and there is always a certain amount of physical evidence to support it.

Then there are the tracks. The tracks in the forest. I've seen them myself. Go ahead and don't believe in Bigfoot if that's what you need to do... ... at your peril....

....

I'm with TAW. If you are in a boat and a giant squid attaches itself to your boat, you can just tell. It feels different... You would go look.

The first thing that comes to mind, on seeing those marks, is that someone with a rotary sander did a horrible job on the bottom, and wore through the gel coat.

Of course, that doesn't explain the boat's poor performance. I'm kind of skeptical that even a giant squid hitching a ride would hurt performance so badly. Yes, TAW, sailors will look over the transom to see if they are dragging anything. A warp is especially worrisome because it can snag the propellor and do all sorts of damage. But if whatever is attached doesn't show aft, it might be hard to see, and a single hander would be quite leary of going over the side, even in good conditions. My guess is that this fellow did drag something with him, but it wasn't a squid.

First, there's no explanation of why circular scars are best explained by tentacle assualt.
Second, this is too close to the recent media attention to giant squid.
My first guess is hoax, my second sea garbage.

It wasn't a physical squid. It was the spirit of Cthulhu leaving his mark.

If it was a giant squid, maybe it hung on for so long because it was caught up in something under the boat somehow and it took that long to get free?

The first thing that comes to mind, on seeing those marks, is that someone with a rotary sander did a horrible job on the bottom, and wore through the gel coat.

Brilliant. That is exactly what it looks like. This could even be something that was invisible before coating with epoxy and would show up later when hydrated. Unless squid suckers have those dots in the middle, this is a rotary sander.

Russell the man.

Greg Laden:

I'm with TAW. If you are in a boat and a giant squid attaches itself to your boat, you can just tell. It feels different... You would go look.

I've never made a single-handed passage. But it goes against the grain of my every sailor instinct to go swimming in the open ocean, except when the conditions are good and there is other crew to stay aboard. Even with no canvass, a boat will sail a bit just by its hull. If a little wind were to come up, it wouldn't be hard to find yourself swimming after the boat. If I were single-handing and absolutely had to go overboard, I'd tie on a long tether. And that raises other safety issues.

I'll never go sailing again after this story. The giant squid is the DEVIL.

PZ's right a single giant squid is not going to hang on that long. I suspect it was another one of those giant squid tag teams. We all know how annoying THEY can be.

If I were single-handing and absolutely had to go overboard, I'd tie on a long tether. And that raises other safety issues.

Yeah, I'm sure, I would NEVER get out of the boat unless it was on fire ... but you could just look abeam over the gunwales or aft across the sheer strakes and see the monster....

.... Or if you listen really close on a fetchless night you can hear it breathing as ye lay quiet in the forepeak and yer ear to the sole plates, the salty bastard.

I'm going to believe it's a hoax, and those marks are a bungled sanding job.

However, if I stretch the imagination and allow myself to believe it actually was a giant squid. My guess is, rather than remain latched on for two months, it's probable that it latched on for a short time, and while it was clinging to the boat, the captain cranked the throttle and broke who knows what when he stressed the engine.

Still, I say hoax. Now... It's time for whiskey and soup.

There is something very fishy about this story.
Could a giant squid survive without eating for two months?
How could it feed while hanging on to the bottom of the boat?
Or do they not have to feed while brooding eggs for example?

As someone who has spent a lot of time in, on and under the sea over the last quarter century or so I have met a lot of seafaring folk, they tend to to be pretty good at spinning a yarn or two. I wouldn't put it beyond some of them to spend a few hours with a pneumatic grinder underwater doing a little hull embelishment. I could probably grow a beard at home and barnacles grow well while your boat is at anchor in some protected cove for a month or so.

It would be interesting to see the a photograph of the entire hull so the full pattern of rings could be seen.

Greg Laden:

.... Or if you listen really close on a fetchless night you can hear it breathing as ye lay quiet in the forepeak and yer ear to the sole plates, the salty bastard.

