The Salty Sea Dog and the Giant Squid

‘Twas nearly twenty years ago today, off the coast of East Africa, when The Salty Sea Dog set a sail on the Indian Ocean. His schooner the S.S. Fish Sticks was on its way to deliver a crate of seeing-eye dogs and helper monkeys to the underprivileged, blind children of Madagascar.

The trip had gone smoothly until a hurricane blew in from Sri Lanka and along with it, a giant man-eating squid. As the hurricane came, The Salty Sea Dog stood grinning. He knew sea hurricanes to be mother nature’s most cleansing shower. He stripped down to his bare nothin’s and went topside where the hurricane could pelt his sea-weathered body clean.

It was then, as the wind and rain were power washing The Old Salt’s nether regions that the giant sea squid found the S.S. Fish Sticks. It clung to the ship’s underbelly with unmatched strength grown in the deep dark sea and with tentacles made to hold a thrashing whale. Within minutes a great moaning, and howling could be heard bellowing from the hold of the ship. The sounds of thirty seven seeing eye dogs howling for their lives combined with the crackling and creaking of the S.S. Fish Sticks as it was slowly being crushed by the hungry squid.

Suddenly, with calamity all around, the helper monkeys rushed sprung from below deck, screeching and yelling. At first this caught the Sea Dog off guard (after all he was buck naked) but he soon calmed as he realized that the monkeys were holding buckets. As they summoned their helper training, the monkeys  started working a bucket brigade to belay bail the rising water and save the doomed, drowning dogs below deck. Upon realizing the helper monkey’s dutiful deed, The Salt Sea Dog was now free to take care of the giant squid squeezing the life out of his beloved Fish Stick. He dove naked into the raging sea armed only with the exfoliating loofa he used to scrub down his barnacles. There he met the squid and using his loofa, stabbed it right in its cold dark eye. In retaliation, the squid shot a massive stream of black ink launching The Sea Dog forty feet into the air.  Aaaahh, but none knew storms better then he, and with a twist of his body, he used gusts from the prevailing sea winds to land himself back on-top of the stunned beast.

The two wrestled for nearly 40 hours, while the storm lasted 40 more. In the end, the S.S. Fish Sticks sank to the cold bottom of the sea. But two weeks after the storm and a week after his funeral, The Salty Sea Dog floated into Bombetoka Bay on the carcass of a giant squid with 37 seeing-eye dogs, and a gang of helper monkeys. All of them eating calamari, all of them smelling like rotten fish.