"What the sea wants, the sea will have." - trad. fishermen's saying

    "From the sea we come, on the sea we live, to the sea we must return." - trad. fishermen's saying

     Dawn came, and with it disappointment. Nothing had happened. There had been no yawing of the stern of the boat, no squeal of stretched cable, no sign whatever of action. Red-eyed and weary, we began to reel in the cables... ...and found that they had been sheared off. Both of them. At about 2,000 feet. Not merely broken, as if they had somehow caught in the bottom or foul-hooked a whale, for the strands would have popped and curled not abraded, as they would have been by the grinding teeth of a deep-dwelling shark. Forty-eight woven strands of stainless steel had been snipped as cleanly as if by sharpened bolt cutters. Bitten off. -- "Discovery," Peter Benchley