Swimming with the monsters of the Sargasso Sea

Stay on the boat! That simple command never leaves the sailor’s mind while at sea.

Falling overboard isn’t quite like falling out of a plane without a parachute. You may live. Yet your chances rapidly decrease in offshore conditions, where the boat is moving quickly, the waves are big, and, very likely, the one other crew member capable of rescuing you is fast asleep on their off watch.

Fall overboard and you and Icarus tumbling through the sky have more in common than not.

So there are few stranger – and wildly liberating – sensations than to pause in mid-ocean, hundreds of miles from any harbor and several miles high up over the seabed, and deliberately plunge from your vessel.

We did this a few days after leaving Bermuda, heading into the heart of the Sargasso Sea, where in light winds we drifted and meandered for a week, becoming so lazy, so unambitious, that at some point it became hard to remember we were ultimately meant to cross the Atlantic.

In other words: perfect swimming conditions.

We were over the abyssal plain that covers most of the mid-Atlantic. The chart told us that under “Moon River” the ocean dropped a staggering 2,900 fathoms. That’s 3.2 miles of water, or 5.1 kilometers. Or 11 Empire State Buildings end on end.

Somewhere down there, the most secretive animals on Earth – giant squid, lamp fish, eels and the rest – were playing their freakish roles.

But our own attention was fixed on the surface, where the bows of “Moon River” eased through mazes of golden sargassum weed, every clump teeming with its own panoply of monsters – miniature though they may have been.

Histrio-histrio, or the sargassum anglerfish, is “pound for pound your worst nightmare,” says Chris Flook, longtime collector of species at Bermuda’s aquarium. The glum-faced little creature swims and walks around the weed, using fins that end in frog-like webbing or what some suggest amount to fingers. We watched him dispatch a shrimp that we unkindly placed with him in a bucket. The encounter was so rapid that the shrimp simply vanished.

Histrio-histrio: bad tempered and quick

Brief encounter between histrio-histrio and a shrimp...

There were other surprises here: juvenile reef fish that arrived as larvae on the ocean currents and which, when bigger, will leave the nursery and return to their coral homes.

There was also a crab with a blue underside and white top designed to blend in with the sky when seen from below and to resemble sea bubbles when spotted from above. Many bunches of sargassum also glittered with sticky nets of flying fish eggs…

In legend, the Sargasso Sea trapped whole ships in its weedy embrace and condemned crews to wander this lost world for eternity.

And that’s the exact fate of many of these small marine creatures. They’re in the most curious of predicaments. On their weed rafts, they can safely navigate the high seas, usually the habitat of great athletes like the tuna or dolphin. Yet, being poor swimmers, they can’t afford to step off – death would soon follow.

So it is that these fleets of tangled ships are doomed to drift around the Atlantic, their crews never sighting land and never entering shallow water, much less the rocky foreshore that a crab, for example, would love.

Free, yet imprisoned: they are a lot like us sailors on boats. Well, except we don’t often have to deal with the likes of histrio-histrio.

Now suspended over this world, it was time to jump from our own raft, the tangle of fiberglass, steel, aluminum, bronze and wood we call “Moon River.”

In I went, smashing the ceiling of the ocean. Sunlight tore down with me, descending in vast parallel columns to incredible depths. Holding my breath, I swam further and further under the boat. The water was so clear I had trouble keeping my sense of distance.

When I looked up, I saw the keel and rudder and propeller in perfect detail, as if through a window.

And all around floated sargassum mats, brilliant gold in the light, hanging like chandeliers over my head. They looked bigger now, viewed from underneath.

Despite having concentrated on learning about the miniature residents of the Sargasso, I was aware that
much larger beasts also frequent these waters. After all, the little attract slightly bigger, and so on. Adele and I took turns: one swam; one kept watch for sharks.

Limited by my lungs, I dove and surfaced, dove and surfaced.

As soon as my head was above water after a dive, I'd become aware of things in an ordinary way. The curve between sky and sea reminded me of the complexity of the world, at once familiar and overwhelming. The sight of “Moon River” drifting away underlined that swimming off your boat in mid-ocean always carries risk.

In fact, each time I surfaced I was surprised at the growing distance to the safety of the boarding ladder. I noted the somewhat anxious expressions of Adele, Zephyr and Looli as they looked down from “Moon River’s” railing.

Underwater, though, everything changed. I felt momentarily as if I could swim forever, that I could follow those sunbeams. Of course, I couldn’t, but a couple times I went down far enough to realize that I didn’t have quite enough breath left for an easy ascent.

After the swim, we set sail again. But only a few minutes passed before something really big did rise from the bottom of the sea: whales.

Spout visible top left

So perhaps they’d been watching us through that crystal water all along.