OSR and secrets of the watery deep

A cleric near OneKeep - Oderic - mentioned the last words of a fading sailor - about the Wreck of the Marshall. Originally reported in The Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the sailor warned that two ghosts haunted the sunken Marshall. With his last breath, the sailor said, 'All's there, but ask b'for takin', yur gotsa askum first..." 

Oderic's story got me thinking about secrets of the watery deep.

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Likely you've heard the sailor Ishmael's account of 'the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.' 

In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, chapter 59, Ishmael reports a 'transparent blue morning at sea' and its revelation of the giant squid.

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

A furlong's 660 feet - that's a big secret. A cthulhu before Cthulhu.

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In Where the Trout are all as Long as you Leg, John Gierach's says, 'secret places are the soul of fishing.'  

One night, Gierach was fishing a hidden pool but could no longer see the trout. He said, "I could still hear them: rises that sounded like a moose trying to wade quietly in deep, still water.'

As it happened, a bolt of lightening interrupted Gierach's musings, and the hidden pool was suddenly revealed:

...in that instant of super-illumination I saw the rings of two dozen rising trout and a hundred mayflies in the air, all frozen in time in a kind of pale, science fiction electric blue. 

Then it was black again...

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Some secrets of the watery deep are fine, others, not. In Melville's chapter 59, here's Flask asking Starbuck about the squid:

'What was it, Sir? said Flask'

'The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.'

Thanks for reading.