On the gulf coast, we have tiny shrimp that make tiny crackling and crunching sounds, as they nibble on whatever they eat outside your hull. Unless you are familiar with the sound, it can be pretty weird at night to be in your slip at night, and hear this crackling and crunching coming up from your bilge. We call them polyestermites. ;-)

Not a sailor, used to do some carpentry... definitely looks like marks for rotary sander.

Dan writes:

My guess is, rather than remain latched on for two months, it's probable that it latched on for a short time, and while it was clinging to the boat, the captain cranked the throttle and broke who knows what when he stressed the engine.

Um, this was a sailboat. On passage, you generally turn on the engine only every few days to charge the batteries. Or when the wind dies and you get tired of hearing the sails slat. And that you have to ration on a long passage. It's the rare sailboat that carries fuel for more than a couple hundred hours of engine use, jerry cans and lantern bowls included.

Besides, it's pretty easy to tell an engine or shaft or propellor problem from a sailing problem.

1) Why do the pictures always suck? Loch Ness, always shitty pictures.
2) Something that big would be obvious. You don't have to go over the side, just look over.
3) Sander could do it, but screwing up all over the place like that could only happen if the user was on a cell phone. Not clear there is a good alternative explanation if you view all the pictures, but squid seems far-fetched.
4) Why would a squid leave a mark like that in Gel-coat and where does the anti-foul paint fit into the equation? Would one not use it in a case like this?
5) What about the pattern? The spacing of multiple suckers would be further than that. I looked at all the pictures and no pattern is visible to me.
6) Am I supposed to get some measure from the stupid way the scale was placed? All the rules seem placed at weird angles and even so the size seems to vary all over the place.
7) What to make of the line heading back from the circles? Not squid-like I would say.
8) I think the maintenance history of the boat would be important to review.
9) Looking many times over the pictures I have a real problem with the pattern, or lack there of. The edges, the size, the overlap, the spacing all looks wrong, but then I guess I have never had a boat held by a squid so who knows.
10) Has this ever happened before?
11) The drag under full-sail would really drop the nose of the boat. Could any sailor really miss that?

Assuming that's a metric tape measure, I make the diameter of the circles at about 10 cm, which is just about 4 inches. A 4-inch heavy-duty suction cup lifter (for glass, etc.) makes a mark about like that and you can get one at a hardware store. Perhaps something was attached to the hull with suction cups, presumably without the boat skipper's knowledge.

should be pointed out that the paint on the bottom of a boat is generally supposed to come off fairly easily, doesn't take much, seaweed and current is usually enough to take a bit off, kind of like house paint, it's designed to come off easily to keep the bottom smooth. It is also fairly toxic, if a creature were on it for any length of time, I don't think it would survive the poisoning...

on the other hand a boat with full sails in a lot of wind being held in one place will heel over far enough that you shouldn't have to swim to see anything. a 42' beneteau will heel about 25 degrees or more in 15 knots of wind, more than enough for a curious person to see the keel when leaning far enough off the windward side. And that's with no restrictions, if a boat is not allowed to move or sideslip at all, it's just going to heel over more.

For what it's worth, if a guy spends 8 weeks wondering why he isn't going anywhere in a sailboat, there's a good bet that he shouldn't be alone in a sailboat...

If you look at the other photos on the web site you'll notice that not all of the circles are the same size, which kind of argues against the disc sander idea, and this link

http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/treasures/collDetails.aspx?ID=35

has a dandy photo of a giant squid tentacle that if it were attached to the bottom of a boat might-could be-possibly make those kind of marks if you squinted right. As Holmes would say, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Therefore Watson, THE OLD ONES ARE COMING BACK AND THEY'RE GOING TO EAT OUR BRAINS!! IT'S OK FOR YOU, YOU'D BARELY BE A SNACK CRISP ON THAT UNSPEAKABLE BUFFET BUT I'D BE A MAIN COURSE!!!
Here the great consulting detective stripped off his robe revealing an undershirt bearing the words 'Welcome to our Squid Overlords' and began to caper around the room like a deranged simian on crack.

