Imagine sitting in a small boat in quiet, open water on the Chesapeake Bay and peering down into the murky depths, when suddenly a massive SOMETHING breaks the surface right in front of you, not four feet away.
That’s what Jack Cover reports happened to him this week as he was out on Eastern Bay, not far from Kent Island. Cover, general curator for the National Aquarium, was looking for comb jellies to add to the aquarium’s jellyfish exhibit.
Cover reports in his blog that his gaze was diverted briefly by a cownose ray swimming on the surface in the distance, when without warning "a big object lauched out of the water like a polaris missile." His initial shocked reaction was that a diver was surfacing, then he recognized this was a marine diver – a loggerhead turtle.