Day One Hundred and Seventy-Seven

Day 177: 25 Jan 2011

Finding something underwater isn't easy in the best of circumstances. It's dark, cold. Radar can be fooled. And now that my slug was a vegetable, I had no link to the God of the Seas' mind.

Still, my visual memory is pretty decent. I remembered the radar and sonar readings from the not-a-fishing-boat on the surface, so I had a general direction in which to go. My eyes are better underwater than they are even on land, so I figured I'd spot something his size pretty easily.

Didn't happen. Not quickly, anyway. The thing about the Atlantic Ocean -- there's a fucking lot of it, even when you're only going a few miles. There's a whole depth factor we don't have to deal with on land.

That's not to say I didn't find him eventually, because I did. After lord knows how many hours of swimming around down there -- it was after the sun had risen and set -- I finally spotted him. He was not exactly hiding, but not exactly out there in plain sight, either, floating below one of North Carolina's barrier islands. I tried to sneak up on him, but here's the thing -- he can see in all directions at once. So that wasn't going to happen, at all.

He charged at me as soon as he saw me, and even my brain-damaged slug could still hear him howling in rage. I brought up the blade.

Blades don't work well in water. Not swords, anyway. It's a physics thing -- too much resistance for them to get up any speed. Without speed, there's almost no slicing power. I didn't know this until just the second I tried to strike at the God of the Seas. It wasn't a good way to get a physics lesson.

I realized I was in a lot of trouble.