The Turtle in the Ghost Net

We were two hours out, running the long way home along the edge of the fishing grounds, when the lookout called down about something on the water that was not a buoy and not a bird. From the bow it looked like nothing at all: a dark tangle riding low, rising and falling wrong against the swell. Only when we came alongside, engines down to a whisper, did we see the eye.

She was a sea turtle, fully grown, her shell as wide as a truck tyre, and she was wrapped in a ghost net — one of the lost fishing nets that drift for years, fishing on their own, killing as they go. It had her completely. Green mesh wound around her shell in a dozen turns, cinched over both front flippers, looped around her neck, and trailed away beneath her in a heavy curtain of weed and old rope that anchored her to nothing and held her like everything. She floated at the surface because she could no longer dive. Her head rose with each swell and sank with it, taking what air she could. Her eyes were half-closed and crusted with salt. Once, while we watched, a front flipper stirred against the mesh in a slow, hopeless stroke, and the net only settled deeper.

She had been fighting it for days, perhaps longer. Every stroke she had ever made had wound it tighter. The sea had given her a prison that travelled with her, that fed on her own strength, and by the morning we found her she had stopped travelling. She hung in the water in the middle of an empty ocean and waited to finish drowning an inch above the surface.

You do not haul a turtle that size aboard a small boat, and you do not cut blind in swell. We brought the boat in on her sheltered side, killed the engine, and put two of us over the side in the water with her, in life vests, with the hull between her and the open sea. I took her head side, one hand resting flat and steady on the rim of her shell, talking the whole time, though what a turtle makes of a human voice I cannot say. My partner worked from behind with the hook-bladed knife we carry for exactly this, cutting only what he could see, only what he could lift a finger’s width clear of skin first.

We cut the net away strand by strand. There is no fast way that is also safe. Some loops had to be worked loose a millimetre at a time before a blade could go under them. We freed a front flipper first, and she let it hang, too spent even to test it. Then the turns around the shell, one by one, the mesh coming away in long green streamers that we hauled straight into the boat. The loop at her neck we saved for near the end. I slid two fingers under it and held it away from her while my partner cut through it fibre by fibre, and when it parted she drew one deep, clean breath and blew it out in a spray that wet my face, the first full breath she had likely taken in days.

The complication came with the last of it, the heavy curtain trailing beneath her. As the weight of the freed net shifted, the trailing mesh swung in the swell and caught fast around her remaining hind flipper, and pulled, and she felt the prison take her again and surged — a sudden, immense strength none of us had believed was left in her. The line of net between her and the boat went bar-taut. I went under for a moment against the hull and came up holding the shell rim with both hands, keeping her head above the swell, while my partner went down in the green water and cut by feel, one strand, then another, until the whole dead weight of the net dropped away beneath us and sank, and the boat crew hauled the last of it dripping over the rail.

Then there was nothing holding her, and for a long moment she simply floated between our hands, breathing. I ran my palms along her shell and flippers the way the marine vet had taught us over the radio: no deep marks that rest would not mend, flippers moving freely now, one slow stroke, then another, stronger. Her eyes opened fully and regarded me with the ancient, unimpressed calm of her kind, and I understood the inspection was mutual, and brief.

She went the way sea turtles go, without ceremony. One stroke became three, the great front flippers pulling together, and she angled down and away from the boat into the green, surfacing once, far off, a dark head in the swell, before the water closed over her and the ocean was only the ocean again.

We named her Ma — the Vietnamese word for ghost. It seemed honest: the ghost net tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that open sea sometimes, on calm mornings, when the water lies flat and innocent all the way to the horizon. I think about the things we lose over the side that do not sink and do not die, that go on working in the dark for years, and about a great old animal hanging at the surface of an empty ocean, waiting an inch above the water she belonged to. And someone happened to be on lookout on a slow boat home. And someone happened to look twice at a tangle most crews would have logged as debris and passed. She dives in the deep green now, clean-limbed and unhurried.