They won’t say how big it was, but with a 1000psi beak bite, I don’t really care.
A giant octopus may have been looking for a date when it attacked a submarine off of Vancouver Island last fall.
The remote-operated vehicle, by Suboceanic Sciences Canada, was checking salmon research equipment 55 metres beneath the surface off Brooks Peninsula, on the northwest coast of the Island, on Nov. 18.
Underwater footage from the incident shows the octopus attacking the sub, first by attaching a couple of arms to an underwater cable. The octopus then reached another one of its eight arms out to grab the vehicle.
A nervous Mike Wood, of Suboceanic Sciences Canada, was operating the ROV and slammed on the thrusters when the octopus attacked. He ended up blasting the approximate 45-kilogram octopus with water, silt and seashells to get rid of it.
Too many wierd creatures in the big blue for me to venture too far out from a boat, the vast majority of them, we haven’t even discovered yet.
I’m not afraid of the unknown, it’s just that my 1911 doesn’t work well underwater.
Howzabout and underwater shotgun, then, AK? It’s called a “bang stick”, and you load it with a single round of 12ga, then screw it back together. It works on contact. When you encounter a bad critter on your underwater foray, you just let the critter get into range, then thrust out the bang stick like you would a spear, and when it contacts the critter, an appropriate 12ga contact wound is blown into it.
Hmmm, problemo: what if the tentacles of the giant octopus are longer than the bang stick?
Hmmm.
Fortuntely, the Pacific Octupus, the largest on the planet, is one of the timidest, (most timid?) creatures on the planet. I have hauled two out of the deep near the Ballard buoy. One was about six feet across the tentacles and one was over ten. I struggled manfully to keep ’em aboard each time and was unsuccessful. That pissed me off ’cause they’re delicious. I also have several friends who dive, and they tell me the last thing they worry about is an octopus. The dangerous thing in Puget Sound is abandoned and lost gillnet mesh. Nearly invisible in water and the nylon it is made from never decomposes.
I have this terrible picture in my head of the octopus, dressed in typical hooker-ware, strutting up to the little sub and saying “Hello, sailor! Been at sea long?”
I am a bad person… 🙂
Hell, the Puget Sound has big sharks swimming in it. Granted, they’re six-gill sharks, which are rather timid and avoid anything that resembles contact with humans, but they are there.
Me, if I’m going to be swimming, I want it to be in water that I can see through. The whole time I lived in Seattle, I never swam in the ocean. Fish, yes. Swim, no.