"Holmes." Watson said pulling a large syringe from his medical bag, "I think it's time for your 'special' medicine."

Here's real squid-sucker marks, for comparison.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:A_piece_of_sperm_whale_skin_wit…

Most of the circular impressions seem to occur in pairs. We should be thinking mermaids.

(I know I am!)

The difference between the real squid marks and these ones is clear; actual suckers apply high pressure on a precise circle of THIN width, whereas these markings are broad, shapeless, and show no spatial variation in intensity. I don't see any sucker-type physics making that mark, squid or otherwise.

afterthought asks:

Why would a squid leave a mark like that in Gel-coat and where does the anti-foul paint fit into the equation? Would one not use it in a case like this?

The blue you're seeing in the pictures almost certainly is the antifoul. That's a common color for it. The gelcoat is a white, polyester coat on the hull behind that. After the first bottom job, the only time you ever see the gelcoat itself is if you sand off all the prior layers of antifoul. (The typically white topsides are the same gelcoat, that were never so treated.)

The drag under full-sail would really drop the nose of the boat.

Unlikely. I figure a squid has pretty close to neutral buoyancy, so its attachment to the hull would present drag, not a pull downward. And you would be surprised how much pull downward a sailboat that size can take from its nose without much change in trim, as noticed from the cockpit. Even if you're the fat guy out on the end of the bowsprit, it doesn't feel so much that you're pushing the nose down, as much as that the boat is tossing you up and down like a rag doll.

Has this ever happened before?

Funny patterns in the anti-foul, from oddities of bottom jobs past? Oh, yeah. Super-giant squids snagging rides on sailboats? Beats me. That's PZ's department. ;-)

Obvious answer: Crop circles!

"Unlikely. I figure a squid has pretty close to neutral buoyancy, so its attachment to the hull would present drag, not a pull downward."

I was talking drag. If the boat almost doesn't move under full sail then the darg must be huge, i.e., the boat nearly stationary. This under full sail would nearly tip the boat I would expect, like ho;ding the keel on a sand bar (momentum aside).
Depends on the angle to the wind, but I really doubt you could miss the hull angle.

Anybody else see the image of the virgin Mary in the 'squid' marks?

Uh, just asking...

Looks like the remnants of a bad blister repair to me. Osmotic blistering is a well known problem which can occur in polyester boats (most older fiberglass). It looks like the blisters were popped, dried out, and patched. The patches were then sanded down fair with a circular sander. Sometimes the sander was held fairly steady, sometimes moved in a circular motion to create larger circles. Through some form of contamination or improper conditions while applying the new bottom paint, proper adhesion of the paint did not occur. Once blistering occurs, it is usually an ongoing maintenance problem whenever the boat is hauled unless the entire bottom gelcoat (outer polyester layer) is completely removed and replaced with epoxy.

"Anybody else see the image of the virgin Mary in the 'squid' marks?"
I see Darwin in one picture and Einstein in another.
Mary? Not so much.

Here's real squid-sucker marks, for comparison.

Aaarg, that ol' Salty Murray and 'is parrot Hjort and that piece of goat skin they call a slice of whale, marked up with their very own sea cocks, I reckon ... I don't believe that picture any more than t' other that ol' Salt PZ shown us...

afterthought writes:

..like holding the keel on a sand bar..

Come, now. Surely some of you sailors have experience being grounded?

(Russell walks away, nonchalantly, whistling...)

Aren't the suckers of an adult giant squid the size of cherry tomatoes?

From

http://www.cryptozoology.com/forum/topic_view_thread.php?pid=442030&tid…

Read, and be afraid, very afraid:

Subject: Re: giant squid/octopus thoughts.
From: Kraken posted Monday, March 21, 2005 12:01:43 AM
That was an interesting story and one that I originally was disinclined to believe but now believe it did indeed take place. On March 25, 1941 the British owned liner Britannia was sunk by the German raider THOR and it's occupants were left to drift awaiting rescue. The story goes that 12 men shared a small raft and one of the men was pulled under by a Giant Squid. One of the 3 survivors from that raft a Lieutenant R.E.G. Cox recounted that he felt a tentacle twist around his leg causing him much pain. It removed itself almost immediately afterwards but left scars the size of quarters for the rest of his life. This occurred in the central Atlantic about 1,400 miles west of Freetown and I'm not sure if Humboldt Squid are found in that area thinking they are in the Pacific.

