When I was growing up in Miami, we used to go scuba diving a lot. My dad and brother would bring home conchs, and starfish for our sea life display. They would preserve them and then put them in our display case. I felt bad about doing this, but a lot of people who had never seen starfish, conchs, sand dollars and all had the chance to examine them. My brother was going to be a Marine Biologist. The starfish were not that bad, but in order to remove the conch from its shell, they had to boil them in acid to clean up the shell.
This was the most horrible thing I had witnessed at my young age. When the conchs were boiled, they screamed..it sounded like a child screaming after being very badly hurt. I had to leave the house when they did this, because the screams would rip through my entire being. I cried each time they did this. That terrible sound still lingers in my soul to this day.
If you do not know what a conch (pronounced konk) is, if you have ever seen a movie showing people blowing through a big shell that looks like a pretty, that is a conch. Many peoples of the Phillipines use the conch to call others by cutting off the very top and blowing thru it. It makes a very loud noise if done properly.
One day while diving, my brother caught a large stingray, they are like the birds of the sea. Its "wing" span was 4 ft. He decided to bring it home and set it up as a display. The first step is to dry it out in direct sunlight, so my brother put it on the roof to dry. Unfortunatly, he forgot about it. All the neighbors could smell the rotten stench of its decaying body, but we couldn't. It should have been treated, but since it was forgotten, it was rotting. We finally got a call from a neighbor who had traced the smell to our home. Needless to say, it was gone the same day.
I didn't scuba much because I have always had a great fear of sharks...which lasts to this day. My folkes finally talked me into snorkling is an area of super clear water. I had just started to relax, when I came up for air and heard my mon yelling "shark". You have never seen a kid get out of the water so fast!!! But it turned out it was just a group of dolphins, which unfortunatly we never got to swim with.
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