Moonlight exposes many things to the eye, but it also hides some things from view. While traveling over night to San Simeon, the moon was nearly full and lit the way for us. As I did my watch, sometime after midnight I went below to use the head. I kept the lights off so I wouldn't dilate my eyes and make it difficult to see when I went back up on deck. As I flushed (the head draws in fresh sea water to flush), the bowl began to glow with a green florescent color. I immediately knew two things: 1 - what the glow was from and 2 - that I must go wake up Casey so she could also see it.

I knew what the glow was because I saw something similar, but on a much grander scale, when we brought our boat down from Washington, near the Canadian boarder. We had hired Charlie, a seasoned skipper, to captain our newly-bought boat back to our home port in the SF Bay. Sean, my father-in-law, and I were the crew for the 6-day trip. Charlie and I were on the ugly watch (midnight to 4am). We were sailing 20 miles out in the Pacific Ocean on a new moon. It was pitch black and we were trying to stay awake. We had talked about the green glow that followed in the wake of our boat and topped the crest of some of the larger waves. It was caused by phosphorescence, microscopic sea algae that glow when something agitates it.

That night, 8 or 9 dolphins joined us. Since it was pitch black, we would not have been able to see them, but their movements in the water stirred up the phosphorescence and they glowed in the darkness. When they jumped out of the water, they disappeared from our sight because they quit glowing. We hooked onto the jack lines and walked to the bow to watch the show! Kneeling in the bow pulpit, I could have touched the dolphins as the bow descended toward the trough of each wave. After about 1/2 hour, a large glowing mass about the size of an orca came at us fast, amid ship on the port side. Since we were on autopilot and no one was at the helm, there was no way we could have turned to avoid a collision. About a yard or two from our boat, the mass quickly turned and disappeared at our stern. Charlie surmised that it was a school of fish. It was frightening and beautiful at the same time. I told Charlie that it would have been great to get some photos of the whole thing, but he said a camera couldn't capture the light. It was a special sight only for the two us right now.

So, back to the toilet bowl story: having heard my account of the dolphins and schooling fish, Casey really wanted to see phosphorescence. I woke her and she ran into the head with me and I pumped the flusher. Green glowing things entered the bowl. Casey was so excited that she got her camera and tried to take a photo and then a short video of it as I pumped the flusher. Neither method of capture worked. I told her that it was a special sight only for the two of us right now...