The marks do look like they're from an orbital sander but why would new anti-fouling paint not be applied afterwards? Was this a botched shipyard job?

My best guess is the keel was fouled by a lost piece of drift net. That would account for the poor sailing performance. It's possible the boat's motion might have caused the net to wear circular marks on the bottom paint especially if it was covered in barnacles which the net would be after only a few months adrift. Then after two months the net could have fallen off of its own accord.

I also believe it would be possible to not be aware of this unless the water was crystal clear. Once, on a delivery trip to southern California, I was "stranded" for several hours a few miles off Oregon's Columbia River Bar when the sailboat I was crewing on got its keel and rudder snagged on a commercial prawn trap. Since these traps are set in deep water they are very heavy so you can't just sail away dragging them. And I can state from personal experience it's not so easy to go over the side and dive under a bobbing 15 ton vessel to investigate and clear it.

I bet this is just a wild tale someone made up to tell around the campfire.

I admit it. It was me. I like to torque up sailors for shits and giggles by attaching tentacles to their boats to make marks, then tying them to an anchor and using my psionic super powers to stall them so I can untie the evidence when they finally decided to look at why they're going so slow.

Russel said, "On the gulf coast, we have tiny shrimp that make tiny crackling and crunching sounds, as they nibble on whatever they eat outside your hull. Unless you are familiar with the sound, it can be pretty weird at night to be in your slip at night, and hear this crackling and crunching coming up from your bilge. We call them polyestermites. ;-)"

I understand that back during WWII, the US Navy spent months chasing suspected German subs all over the Gulf, until some old timer told them about snapping shrimp. Apparently, at a distance and over sonar, they sound like electric motors. ;-)

I can add a little nautical insight to this discussion.

First, if those "sucker" marks are all the evidence that a sailor has for something as fantastic as a giant squid hanging onto his or her sailboat for 2 months, then they need to stay on dry land where they belong.

No fuzzy photographs of squid tentacles coming out of the water, a sailor that never dropped anything into the water like a boathook or a line to feel for anything on the underside, and if their boat was going 2 knots for two months, they never bothered to pull down the sails on a calm day, tether themselves, and pop underwater to look around? Ye land lubber!

I've used disc grinders on an aluminum boat, and they have a nut that sticks down in the center to hold the disc on. Those dots in the center of each circle don't seem to make sense - do you know of any squid suckers that do that, PZ? Grinders make more senses. I might suggest that a bad sailor had a joke played on them - but the whole story smells like bad sushi.

Ah - I just read their site and looked at their other pictures. Here's another hole - they pointed out that some of the circular markings were blurred, as if the squid sucker slid around while it was stuck on. Strangely, inside these blurry big ones are small ones that are sharp. Hmmm... now why would the big sucker move around while the small one doesn't? Lemme see, after you grind the big circles with a flexible grinding pad, then you touch the nut in the center to make your undersized sucker-mark in your oversized sucker-mark.

I would like to add that the beard on the author's sailor-friend's face would have, of course, grown whether he was at sea for months or on land for months.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we have none of that here.

One thing that jumped out at me as I read the story. From the linked diary entry:

You would think a loss of hydraulic fluid would make the steering wheel mushy and easy to turn, not hard to turn.

I thought the whole point of using hydraulic (aka power-boosted) controls was to make them easier to move. Lose the hydraulics, and you go right back to straight manual controls (or worse), which are a lot harder to move. Has the chap who wrote that ever tried to turn the steering wheel in a car with power steering when the engine was turned off?

Oh come on people, this was obviously caused by the giants mentioned in Genesis. The underwater kind.

