Tribute To Flying Fish

It must be quite an exhilarating sight  to see for the first few times,  a flying fish break the surface of the sea on calm days and dart at very high speeds and fly over to a safe distance far from us noisy intruders and once again dive headlong with a minimum splash!

The dive would have appealed to springboard divers like Greg Louganis and the streamlined body of this extremely Artful Dodger had been studied by flying enthusiasts in the early days of the aero plane.  The powerful tail and the elongated pectoral fins help the fish take off and actually fly for almost 40 or so seconds and up to about 150 feet!

Till the crew of Japan’s NHK recorded on film a flight of 45 seconds, the record for duration of flight for this aerial fish was 42 second! In the last few days I have watched over a hundred such short flights and seen these acrobats turn in mid air and change course! But getting an acceptable standard of a photo of one of these shy fish is almost impossible when your boat is going at 30 kilometers and the fish is going at 50 and in the opposite direction! You get almost ten seconds to hold the camera loosely to minimise camera shake and yet firm enough not to drop it also in the breakneck speed,  frame, focus and shoot! If you lose that first ten seconds or so, the fish is beyond ‘reach’ of your normal lens but still going on steady just a few feet off the surface of the blue vastness!

The learned  ancient Greeks who gave unpronounceable ‘scientific’ names to everything mistakenly thought that the flying fish left the sea to sleep on land, and thus named this delightful fish "Exocoetidae" which literally means ‘sleeping outside bed’ !

Many of our tiny islands have been blessed with showers of the flying fish at certain times of the year. Islanders just grab what they can from their homes and run to the beach and collect as many as they can when these sudden explosions of flying fish happen. It is believed they commit this apparent mass suicide to escape the mouths of the huge and extremely fast Yellow Fin Tuna! Out of the Tuna’s reach and into the hands of a thankful, humble people whose sustenance has always been from the sea around them!

Thank You.