Pirates, Manatees, and Mermaids

By Geoffrey T Williams

Alena and Tyler Worthy - the SOS Aquatic Intervention team is using new technology to save endangered dugongs in the Persian Gulf. When they get a new Red Alert, they find themselves flying half way around the world to Florida's land of Ten Thousand Islands to save manatees. A frightening, dangerous poacher named Billy Boat is stripping Florida of one of its most valuable resources: its beautiful, and exotic orchids - and making tens of thousands of dollars selling them on the black market. As his convoy of jet boats roars through the islands, they are hitting and killing manatees. The SOS team joins up with The Mermaid Squad - a group dedicated to helping manatees. But Billy Boat has other plans. The SOS team will need every bit of courage, technology, and guile to end the poaching and save the gentle creatures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoffrey T Williams
• Release date: Jul 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476343624

Geoffrey T Williams

My love of science started when my geologist father told me a rock I had found in the back yard of our Wyoming house was a dinosaur bone. Fast-forward some years, and I wrote a short book called "Dinosaur World" and produced the cassette tape that went along with it. Thanks to a small publishing company named Price Stern Sloan, the book and tape went "viral," selling tens of thousands of copies in just a few months. That success led to the other Dinosaur World volumes, which eventually sold more than eight million copies. From that I branched out to write about other sciences I loved, including astronomy and space travel, entomology, oceanography, etc. And since I love producing audio, almost all the books included cassette tapes, and later, CDs.

Book preview

Pirates, Manatees, and Mermaids

By Geoffrey T. Williams

Illustrated by The Artful Doodlers – Photography by Tom Campbell

©2010 Jokar Productions – Smashwords Edition

Published by Save Our Seas Limited

Table of Contents

The Claw

Red Alert

The Keys

Billy Boat

The Reckless Riders

On the Hunt

Swimming With Mermaids

The Mermaid Squad

Let’s MakeA Deal

Hatching Ideas

A Wild Ride

Ghost Hunting

Captured Ghosts

New Friends and New Ideas

The Claw Strikes Again

Oysters and Orchids

Glossary

About the Author

The SAVE OUR SEAS FOUNDATION is committed to protecting our oceans by funding research, education, awareness and conservation projects focusing on the major threats to the marine environment.

Learn about the five threats, discover what the foundation is doing, and find out how you can help. Visit http://www.SaveOurSeas.com to learn more.

Chapter 1 - The Claw

The creature floated through the tall, slowly shifting grass, its long arms and strong claws held at its side. Its eyes swiveled—front, back, up, and down—searching, constantly searching.

Suddenly, its eyes locked on dim shadows in the murky distance. Whisper quiet, the creature moved ahead. The shadows grew larger and more distinct, finally becoming two separate shapes: large, round, dark-gray shapes, moving lazily, with trunk-like snouts and large upper lips. They were dugongs, close to three meters long, and weighing almost 400 kilograms each. They were grazing like giant underwater cows (even though they’re more closely related to elephants), eating their favorite food—the seagrass that carpeted the bottom of the Arabian Gulf. Dugongs eat as much as thirty kilos of it a day.

There you are! Tyler Worthy said to himself.

He was sitting in the lounge of his big hydroplane, the Sea Worthy, at the controls of his newest, favorite toy—a remote-controlled aquatic vehicle, which he called The Claw. Made of titanium, and shaped like a large teardrop, it was designed to search underwater to a depth of three thousand meters. It had strong mechanical arms with pincers on the end, which could pick up something as heavy as a boat anchor, or as fragile as a conch shell. For eyes it had two high-definition cameras that could swivel to view everything around it. Right now it was viewing the two dugongs, almost twenty meters below Tyler and the Sea Worthy.

The hydroplane wasn’t Tyler’s, exactly. It belonged to the Save Our Seas Foundation (http://www.saveourseas.com) headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and was used by the Foundation’s Aquatic Intervention team, of which Tyler was the STO (that’s Senior Technical Officer, which is what Tyler wanted on his business card, if the Foundation ever gave the team business cards).

Alena Worthy didn’t have a card either. If she did, Tyler figured it would just say SIS. Alena, his twin sister, was the team leader, mostly because she was older—by six whole minutes. She often reminded her brother of this fact. At the moment, Alena was on the bridge of the Sea Worthy, monitoring a half-dozen screens and gauges showing the depth and shape of the sea bottom.

"I