The first one landed on board just after three in the morning. Its gossamer wings beating frantically against the rubber stucco deck, its eyes spinning crazily in their sockets. Gasping wetly at nothing. Its scales dripping with sea slime in our headlamps, shining dully in the baleful red shadows in the leaden night. Sparkles of bioluminescence in the black below us mirroring briefly the sparkling dark sky above as tiny sea critters flash their disturbance at our passage and then gone. Four am conversations about banana boats in Cayman and apple trees in Maine and things that rhyme with Katie Jewett. Less than an hour till we can sleep again.
They often end up on boats, or broken against their hulls, as they flit across the water pixie-like and unseeing in the night-time. You don’t really know what they’re like until you see them, wings vibrating like a hummingbird, zimming from wavecrest to foamy wavecrest. I had forgotten flying fish were even a real thing and they hardly seem it. Apparently they fish them in Barbados but not really anywhere else. You learn a lot on these trips.
The second one landed I don’t know when but we found it just after lunch behind the deck hose. It was a different being, a papier mache relic of a life since gone. Its mouth like a cartoon fish’s, idly agape; its eyes sunk back and flat. It had voided itself like a man just hanged. The shimmering scales flaking off in the noonday heat and the wings most of all dried and shriveled and pointed. Do we get rid of it? Wait I want a picture with it. Hang on get your camera let’s get a picture of it. Cool look at it. Wow. Do you want to hold it?
We threw them both back. The one to go on to whatever mysterious latterday fishy adventures it might have, awakened or broken forever by its brief time as a passenger on Sea Dragon on the Bermuda crossing till it was its time too. The other to bob away in our wake, a gift to the ocean, a remembrance left behind on a country road, as more of its fellows skipped unknowing by.
-Geoffrey Loss, Gulf Stream Exploration expedition, May 27, 2015
