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Fishermen tracked it for 45 minutes off the coast:
A SEA SERPENT IN NOVA SCOTIA

Wallace Cartwright (inserted above), a lobsterman from Cape Breton Island, has only reluctantly been telling his latest fish story. He says he saw a sea serpent. First he and his mate thought it was a floating log. As the fishing boat got closer, Cartwright said, the animal raised its head. "It had a head on it like a sea turtle, and a body like a snake. The body was about as big around as a five-gallon bucket (or 30 inch)".

"I was kind of leery of approaching it," he told CBC Radio. "God knows, the thing might have been able to jump out of the water, you know? And I'm sure it could have swallowed you whole." In 30 years on the water, he'd never seen anything like it, and he's been hesitant to tell anyone.

Before resuming fishing, though, they followed the creature for about 45
minutes as it submerged and surfaced five or six times, headed for deeper water.
"I've been a lobster fisherman for 30 years, and I know what a bunch of seals
or eels on the surface look like. This was one distinct animal," said Mr. Cartwright. "One I've never seen before."

He might have been concerned that no one would believe his tale, but the curator of zoology at the Nova Scotia Museum says he thinks Cartwright saw an oarfish.

SNAKELIKE IN APPEARANCE

Oarfish have only recently been documented, Andrew Hebda said, mostly in waters north of Great Britain. "They can be up to 40 feet in length. They are long, they are thin, they are snakelike in appearance," he said. If he's right, Hebda suspects the oarfish followed a cold ocean current to Cape Breton.

"There aren't too many eight-metre-long fish in the world, it could only be
one of a few known things. That's if it's a known species at all," said Andrew
Hebda. "We have some specimens here at the museum taken from waters off Labrador and the Scotian Shelf, and we have no idea what they are."

But he said from the description Mr. Cartwright gave him, the creature is probably an oarfish, or ribbonfish. It likely followed a cold ocean current to Cape Breton. Few oarfish have ever been caught; most specimens seen are washed up on beaches. So encounters with live specimens are rare. Oarfish are said to be the longest of all fish. Their ribbon-like bodies usually grow to eight meters, but specimens up to 17 meters long have been reported.

Mr. Cartwright's helper, who didn't want to be named, tells of a similar sighting near Alder Point some 60 years ago.

Mr. Hebda said there have been over 31 sightings of "sea monsters" in or off Nova Scotia over the last 140 years. Usually described as multi-humped
serpents, most are basking sharks, he said. "There have been reports from Lake Ainslie, and Aspy Bay. Cranberry Lake has some monsters in it too," he said. "There have also been recent sightings of oarfish-like creatures off Antigonish and P.E.I."

OARFISH FACTS

The oarfish (Genus Regalecidae) is a strange-looking deep-sea fish found in warm parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Its body is compressed and the dorsal fin forms a manelike crest behind the head. Oarfish are large, up to 9 m/30 ft long. They have a small mouth, no teeth or scales, and large eyes.

The Oarfish is metallic silver-blue, with blue-black blotches and wavy markings on the body, and pink to red fins.

Secret Life Of The Oarfish: You've heard the saying, "There's a limit to everything." This saying may be generally true. But when it comes to the ocean floor, traditional wisdom has been turned topsy-turvy. Listen


RARE SIGHTING OF OARFISH FILMED

Divers from the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center
(AUTEC), a Detachment of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, Rhode Island, were startled recently when they were visited by a strange looking sea creature.

The divers, Brian Kakuk and Bill Cooksey, employees of Range Systems Engineering Co., a subsidiary of the Raytheon Corp., under contract to the Navy, were inspecting a buoy installation in the south end of the Bahamian waters known as the Tongue of the Ocean (TOTO), when a large serpent-like creature appeared.

The creature, never before seen by either of the two veteran divers, displayed no aggression as it gently swam towards them.  Swimming vertically using only its elongated dorsal fin, the creature, over 5-feet in length, approached to within an arms-length of the divers.

SMOOTH TO THE TOUCH

"It approached and hovered about ten feet away, about 20-feet below the surface. It looked at us. My first impression was that the eyes moved in the sockets and followed our movement", said Cooksey. "I approached the fish and much to my surprise it allowed me to touch the lower part of its body. It was smooth to the touch and fine scaled like a mackerel",

TOTO is a unique deep water basin, approximately 110-miles (204 km) long and 20 miles (37 km) wide, bounded on two sides by shallow coral reefs and by Andros Island on the third. TOTO is home to AUTEC, the Navy's principal East Coast in-water tracking range.

TOTO's maximum depth of 6000 feet (2012 m), smooth basin floor, steep walls and shallow surrounding waters make it an ideal location for testing antisubmarine warfare systems and tactics of Navy submarines, surface ships, and aircraft, as well as conducting basic acoustic, environmental and oceanographic research.

MOVING AGAINST THE CURRENT

The divers surfaced and picked up a video camera. "We moved away to the buoy to do a safety stop. I turned around and saw that the fish was following us," noted Cooksey. "It had incredible control of its elongated pelvic and dorsal fins. On the ends of these fins were yellow and blue tassels.  It appeared to have control of these little flags moving them against the flow of the current".

"After a few moments of filming it began to swim into deeper water", said Cooksey.  "We dropped from 10 feet to 80 feet quickly. I was amazed that it could move so fast in its heads up swimming style. It stopped for a moment and was gone".

Back on shore, the video was reviewed and creature identified as an oarfish (Regale-
cus glesne). The oarfish, although believed to inhabit all the tropical and temperate oceans of the world, as well as the Mediterranean Sea, is rarely encountered. Most of what is known of the animal has been gleaned from carcasses found floating, or washed ashore, in other parts of the world, and even those finds are rare.

FIRST TIME ON VIDEO

According to one source, the number of people who have actually seen the fish alive is very small. By all accounts a live oarfish has been photographed on only two other occasions, one of those times by a sport diver, also in the waters off AUTEC. This encounter is believed to be the first time that a live oarfish has ever been captured on video.

The oarfish is thought to prefer living at depths down to 2000 feet, but has been sighted on occasion near the surface where it has been misidentified as a sea serpent.  Lacking caudal or anal fins, it was once thought to slither through the water like a sea snake or eel.

This recent sighting and a previous one show that the fish actually swims vertically in the water column using an undulating dorsal fin to propel it. "The back fin that ran from its head to the end of its body controlled its movement in the water. In its heads up attitude the fish had total control of its position in the water", said Cooksey.

MANE-LIKE CREST

Silver in color with streaks of blue, the oarfish has long oarlike pelvic fins, a long ribbon-like dorsal fin, and a mane-like crest on top of the head.  The longest known bony fish, oarfish can grow to 20-30 feet in length with a weight around 600 pounds. There have also been reports of oarfish that have measured up to 56 feet in length.

FOOTNOTE: The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC)
consists of deep water test ranges and research, development, test and evaluation support facilities located at Andros Island, with administrative and logistic support offices in Newport, RI and West Palm Beach, FL.

A short video of the encounter as described above is available as an avi file and a
rm file. NOTE: These are a large files and best viewed via a high-speed connection.

After watching that video footage everyone can see how impossible it appears to be, that it was an oarfish that Cartwright and his mate saw and as if that was not enough, here is a comparison between the head described by the lobster fisherman and the head of an oarfish:


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Seaturtle

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Oar fish

Map of the Area of the Sighting
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SOURCES: The above information was copied to this website from the following: CBS News 25 June 2003; Brian J. Goodwin´s Crypto Chronicle; Australian Museum Fish Site; and NAVSEA.



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