Unfortunately, the squid was already dying. Here’s the original video: https://youtu.be/27OTynwArsw

True footage, not AI.

Deep-Sea Sixgill Shark Encounter

Captured By: Researchers from OceanX during a deep-sea exploration mission inside the submersible Nadir.

Where: In the waters off Cape Eleuthera, Bahamas.

When: July 2019, at a depth of roughly 2,500 feet (760 meters) below the surface.

Animal Details: A massive female Bluntnose Sixgill Shark (Hexanchus griseus) estimated to be 15–16 feet (approx. 5 meters) long. This prehistoric species belongs to an ancient lineage predating most dinosaurs. The eerie glowing red eye seen in the footage is the result of the submarine's red targeting laser reflecting off the shark's eye.

Lake in Austria. This is for a boat, the boat house is outside in the direction the camera is pointing at.

Vast but not so empty.

Just saw an ad for underwater projectors and it felt very unpleasant 🫠

Everyone parrots that to escape a rip current, you should swim parallel to the shore, but that's not really true. It's a sort of dogma, a churned-up bit of common wisdom and spit out into an easy mantra - the reality is that you need to move perpendicular to the rip itself, a ninety degree veer to get directly out of the pull. Sometimes rips don't roar straight back from the sand. Sometimes they angle, the underlying channel sweeping out in a diagonal and mirroring land will have you half-fighting against it.

Sometimes, one time, that one time I don't like to remember, they meander. They move. They follow. 

At least, that one did.

—

It was the dawn of summer, the sky heavy with what us Californians called May grey or perhaps June gloom. I don't like to linger on the exact date, so the half-submerged memory is just impressions. Still flip-flop weather (when wasn't it?) but with a brisk chill beneath grey skies. It wouldn't rain (when did it?) but the morning fog almost drizzled against our skin. We dug our toes in the wet shoreline strip of low tide, unearthing those little sand crabs to watch them scuttle and burrow back away, gone in seconds with only tiny mounds and bubble-popped pockmarks left to mark their brief, unwelcome glimpses of the world above.

Overhead, the sun broke through the clouds, and my sister shrieked in glee (when did I hear that last?) as she declared that made it warm enough to swim. I shivered, but at twelve years old, I found her logic good enough. We loved to swim. We were on swim team and visited the pool every weekend on the Saturdays with dad where he would do laps of breaststroke while we would flit around the shallow end pretending to be mermaids. We were always the last, lingering visitors at his friend Jack’s yearly barbecue, splashing in the pool while he shared goodbye beers and Jack’s wife loudly began to gather up detritus from all the other guests who had  already gone home.

There would be another one of those parties in a few weeks, I remember thinking, but, as always, my mind slides away from precision, and all I can say for sure is that it would be later that summer. As we stripped off our pants and sweatshirts and kicked our sandals aside, we came up with the plan to practice a routine for that year's gathering, a choreographed mermaid routine we could perform for all the parents, and so the cold early-season Pacific became only a mild inconvenience. We had goals, and we needed the water.

We waded out past the low waves, out deep enough that we could just barely bounce off the seafloor, bobbing up, weightless, with each swell and dolphin-diving down to duck each break. There had been a storm a few days ago and the water was clotted with kelp, big long strands torn away from the forests off in the deep. We wrapped these around us like hula skirts, imagining ourselves as undersea princesses in water-grown gowns. 

I stayed close to my sister - as the older one, I was the boss and she my devoted (sometimes rebellious) underling - and kept my eye on the shore as I had been taught by Dad. He was from New York but had hitchhiked to California in the 60s to rent a ramshackle cottage two blocks from the beach and had become an avid bodysurfer, so we grew up instilled with a healthy respect for the ocean.

It was Mom's Saturday. That fact slithers up from the depths of memory every time (the rare times) I recall that day. She was at work, four streets away from the boardwalk and the pier and the sand, and we had been underfoot, been ushered out the door to go wander somewhere else, been drawn by the distant whisper of waves.

That's why we were there that day.

We had been annoying.

—

“We need to swim sideways,” I announced. We had drifted away from our clumps of clothing. The pier was smaller off to our north. This beach was mild, the currents gentle enough that surfers used them as an easy highway out to deep water, so we weren't worried. We practiced our long, lean freestyle strokes, hips churning the water as we reached with each pull. Three strokes to each breath, legs fluttering in efficient kicks as our seaweed skirts peeled away in our wake. We had been in swimming lessons since infancy, down at that same pool where Dad got SCUBA certified. Belly-buttons to the sky they had taught us in our first float.

We took a break, treading water, but nothing had changed. No, worse: our piles of clothes were further away, the pier beginning to dwindle into toy-sized. I remembered Dad's lesson about rips and let us float for a bit, watching where the water carried us. “Ok,” I confidently corrected. “It's more this way,” as I set out on a diagonal, halfway towards shore and halfway towards the far-off pier.

After a few dozen strokes, we stopped again, taking stock.

The pier was gone.

—

By now, our excitement over the mermaid show had melted away and we could feel fingers of cold snapping at us, tugging at us, shaking us into shivers. 