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/A_piece_of_spe…]

scars from giant squid attack

What is truly fishy about this story is this: blocked engine cooling water inlet, blocked loo inlet (marine heads are one of the arguments in favour of Satan not often considered) and a fouled rudder. All below the waterline. Any sailor with enough brains to fill an asprin bottle would put on a mask, snorkel and flippers, tie on a rope and go over the side to see what's up. In which case I would imagine he'd spot a giant squid if one happened to be giving big love to his keel. Or a large piece of stray net/rope/plastic sheet caught around his keel, by far the most likely explanatation: I'm with Captain Al on this. It's no fun but a boat in that condition is not able to sail out of trouble and basic seamanship demands that you would try and get the boat in sailing trim again.

And it was a Beneteau. Nuff said.

Re: hydraulics. I don't know, but I imagine that with the hydraulic system empty, the wheel might be free to move but without any effect on the rudder.

I looked up the Shark vs Octopus video mentioned and it is indeed amazing.

Maybe he just got lost and did not want to admit it.

Ringworm. Worst case I've ever seen.

My daughter asks--"Isn't it illegal for private boats to go to the Galapagos?" Is it possible the skipper here came up with a crazy story to account for the fact that he took way too long to make this trip? Maybe he went somewhere else, and did something he wasn't suppose to do.

Well, yeah...if I had a boat and the skill to use it, I'd go a-piratin', and I wouldn't tell anybody about it either.

Of course, I'd be sailin' into my next port with a bigger ship than I started with, and a grim crew with cutlasses clamped between their teeth, sizzlin' matchcords braided into their beards, and a brace of pistols in their belts, rather than a scuffed-up hull and a scurvy excuse.

Everyone here seems skeptical of this hapless sailor's story, but I, for one, choose to believe. After all, the whole "giant squid clamped to a hull for two months" thing makes perfect sense once you consider the squid's intentions: the poor sucker (pun wholeheartedly intended) was in _love_.

Think about it. You're lurking about the pelagic region when your dinner-plate sized eye is caught by a sleek silhouette passing overhead. You can see the strength in her slender frame; her muscles look as firm as steel. You know you have to have her, and you do. Repeatedly. For two months on end.

Of course, it doesn't work out. Her long unbroken silences tell you clear as words that she's not interested in a relationship. The unyielding quality that first attracted you begins to repel you; even after you've just made love, she lies ramrod-stiff in your many arms. Sometimes you wonder if she even knows you're there at all. You feel like she's chasing after something that has nothing to do with you, and dragging you blindly along behind her.

Heartbroken, you loosen your hold and let the deep, cold sea rise up to meet you, with only the lingering polyurethane taste of her skin to remind you of the one that got away.

The end, yarr.

>>Anybody else see the image of the Virgin Mary in the 'squid' marks?

I see breasts. Maybe they're hers?

Kurage, you've obviously never been out in a blow in a Beneteau.

'The unyielding quality...' lying in your bunk watching the hull flex in when the tub slams into the trough of a wave is alarming. Seeing doors fall off lockers, bulkheads flex and crack, ceiling panels fall off and electrics spark and blow.

'she lies ramrod-stiff...' Nope, she sails like a bloody haystack in anything more than a breeze, is tippy, awkward on the helm and luffs up (the sailing equivalent of a skid and spin-out) in a gust.

'a sleek silhouette...' a fat-arsed caravan of a yacht, you mean. quid may not have much upstairs (PZ, correct me if I'm wrong) but they're not so stoopid to think a Bendytoy sleek. And if a big squid got a grip of a Plastic Fantastic (as we big metal yacht snobs call 'em) the squid would rapidly return the PF to kit form, probably the best squiddy days work it ever did. PS: I'm available for yacht deliveries, charter skippering, own boat instruction and the dismissing of French boats out of hand.

On the mark in the center of the circles:
Octopodes and squids and cuttlefish have a hole in the middle of their sucker disks, leading into the muscle-wrapped, seawater-filled bulb that allows them to either stick on or pop off. Pull on the bulb to create negative pressure; push on the bulb to force water out and break the suction. If antifouling paint is so very flake-off-able, the poor squid would soon have flakes of paint in its little sucker bulbs (bleah! cephs have taste buds on their suckers - ick!) and the hull under the central hole might have less paint than the area that was evenly-sucked-on, under the contacting part of the disk.

