Backstory: In our first experience with snorkeling in Venezuela, Dorin stays on the Fandango while Cory and I row the tethered dingy away from the boat so we can roll into the water. I realize I can’t hold my breath long enough to dive 30 feet and back, so I stay in the dinghy, while Cory finds many specimens of sea life on the sandy bottom, bringing them to me to inspect or keep. The last thing he brings is a large conch shell which I put on the floor of the dinghy under my seat….
He hoists himself up and climbs back into the dinghy. There’s a couple of inches of water sloshing in the bottom, as usual, from trailing it behind the Fandango. I’m sitting on the rear seat when something shoots out of the conch shell.
It’s alive!
I scream and jump out of the Tinker.
Cory follows me a split second later. “What’s wrong?” he asks as we hang onto the tubes. “Why did we jump?”
“This thing was in the conch shell, and it just shot out. It’s in the bottom of the boat.”
“What does it look like?”
“Brown, slimy, or at least shiny, moves like lightning.”
We half hoist ourselves up onto the tubing and look in, but we don’t see anything.
“Well, guess what?” he says. “Whatever it is, I bet there are more here in the water than the one in our boat. Let’s get back in.”
“Nope. Unh-uh. Not on your life. You can row back. I’ll push you from behind with my flutter kick.”
“Hey, I see it! Nope, it’s gone again. Under the seat. I can’t tell what it is. Okay, let’s go.”
Back at the Fandango, Dorin says, laughing, “So what’s up? Did you spot a needle fish?”
I hoist myself onto the dinghy tube. Dorin takes my hand and pulls me up.
“Hand me something, something like a jar,” Cory says.
I rummage around and come up with a large, empty, clean mayo jar. Holding the jar, Cory stands in the bottom of the Tinker and rocks it from side to side.
“Hmm. Nothing.” He jumps up and down a little to make the water slosh back and forth.
“There it is!” He scoops it up with some water.
“I got it!” He hands the jar to Dorin.
“Hey! You know what you’ve got here?” he asks.
“If it’s an eel, it’s going back into the water,” I say.
“It’s an octopus. A baby octopus.”
Cory climbs into the cockpit, and we take turns looking at our ocean-life acquisition, an eight-tentacled baby octopus.
“Cute little guy,” Dorin says. “Too bad we can’t keep him.”
“Can’t we? For a little while?” I ask. The miniature octopus has attached a couple of tentacles to the inside of the jar.
“We don’t know what it eats,” Dorin says.
“How about we just keep it overnight,” Cory says.
We sit in the saloon and examine our new pet as we pass the jar around. We can see tiny individual suction cups that Oscar, the name Cory has given him, uses to manoeuver around the jar.
Dorin drops in tiny pieces of cooked meat that Oscar ignores.
We sail on and anchor in shallow water near a small island that appears uninhabited.
This time I’m the first one in the water because there are reef formations near the surface, and Dorin says there should be good snorkeling. We can see in the shallows that it looks interesting. And it is! The reefs have little growths attached that look like puff-ball flowers in red, yellow and purple.
When I lift my head to tell Dorin, he hands me the boat hook. “They are sea anemones. Tap once on a rock and see what happens.”
I do and the “flowers” immediately disappear, pulled back into little mollusk-like growths attached to the rock.
“Leave them alone for a while, and they’ll come back out,” Dorin says.
I turn away, and Cory and I flutter kick into deeper water, swimming through schools of tiny fish that flash silver, purple, and blue when the sunlight hits them. They separate and swim around us. I look at Cory, and he gives me the “okay” gesture and nods. He’s also enjoying this.
After a while, Cory signals me. When our heads come out of the water, he tells me he’s done for now.
I nod. “Okay, I want to keep going for a few more minutes.”
After what seems like a few minutes, there’s a tap on my foot.
I lift my head, and Cory is there without a mask. “So, um, Dorin says you have to come out of the water, or you will burn.”
“I’ve only been in the water for ten or fifteen minutes,” I say.
“Try an hour and a half!”
I look around and sure enough, the Fandango is a far distance back.
“Are you having fun yet?” Dorin asks when we get back to the boat.
“Hey, is there any way I can earn a living doing this?” I ask Dorin when we climb back into the boat. “I’d do this every day if I could.”
“So, it’s true what they say about snorkeling in Venezuela? I didn’t oversell it?”
“Oh, my goodness, no! I love it, love it. I didn’t know it could be this beautiful. And there is so much variety of sea life that just keeps changing as I go.”
We eat supper inside, and Cory keeps Oscar’s jar by him so he can watch him move around.
“What if he’s a she?” Dorin asks as he drops a piece of fish in Oscar’s jar. “She’s kind of cute.”
“Then I’d call her Oscarita,” Cory says.
When Dorin and I get up the next morning, Cory is already at the dinette. “You won’t believe Oscar. Come and see.”
They sit and look at the octopus moving around. “Wow,” says Dorin.
“So, it’s not my imagination,” Cory says. “He grew overnight.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dorin says. “Half again as big. Look, she is on the bottom and her tentacles can almost reach the top of the jar. We’ll have to let her go.”
“Wait, we have a bigger jar. I’ll fill it with water.”
Cory finds a half-gallon jug and is back in a moment, having filled it with seawater three quarters of the way to the brim. He pours the water slowly from the smaller jar into the new, larger one. Oscar is not having any of it, though. Even as the water drains, he clings to the sides of the jar he’s in. Cory pours water back into the small jar and then upends it quickly before our octopus is able to get good suction going. Oscar slips into his new vacation home.
In the afternoon, Cory and I snorkel near shore, and then we wade in a shallow pool and harvest empty sea shells to bring home. We find dozens of sea urchins of different shades of green and purple. They don’t have spines on them, but I turn each one over to be sure it’s empty. Cory also finds a tiny, tiny live crab and, back on the boat, he drops it into Oscar’s aquarium.
That night Dorin says, “Uh-oh. I think Oscarita grew during the day.”
I’m shocked because he is taking up much more room in the jug than he did in the morning. We sit and watch the actions of the suction cups as he moves around the glass.
“There’s a small section on octopus in my book, but not much,” Cory says. “The mother dies as soon as the eggs are hatched, and they raise themselves. When they are really young, they are vulnerable prey to larger fish, so they hide in shells and crevices in rocks.”
The next morning, Oscar can reach one tentacle out of the jug.
“She’s going to climb out of there soon,” Dorin says. “You know what that means.”
“Okay,” Cory says. “I guess you’re right.”
“I’ll do it if you don’t want to,” Dorin says.
After breakfast, Dorin enters the water in the shallows where I discovered the sea anemones. I hand him the jug. He lowers it fully into the water and waits for Oscar to swim out. He doesn’t. Dorin yanks the jug backwards, trying to force eviction, but the octopus holds fast to the inside. Dorin walks in water up to his chest and tries to release Oscar again. No dice. Oscar is holding on for all he’s worth. Finally, Dorin asks for his mask. He snorkels further out along the reef. He holds the jug very close to a crevice in the reef, and Oscar shoots out, slides into a narrow crack, and almost disappears from sight.
“I guess octopuses are smarter than I thought they were,” Dorin says when he climbs back onto the Fandango. “She didn’t want to be exposed to predators until she could find a safe place to hide.”