April 1, 2015
Bouwe Bekking
Skipper, Team Brunel
A beautiful night of sailing, 25-30 knots of breeze under clear skies. We can see heaps of lights of squid fishing boats. So far so good - then all of a sudden our boat slows down dramatically.
Rokas on the helm shouts : "Check the foils, we must have sailed through a huge patch of weed".
But then we see something what you only can see in a horror movie. Left and right several tentacles of a monster squid come crawling along the deck.
The guys onboard instinctively grab winch handles and their knives and start battering into the squid, who slowly starts pulling the boat now to a complete stop.
The first loose items starts disappearing from the deck in apparently what is the mouth of this beast. In the meantime everybody gets on deck, Stefan our OBR, only in his boxers and a camera around his neck yells: "This is fantastic and unique! This footage will win me for sure the overall media prize!"
In his ignorance he does not really understand how serious of a situation we are in, until suddenly a tentacle graps around Stefan's leg and drags him to the side of the deck, where the huge mouth of the beast is appearing.
"Help, help ,please help, what can I do?", Stefan yells. All of us rush to his aide and start slashing into the beast's huge arm in the hope that he will lose his grip. Then somebody shouts: "Try throwing your camera in his mouth"
Stefan someway somehow throws his 15 kg heavy underwater camera right in the mouth of the beast and that does wonders, all of a sudden the beast lets go all his arms and we are free.
What a scare for all, the near unthinkable had just happened to us. Stefan is most freaked out that he has lost all this unique footage, still not realizing how lucky he has been.
One thing's for sure, when there are little squids, there are big ones out there as well.
Cheers,
Bouwe
