Unlikely Story: The Swordfish With a Nose Ring

A few weeks we asked you for your most unlikely stories—the kinds of things that make you scratch your head and think, “What are the chances?” Last week we published a birthday coincidence. Here’s another one of our favorite stories, this one submitted by Dan Clem.

or seven weeks in the winter of 2003 I was a fisheries observer aboard a swordfish longliner based in Long Beach, California. The vessel’s home port was Honolulu, but the incidental take, or bycatch, of protected sea turtles around the islands had forced a closure of Hawaii’s longline swordfish fishery. Some boats tied up or fished for other species, but others steamed to California where they could legally set sail for the high seas and essentially fish in the same areas near Hawaii they had been fishing before as long as they landed the