Listing to Port

Getting your socks wet with salt water, having to wait several hours outside Calais due to a French dockworkers’ strike, ship’s cat hates you, the realisation that there are not plenty more fish in your specific case, getting stranded on a desert island and having to fend off crabs with a stick, vomiting into an oncoming wind, the ship’s mess running out of cocoa, precision-aimed seagull shit, when the mutineers need your cabin for plotting in and they leave it in a state, when the size of your beard is insufficient for the size of your submarine, attacks by pirates, an excess of shanties, seals that are not quite as cute as expected, having to scrub the deck, the sudden realisation that you are a shark, when the toilet is blocked and also rocking from side to side, when you’re not quite sure what the sun is supposed to be doing relative to the yardarm but you’re fairly sure that you’re at a latitude where it’s not going to do it, no mobile phone signal, mermaids who point and laugh, everyone saying ‘Arrr’ long after it has ceased to be funny, being caught between mating krakens, incorrect splicing of the mainbrace.

1. It is insufficiently buoyant.
2. It is uninterested in your cares, concerns and tales, and is frankly uninfluenced by the gentle rhythm of your daily life, instead looking up to - of all things - the moon. The moon! As if some barren satellite, some great blundering dust ball, could be more interesting than the beautiful clockwork of water-based life forms!
3. It is too wet, and if you invite it into your house it is hard to get it to leave.
4. There is a hole in it about where your ship should be.
5. It is doing something unseemly for a body of water, like being on fire or turning purple or voting or something.
6. It has never got over its great long-distance polyamorous love affair with all the oceans of Mars, who fled the solar system together many millions of years ago and show no signs of returning.
7. It is sitting on the place where the treasure is and refuses to move.

1. The Imperious Snurf. The Snurf looks rather like one might imagine a sea monster to look and no wonder: it was the original model for the monster entwined around the compass rose on ancient maps. If you meet the Snurf it will tell you this at great length, along with numerous tales of its glory days in the 12th century. If you bring it mangoes it will tell you its adventures with the other stars of the old map modelling world, including the time the Desert Lions loaded it onto a large cart and took it for a ride across the Sahara to party with the North Wind. In the modern age it is sadly underemployed. It can be easily summoned by floating a large wooden arrow, circle and/or letter ‘N’ in the Atlantic Ocean.
2. The alX'char. These beings are aliens from a planet with a high-density atmosphere. As such, their exploration of Earth has naturally concentrated on what they believe to be the most likely place to find intelligent life, i.e. the deep oceans. They regard the above-water parts of the globe as hostile environments unlikely to harbour much of interest. After three hundred years of exploration, they have largely written off suggestions of interesting transmissions from the planet as a fluke, but one occasionally encounters tourist groups who have dropped by to spot angler fish, which they believe to be the planet’s apex life form. Obviously no human has yet had a friendly conversation with them but I suspect they’d be quite interested in the prospect.
3. The inhabitants of Nether Timewell, a small village on a gently hilly part of the sea bed near Rockall. Nether Timewell was founded by humans cursed to immortality by various malign fairies. Being the sort of people who get cursed to immortality by fairies (you know the type), they were naturally curious about the new exploration opportunities available to them now they were no longer able to drown. I am not sure how, but sooner or later every fairy-cursed human who walks into the sea ends up at Nether Timewell, where there is usually a small cottage already waiting for them. The village’s extensive system of underwater lights is powered by one of only three authentic perpetual motion machines in the world and is something to behold, should you get the chance.
4. The sea itself. Although it is perfectly possible to have a conversation with the sea, be aware that you may not get an answer within a human lifetime and that it will almost certainly not be at a pitch audible by human ears. However, there are certain mystics who claim to have asked the sea multiple questions and recieved credible answers with only the minimum of translation equipment. For example, Norbertina of Amsterdam claimed to have received a full but oddly damp proof of Fermat’s last theorem in the post after discussing the matter with the Pacific from the belly of a friendly whale. If you wish to try this, the Indian Ocean may be the best one to start with. Do not attempt to have a conversation with the Southern Ocean, which is rumoured both to be unusually slow in answering and also somewhat grumpy and forgetful.