Evening. I'm calling from Wellington, and I need to tell you about something that happened to me back in '97. I was working on a commercial fishing vessel called the Pearl, operating out of the Bay of Plenty. Now, I've been at sea my whole adult life, started when I was seventeen, so I've seen plenty of strange things out there. But this, this was something else entirely. It was early March, I remember because we'd just gotten back from a week off for my daughter's birthday. We were about 80 miles offshore, running night operations for squid. Standard stuff, you know. We'd drop our lines deep, maybe 400, 500 meters down, and haul up whatever came up. The crew was five of us total. Captain Ron was running the boat, then there was Tommy and Pete on deck with me, and young Sam in the galley. The night started normal enough. Clear sky, calm seas, maybe a light chop. Water temperature was sitting around 15 degrees Celsius, I checked it myself. We'd been pulling up decent catches all evening, mostly arrow squid, some of them pretty good size. Two, three feet long. Nothing unusual.
It was around two thirty in the morning when things got weird. I remember the time exactly because I'd just radioed our position to another boat working about ten miles south of us. We were hauling up one of the deep lines, and it was fighting. I mean really fighting. The winch was straining, making this grinding noise I'd never heard before. Tommy yelled for Captain Ron, said we'd snagged something big. We figured maybe we'd hooked a small shark or caught some debris. Happens sometimes. But the way the line was moving, it wasn't stuck on something. Whatever was down there was alive and it was pulling back. The four of us got on that line, helping the winch bring it up. Took us maybe ten minutes of steady pulling. The whole time, you could feel this, I don't know how to describe it, this intelligence on the other end. Like whatever was down there knew exactly what was happening. resistance on a fishing line is chilling - Heath'
When it finally broke the surface, I, I couldn't process what I was seeing at first. The deck lights hit it and this massive eye, had to be at least a foot across, just stared up at us. Dead center of this thing's head. The eye was like nothing I'd ever seen. Dark red around the edges, black pupil the size of a dinner plate. It was a squid, but not like any squid we'd been catching. The mantle, the body part, was easily twelve feet long. Maybe more. The tentacles, Jesus, the tentacles were stretched out behind it in the water, and I could see they went back at least thirty feet. Maybe forty. Two of them were thicker than the others, those feeding tentacles they have. Covered in suckers the size of coffee cups. The thing was this deep red color, almost burgundy, and its skin kept rippling. Changing shades. Dark red to pale pink to almost white, then back again. Later I learned that's chromatophores, these color cells they have. But in the moment, it looked like the thing was flickering in and out of existence.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]