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When the sailors wanted to go swimming in the ocean, they had to be very careful because the water around Woodlark Island was full of sharks. Usually two men with rifles would keep a lookout for incoming sharks. They were easy to spot because they swam with their dorsal fins sticking up out of the water. One of the lookouts would shoot a bullet through the dorsal fin and it would turn around and swim back out to sea. All the other sharks in the area would follow its blood and it would be safe for the sailors to swim for a while. 

One day the sailors saw a huge dark shadow swimming under them. They scrambled out of the water and watched. It was a Devil Fish (manta ray). It was six feet wide from wingtip to wingtip. Its mouth was 28 inches wide and eight inches high. It was very scary looking. One of the sailors said that if you drew an imaginary line from wingtip to wingtip and another from head to tail, the point at which the two lines crossed would be the Devil Fish’s brain. If you shot it right there, you could kill it. The sailors argued for a few minutes and then they picked out the best shot amongst them and let him try to shoot the Devil Fish. The next time they spotted it, he shot. Glub, glub, glub the Devil Fish sank to the bottom. But was he really dead or just hurt? The sailors argued some more and then decided to send one man down with a harpoon to stick it to make sure it was dead. They had to draw straws to see who the unlucky man would be. One of the SeaBees lost and took the harpoon and a deep breath and dove down. Soon he came back up and said he had stuck the harpoon in it all right and it hadn’t moved at all. All of the sailors pulled on the rope attached to the harpoon and they pulled the dead Devil Fish up onto the beach. It was enormous and very heavy but also very much dead. The sailors turned it over and it was beautiful. Its underneath had slots that looked just like venetian blinds (big mini blinds). The Devil Fish took water into its mouth as it swam along, and the water would flow out through the slots keeping the food inside the Devil Fish. After a while it began to smell awful, so the sailors threw it back into the ocean.