Wednesday, November 8th – Sea Day

I witnessed a marvelous wonder this morning – flying fish!

We crossed into the Central Time Zone today, so I had an extra hour to kill after breakfast this morning. I decided to take a stroll on the Sports Deck, deck 12, which sits above the main pool and the bridge. I stood at the railing looking across the sea, which is calm for the very first time since I boarded 12 days ago – no white peaks at all! We’re traveling at about 60 knots, and as I peer over the portside railing into the water, I see these slivers of light streaming across the waves, perpendicular to the ship’s course. At first there were only few, and then many of them, and in a staggered formation.

It was then that I figured out that those little slivers were really fish! Flying fish! They’re about six to twelve inches long, and they have these long thin bones along each side, about three-quarters the length of their body, webbed to their side and retractable. I guess we must have been sailing through schools of them, because every once in a while you’d see group of them speed toward the surface, leap out and spread those side fins, sailing through the air for 200 feet before they’d just touch the tops of some waves to get another wiggle of acceleration and keep on flying! They’d keep on like this, grazing the surface for a few feet and then flying for another 200 feet or so, up to 1000 feet before plunging back beneath the surface, once they were a fair enough distance from the ship’s wake.

It doesn’t seem physically possible for such a phenomenon to occur, but here I was witnessing it hundreds of times, over and over. I was amazed at how far these little fish could fly! And it just reminded me of how clever and creative God is, and occasionally how whimsical.