Swordfish vs Man: Fish 1, Man nothing

Good day all. In a story that looks like it came from The Onion, a man was impaled and killed by a swordfish in Hawaii. While it does look like one of the phoney stories The Onion puts out, it’s quite real.

It appears that a man decided to jump into the water to grab the fish. The fish objected rather vociferously, to the detriment of the man. Here are the details from Fox News:

A Hawaii man was killed Friday, (May 29), after he was apparently impaled by the bill of a fish, officials said. Witnesses at Honokohau Harbor in Kailua-Kona reported that a man in his 40s jumped from the pier in an apparent attempt to catch a billfish, said West Hawaii Acting Battalion Chief John Whitman of Hawaii County’s fire department.

What? This guy never heard of a net or a gaff?

The fish was a swordfish about 3 feet long with a bill about 3 feet, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources said in a statement. It weighed about 40 pounds.

I wonder if it was a French swordfish? Did it yell out “En Guarde!” before running this guy through?

“All we know is next thing they know, the man is seen floating,” said Whitman. Firefighters tried to resuscitate the man, who had a puncture wound to his right, upper torso. The man was taken to Kona Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Whitman said

Swordfish are not friendly creatures. They are nasty fish that object to being eaten. Just how dangerous are they? Back in 1967, the deep diving submersible, Alvin, was on it’s way down to the sea floor when, at the 2000 foot level, the crew heard a thud and the whole submarine shuddered. Being intelligent people, they scrubbed the dive and headed for the surface. What they found startled them. Here are a few details from Gizmodo:

It was after the overhaul, in 1967, when Alvin got attacked by a swordfish at a depth of around 2,000 feet, during dive number 202—somewhere around the Blake Plateau and Cape Charles, in the Bahamas. The pilots heard a big metallic noise, the whole submarine shook, and something penetrated the outer hull.

At those depths, if something punches into the hull, you are lucky if the vessel doesn’t implode.

It was a dangerous situation, so the crew decided to get quickly back to the surface. When its mothership—105-foot catamaran Lulu—lifted Alvin off the surface, they discovered this huge swordfish stuck in the hull.

Follow the link and you will see a picture of a very large swordfish stuck to the hull of the Alvin. And for those of you from PETA, wondering if the poor innocent fish survived, was nursed back to health and returned to the briney deep? It didn’t. The crew cooked it for dinner.

While I do offer my condolences to the family for the loss of a loved one, why this man decided it would be a good idea to wrestle a swordfish is beyond me. Chalk this one up as potential winner of the 2015 Darwin Awards.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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