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I grew up on the East Coast of the United States. MD and FL to be specific. Going to the beach was a regular thing in our household, whether it was the Chesapeake Bay or the Atlantic Ocean somewhere in West Palm Beach. My grandad has a house on the actual bay. Grew up spending every family gathering there. The adults would visit/catch up, and us kids would be in the water. I was NEVER scared of the water.

Then, as an adult, Im sitting at an inprocessing for a base in Okinawa, Japan, and theyre going over local hazards in the region.

I had never heard of the Blue Ringed Octopus before.

And from that moment on, I became terrified of things in the ocean.

My husband always laughs about that story because its rare that they even make it into the waters around Oki, but that genuinely really was the moment that my brain was like “Omg, you have to worry about more than sharks in the ocean.”

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Stonewyvvern@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The ocean is beyond beautiful. Spent some time on the shores of NC and VA…

Started studying marine biology due to the oceans vast amount of mystery…Now it’s “The ocean is beyond beautiful and just as deadly.”

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- toynbee@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The ocean is indeed beyond beautiful. I’m not a marine biologist, but I went to Jamaica for my honeymoon and truly appreciated it there. A lot of my time was spent just … Admiring the water.
  
  I remember a Jamaican local commenting that she’d seen the ocean around the USA in movies and wouldn’t swim in the ocean around the country based on that.
  
  Also, I got punched in the face by a fish while I was down there.
  
  Beautiful, though.
  
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  - edgesmash@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Also, I got punched in the face by a fish while I was down there.
    
    Please elaborate.
    
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    toynbee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There was a cluster of fish and the water was so clear that you could see them from the surface, which I thought was cool. Some of them were even jumping out of the water, which I’d never seen in person before! Because of that, I worked my way to around the middle of the cluster and crouched, then just kind of settled down to watch. Eventually, I guess I had been still long enough that they forgot I was there and started jumping around me. When I was done surveiling them, I stood up and turned around, only to receive a fish directly to the face.
    
    It was so unexpected (to me and, I presume, to the fish) that my first thought was that someone had thrown a rock at me, but my newly minted wife clarified that it was, in fact, a fish.
    
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    Infomatics90@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    not OP but I’ve been slapped in the noggin clean by a nice big salmon while fishing. was quite the nice greeting.
    
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- EffortlessEffluvium@lemm.ee ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Started studying marine biology
  
  How were you able to dissect one?!?
  
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  - MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    (recorder clicks on) “It seems the diet consists…mainly of a waxy substance…apparent preference towards bright primary colors.”
    
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  - Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Strap them on the table tightly
    
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toynbee@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
For a while, I lived in Havre de Grace, MD. In that timeframe, I experienced several fourths of July. One of those times, for some reason, my then-girlfriend and I got in a mood to watch horror movies.

We opened Netflix (then our only streaming service) and looked in the horror category, eventually settling on The Bay. We’d never heard of that movie before and selected it pretty much at random.

Turns out that movie is implicitly set in HdG and explicitly on the fourth of July. Kinda freaked us out for a bit.

After that, we looked up movies set in HdG and that’s how I found From Within, a mediocre movie featuring Bruce Willis’ daughter; and also how I found out that House of Cards filmed Kevin Spacey’s home town there.

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