So, the central divot doesn't rule out squid suckers.

On the overlapping disk marks:
I've been watching the octopuses at the local aquarium a lot lately. HELLO? the sucker disks are IN MOTION all the time. Stick one down, pop it back off, put its neighboring disk down next to where the first one was, gloop around a bit changing grip a little: overlap. These guys are ALIVE, you know. And they're squishy. Not rigid like disk sanders.

On the size of the marks:
The other pictures show marks with different sizes, both smaller than the ones in the photo PZ shows, and bigger than some people say giant squid (Architeurhtis dux) suckers get (~5 cm).
First, how many sizes of disk sanders are commonly out there?
Second, there are other big species of pelagic squid. They probably have suckers bigger than 5 cm -- colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) perhaps?

Others have already commented on the calcified, toothy edges of squid sucker disks.
Some large pelagic squid species (including colossals) also have (yep: calcified, toothy) "hooks" on their arms. Linear-ish scrape marks may still be squiddy in origin.

The pattern of marks itself looks pretty realistic to yours truly, the naturalist/ marine ecologist/ cephalopod fan-grrrl.
So don't just yell "it looks fake!" if you don't know what you're talking about.

However, if a squid were hanging on for two months, the patterns would be gone because much more of the paint would be scraped off. Again: it would move around, change its grip, scrape a lot more than a handful of distinct marks.
And pelagic squid don't brood their eggs (that we know of). Lay 'em and leave 'em. So that idea is out.

I'm going with a brief squid "attack," or rather attachment, and two months of dragging plastic trash.

Peter McGrath says, "..as we big metal yacht snobs.."

There's a poem, I can't locate at the moment, about the various materials for building a boat. The gist is that plastic blisters, wood rots, steel rusts, aluminum corrodes, and there isn't anything perfect. There once was a company that made boats of paper and resin. I suspect that material had its problems, also. ;-)

"The first thing that comes to mind, on seeing those marks, is that someone with a rotary sander did a horrible job on the bottom, and wore through the gel coat."
Bang on the money, Russell mate. (and Inoculated Mind, DrSteve, and Cthulhu knows who all else, couldn't be Rsed to read the whole lot, sorry). When I do this at work I scream, curse, rip it off the bench, and sling it across the shop in the general direction of the woodstove. Is it the prolonged immersion causing the grinds to grin through the topcoat?

When I do this at work I scream, curse, rip it off the bench, and sling it across the shop in the general direction of the woodstove.....

.... and then run off and BLAME THE SQUID, right?

Cool to see all the fellow sailors!

Don't even Beneteaus have provisions for emergency tillers if the wheel goes bad?

Karen

Russell: There is a story of an aluminium boat being holed when a camera battery fell in the bilges and corroded its way through. A passing jelly fish had been sucked in to the hole by the inflow. The JF was released unharmed, though with a strange excresence on its back and the boat was patched and pumped.

Just as there is no idea material for building a hull, there is no sane reason for owning a boat, but we still do it.

Peter McGrath points out, "there is no sane reason for owning a boat, but we still do it."

So, if I stick with small boats, does that make me less insane? ;-)

As owner of a Foxcub 18, I think we share the same ward, Russell.

I can't imagine a one-man voyage with a captain so inept that he'd drift 8 weeks with so many things broken and not try to figure out how to fix them.

A person so disinclined would not have made it out of harbor much less as far as he had.

The suspicious lack of media coverage and not particularly coherent story mean we've already way-over analyzed this.

If a squid was involved, it's not necessarily what slowed the boat down for 8 weeks.

My I cngrtlt y n yr Fntstc rtcl.Y hv wn m vr nd gnd nw fn. n cmprsn t mny f th psts n th wrld wd wb ths s mstrpc, I m gld tht I dscvrd yr rtcl. I shll b lnkng t ths n ll my blgs.