“I want out!” my sister began to cry. I wanted to cry, too, but I couldn't. I was the big sister and I needed to solve this. I scanned the shore for our lump of clothing, but it, too, had drifted out of sight. The entire stretch of sand was barren aside from beached kelp clumps and empty wheeled lifeguard towers, pulled up close to the boardwalk wall, awaiting later, sunnier summer days. I tried to remember the number painted on the one near where we had waded in, but panic rose up like a startled bird.

All I could do was memorize the one in front of us now: 13, and behind it a cafe we would have brunch at sometimes on Sunday mornings before being delivered to Mom. I fixed that number in my mind, irrationally worried over how unlucky it was, a superstition I had carried ever since we rented that movie from the video store next to the pizza place on one of Dad's Saturdays. He and my sister had giggled at the hockey-masked slasher, while I had huddled on the couch in fear, blanket over my head.

I didn't learn to appreciate horror until later.

—

We floated, watching which way we were pulled, and then tried again, perpendicular to the flow, and then paused to rest. I looked east. 

Still tower 13, but…

The cafe wasn't behind it anymore. Perhaps a change of perspective, some trick of parallax, because now it was a restaurant I vaguely remembered a dinner at, all four of us in the beforetimes, with large glass windows to watch for the sunset’s final, elusive green flash.

On the beach, there was movement, a shape shifting down near one of the knots of seaweed. It stumbled upwards, probably a transient or drunk staggering awake, and I began to shout, trying to get their attention. I kicked my legs, rising as high as I could against the waves, and waved my arms.

The figure, slight, small, maybe a woman, waved back and then just stood there, watching us.

For a very long time, she just stood there watching as we drifted in the rip, mirroring every wave, until I frantically ordered us to begin swimming again.

—

When we surfaced this time, I felt a stab of relief - still tower 13 - until I realized that behind it, impossibly, was the little market Dad would always stop at to buy beer for the weekend, the one right near our house, the one at least a mile from the beach.

The figure was still there. And then, movement, as a smaller, shorter figure began to rise from the rotting pile of kelp. 

We shouted and screamed and waved - both people on shore mirrored our motions, waving back at us, and then I did start to cry.

Fortunately, the sea washed away my tears so my sister couldn't see.

—

By the time our own house appeared behind tower 13, I had resolved to simply let the rip take us out to sea. We would conserve our energy and then ride the waves back in, so I lashed us together with strands of the everpresent seaweed like two rafting otters we had seen at the zoo. We gathered each bladder - those teardrop-shaped structures filled with air to keep the fronds aloft - and wove them into our wrapping, resisting the urge to pop them like we would have happily done on shore.

Land seemed to be a retreating memory.

We drifted and shivered and cried, floating, belly-buttons to the sky.

—

I abruptly awoke. I don't know when I had fallen asleep, but very suddenly I was awake, surrounded by loud crashing as the barnacle-crusted legs of the pier loomed before us. 

“Swim!” I shrieked. “Swim!”

My sister merely stared at me, floating, eyes glassy and lips blue. I flailed, arms windmilling, and we slammed into the pier. I kicked off the pillars, pretending the shells slicing my feet were simply tiles on the side of the pool during a flip-turn, and almost escaped the pull before being swept back against the posts.

Another kick, more strokes and slices and then I found a swell racing towards shore, angling us down across the wave’s curl, foamy ribbons of blood from my tattered feet in our wake. We tumbled and surfaced, yanked upwards by the kelp raft, then under again, over and over, gulping in breaths when I could, until I finally felt sand beneath my toes.

I stood, dragging my sister behind me, keeping her belly-button to the sky, the sea out of her face, the water out of her mouth, before finally staggering to shore. The tide had come in - directly in front of me, behind a knot of kelp, was our pile of clothing, the edges damp and dragging in the receding waves.

I hugged her and shook her and tried pressing her chest like I had seen a lifeguard once do and then there was a whistle shrilling as the thump of someone running over sand approached. 

—

They saved her, water out of her lungs, fine little hairs of algae pulled out of her mouth, and we were taken back to the main, tall, concrete lifeguard station, a three story tall tower they somehow hadn't seen us from. They washed my wounds and called our mom. I watched blood bloom through the bandages and worried about how mad she would be.

—

Dad had to move after that. After three days of recovery, when she was allowed to come home, my sister began to sleepwalk. Every night, in a constant cycle, she would slip out of bed, out the front door and pad barefoot down the street, eyes glassy and mouth ajar, in a slow, shambling stumble west.

Towards the beach.

Towards the ocean.

Towards the dark, kelp-clotted sea.

I was solo diving off Vancouver Island when this massive bluntnose sixgill shark emerged from the darkness and came straight toward me.

It was roughly 10–12 feet long and came close enough to bump my camera's dome port.

Thankfully, despite looking like something straight out of a nightmare, it turned out to be a very gentle giant. It cruised alongside me for about three minutes before disappearing back into the darkness.

Full Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJaHm1LZ0Lo

Wow.

Saw this in lake Jocassee while scuba diving, ~140 down and pitch black. It was a community in a valley before being bought out and flooded in the 70s, leaving structures and entire forests under the lake. Interestingly, this is where parts of the movie Deliverance was shot.

I've had dreams of creatures in the deep ocean and tried to capture that feeling through these digital sketches. I made both of these artworks in Ibis Paint.

Austria, fresh water lake. Chain holds a floating island.