Brings back old times. I lived on Puget Sound, across from Seattle. My neighbors taught me to skin dive, and we did a lot.
About two years after I started, Jacques Cousteau pulled into Seattle for some repairs to Calypso. He was delighted to visit Puget Sound and do some diving, he said in a TV interview, because the largest octopi in the world lived here. I like to have died! I had been swimming around with those things and didn't even know it.
Actually they're incredibly shy, and I never even saw one in the four years I was there and diving. The most common method of catching them was to take a bag of copper sulfate crystals on a stick and shove into an octopus' hiding place. They're violently sensitive to this and come shooting out. All you have to do is spear them or rassle them into a bag. I never did this, as "bluestoning" is totally illegal.
I did have a few good octopus stews while I was there, though, presumably from legally caught ones.
Mike
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