Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul Read Online Free PDF Page B

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