![]() ![]() They’d haul themselves out of their dens and move over the shell bed in an ambling shuffle. ![]() The octopuses watched Matt, and also watched one another. Their eyes were large, and not too dissimilar to human eyes, except for the dark horizontal pupils-like cats’ eyes turned on their side. They were mostly brown-gray, but their colors changed moment by moment. The octopuses each had a body about the size of a football, or smaller. On the shell bed were about a dozen octopuses, each in a shallow, excavated den. A pile of empty scallop shells-thousands of them-was roughly centered around what looked like a single rock. On one of these dives, roaming over a flat sandy area scattered with scallops, he came across something unusual. As the bay is large and typically pretty calm, Matt, a scuba enthusiast who lives nearby, had begun a program of underwater exploration, letting the breeze carry the empty boat around above him until his air ran out and he swam back up the anchor line. ![]() ![]() This bay is well-known for diving, but divers usually visit only a couple of spectacular locations. The breeze on the surface nudged the boat, which started to drift, and Matt, holding the anchor, followed. He swam down on scuba to where the anchor lay, picked it up, and waited. On a spring morning in 2009, Matthew Lawrence dropped the anchor of his small boat at a random spot in the middle of a blue ocean bay on the east coast of Australia, and jumped over the side. ![]()
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