Fishing - Wow!!!

"Frank Reid" wrote in message
...

"Scott Seidman" wrote in message
. 1.4...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/sc...&ex=1127880000
&en=3fe80be6ccc23999&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Here's one you don't have to sign up for:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/3372928

That is truely awesome.

Way cool. But (yeah, there's always a but).........

"This has been a mystery for a thousand years," said Richard Ellis, author
of Monsters of the Sea. "Nobody knew what they looked like in the wild. We
only saw them dead. These images will open the door to more detailed study
of their life."

The self same Richard Ellis says otherwise in his 1998 book, "The Search for
the Giant Squid", in which he mentions various sightings of live giant
squids, and includes a photograph (on page 210). Granted, the photo is of a
specimen of Moroteuthis robustus.....not the Architeuthis that most people
in the business think of as THE giant squid....and it was dying and in
shallow water, thus failing the test of "...one living in its natural
habitat, the inky depths of the sea." Elsewhere in the book though, he
repeatedly states that so little is known about this creature that little
can be said for certain about whether or not it naturally spends much time
in shallow water.

Oddly, despite citing previous encounters with live giant squid, Ellis says
in his "Conclusion", "Long after I had completed this manuscript and turned
it over to the publisher, I received a letter from a man who had seen me
claiming on a television program that nobody had ever seen a living giant
squid. 'Not true,' said Dennis Braun,....(pp.245-247)" He goes on to relate
Braun's story of seeing a giant squid on the seafloor at Vieques Island in
1969 from the ship he was stationed on as a young Marine. Ellis interviewed
Braun, who had provided a detailed description of what he had seen, and
gives the impression that he finds the story believable in spite of the
unusually large size of the specimen. Further, he also includes (p. 248)
the story of a "ship's officer captain", C. A. McDowall, whose story of
seeing a large school of as many as 200 [!] giant squid in the Arabian Sea
was published in the January, 1998 issue of the "Marine Observer."

Wolfgang
who, in the interest of saving tim's bandwidth, will say nothing of the
adventure of john rassling the giant squid on the shore of lake superior.
:)