I have always believed that there are gargantuan sea monsters alive in the volumous ocean depths.

From ancient times sailors have told and retold stories of sighting the huge many-tentacled beast called the Kraken. We now know that a creature very similar to Kraken descriptions exists, the Colossal Squid. In 2007 the largest known Colossal Squid was captured in the waters off New Zealand. It weighed 495kg and was 10m long. How big does the Colossal Squid grow? No one knows. Is there larger undiscovered Kraken-like creatures alive today? No one knows.

Here is where this post gets creepy…

A member of my church competed in the ‘New Zealand to Numea’ yacht race in 1975. He recounts the story that while the yacht was several miles out from Vanuatu the crew heard a very unsettling intermittent slapping noise. They sighted the tail of a very large whale. Something was obviously attempting to pull the whale down as it was struggling to keep itself close to the surface by using its tail to pull it backwards (hence the slapping noise). The disturbing part of this story was that after a short time there was a huge and violent plume of bloody water surrounding the whale’s tale and then it disappeared under the surface.

Very creepy indeed.

What kind of creature would have the strength to pull a large whale underwater?  It couldn’t be a shark as sharks can’t swim backwards. What caused the huge plume of bloody water?

I can’t think of any other explanation other than a Gargantuan squid-like animal had clamped onto the nose of the whale and was proceeding to drown/constrict it.  In fact this explanation sounds very plausible.

We know the giant squid tangles with whales from numerous eye-witness accounts.

In 1965, a Soviet whaler watched the battle between a squid and a 40-ton sperm whale in which both animals died. The strangled whale was found floating in the sea with the squid’s tentacles wrapped around the whale’s throat. The squid’s severed head was found in the whale’s stomach.

In October 1966, lighthouse keepers at Danger Point, South Africa, observed a baby southern right whale under attack from a giant squid. For over an hour the monster squid clung to the whale trying to drown it.  “The little whale could stay down for 10 to 12 minutes, then come up. It would just have enough time to spout… and then down again.” The squid finally won and the baby whale was never seen again.

Why am I suddenly hankering to re-watch Pirates of the Caribbean 2?