This is an article that Noah wrote for the Reach the Woirld website (www.reachtheworld.org)

If there is one thing that I have seen on this trip that is completely
unlike anything I ever imagined, or ever could have imagined, it's the
flying fish that we saw entering the Bahamas. Dad would point out over
the water and say 'Look, flying fish! It just flew almost one hundred
yards!' and I would tell him 'Dad, a hundred yards is the length of a
football field. There's absolutely no way that a fish went that far in
the air'. Dad invariably would just drop the subject and that would be
the end of it. But then I actually saw one.
More accurately, I saw a zillion. Flying fish travel in schools, and
when they decide to fly, they really fly. They do not just jump out of
the water and glide for a while, like how I used to imagine them. They
explode out of the water by the dozens in plumes of ocean spray, and
they really fly. They go up and down over the waves and sometimes use
them like a ramp to get big air, like an Olympic snowboarder, or a
skateboarder in the X Games. Another thing that we have seen them do
is get just a little bit out of the water and bounce off of the surface
a couple of times like a skipping stone and then do something that
looked exactly like they were walking on their tails, like dolphins in
an aquarium show.

WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?
A flying fish's body is shaped like this: >, kind of a bullet shape
or a cigar shape. They have large forked tailfins, with a smaller
dorsal fin close to the tail. They have either two or four (depending
on the species) large and graceful pectoral fins, which they use like a
bird's wings. They have big eyes. Some varieties have very large
mouths, and others have smaller ones. The largest species of flying
fish is the California flying fish. While the average flying fish is
around eight inches to a foot, it is about sixteen inches on average.

HOW DID WE FEEL WHEN WE SAW THEM?
I asked everyone on the Wanderlust how they felt when they first saw
flying fish. Benjamin had no comment. Dad said he felt 'Excited. It
was a new experience for me. I had heard about them, but I had never
actually seen them, and so they exceeded my expectations'. Mom said
that she felt 'Excited, interested, intrigued, enthralled', and that
she 'wanted to sit there and watch them forever'. When I asked Alice
how she felt she said 'I felt like I was dreaming. I didn't know
things like that existed in the world'. As for me, I thought it was
absolutely incredible. I felt entirely overwhelmed.

WHERE DO THEY LIVE?
Flying fish live in warm seas, like in the Caribbean and in the Gulf
Stream of the Gulf of Mexico (these are the places we have seen them),
and the Pacific near California.
HOW DO THEY USE THEIR ENVIRONMENT TO SURVIVE?
They flap their pectoral fins like a bird's wings and use their tail
fins like a propeller on a boat or on a plane. Flying fish can fly at
double their swimming speeds, (up to 45 miles per hour), and for up to
490 feet (150 meters) for thirty seconds to avoid predators. They can
jump to a height of 71 inches (almost six feet - one book even says
they can jump up to twenty feet) above the water. In order to leap
that high, the fish build up speed underwater by thrashing their tail
fins side to side with their pectoral fins (their "wings") at their
sides to be more streamlined so they can move faster through the water.

WHAT CAN HARM THEM?
Bigger fish, like tunas and mackerels, are some of the main predators
of the flying fish but they can fly out of the water to avoid them.
Unfortunately however, when in the air, they become prey to sea birds
like gulls.

ARE WE WORRIED ABOUT THEM?
We are not especially worried about them at all. Flying fish can fly
to escape the bigger fish and swim to escape the birds, and since they
are not very tasty for people and are not even big enough to make a
whole meal, there are not a lot of people out there fishing them to
extinction. There really is no major threat to them that we know of.
They are not endangered or even threatened.