When Ted Judah goes scuba diving off the coast in Monterey Bay, he normally swims at the surface to the area above the dive site and then descends. But on the morning of Dec. 30, the water was exceptionally clear as Judah swam out from McAbee Beach.

“I decided to just put my face in the water and look at everything,” he told SFGATE. And within seconds, something that resembled a blade caught his eye. There was “an undulating thing” attached to it, Judah noticed, and he immediately surfaced and told his wife: “There is something really amazing down here.”

A Monterey Bay Aquarium marine biologist would later identify it as a juvenile king-of-the-salmon, a rare ribbon fish that spends most of its time at around 3,000 feet. Very few humans have seen the unusual and mesmerizing fish alive. But when someone does, it tends to stir up both a lot of excitement and — due to a Japanese legend about ribbon fish sightings portending earthquakes and tsunamis — some amount of trepidation.   

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

For Judah, though, it was an entirely blissful experience and a crowning event of a life centered around the ocean.

Judah, who lives in Petaluma, grew up in the Bay Area with a father who was an avid diver. At age 8, Judah received his first wetsuit, which his father made by hand, and he went on his first abalone diving expedition. In 1996, Judah met the woman who would become his wife during an advanced open-water diving course in Monterey. The pair dived together often but took a 15-year pause after the birth of their daughter. A few years ago, when Judah’s wife started working at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco as a volunteer coordinator, she suggested that they start diving in the tanks there — and elsewhere, too.

Los Angeles | 'The little California coffee shop crushing Starbucks, one latte at a time
California| Century-old........

© SFGate