The prize of the catch

I'm not sure if I am supposed to post the picture or not. In this picture with outstretched arms I am holding aloft two dead octopus with a tough look on my face. They are both about five pounds and hang limp for around three feet. Before that day my friend Jeremy Keys and I had already been fully integrated in the spearfishing world minus one thing, we hadn't speared any octopus. I had asked many a talented fisher how I was to recognize one and I had always been told to look for their eyes in the hole and no more. This Saturday morning we had decided to spend all day spearing and we tried both sides of the bay where we were living. Jeremy didn't know it, but I wasn't even looking for fish (not to say that I didn't shoot at some), because I was so concentrated on trying to find an octopus. After two hours in the water on the south side of the bay we ran into a couple of my old high school friends who said they were looking for tako (what Hawaiians call octopus-though its actually a Japanese word) however they had been unable to find any. So, we returned to the north side of the bay. As soon as we were on our way out, maybe twenty feet from shore, I spotted an octopus moving out from some rocks and shot it. It was pitifully small and rather than deprive the squid of its life I decided to let it go. Octopus heal easily so I wasn't worried about it dying. The way it scrambled away let me know that it was okay. So the hunt went on and two hours later we had no octopus but we did have a few fish. However I had learned to recognize the type of hole that the small octopus had come out of earlier and I was hoping that it would help me identify other holes where my prey might be dwelling. I was finally rewarded when I could see the large eye of what was obviously a much larger Octopus. It was a thing of beauty and so was the fight to get it out of there. It took about five minutes but it was worth the wait. I ran it up to the house whooping and yelling enough to get Jeremy's attention. I dropped it in a bucket and jumped back into the sea with my skills now honed. In less than two minutes I was fighting my second octopus with glee. By this time Jeremy was not only impressed but jealous. After dropping off my second prize I returned to show him how to find them and we were both soon catching octopus with ease. In the end I had 3 and Jeremy collected two. We knew that we would never eat all of them so we took pictures and then let the three smallest go. Then, after beating them to death, we took pictures with the largest two while smiling and laughing about the shear joys of the day. We were finally baptised spear fishermen