A pleased Gudmund (Gudy) Gudmundseth was about to call it quits on a day when the weather was fine and the fishing even better.
He and a buddy had already landed five spring salmon using trolled herring when they got another bite.
Whatever was at the other end was in no hurry to come aboard.
"It went for a huge run, then nothing," Mr. Gudmundseth said. "Another huge run, then nothing. I thought I had a salmon. Then I thought I had a halibut. Then I didn't know what I had."
Aboard Miss Piggy II on a beautiful fall afternoon in the ocean about 20 kilometres southwest of Carmanah Point on Vancouver Island, a self-employed roofing contractor was about to earn a small place in the lore of Canadian marine biology.
The sport fisherman scooped his catch into a net. He remembers thinking, "What the hell?"
What he first suspected was an octopus turned out to be a squid, but a larger one than he had seen before. He was going to throw it back when he noticed a hook had pierced the doomed creature's left eye. As he made a quip about calamari, the squid ejected its ink.
He flung it onto the deck of the powerboat, opened the hatch and kicked it into the hold.
Only later, after he brought it home on ice to Maple Bay, where it was identified by a marine biologist, did Mr. Gudmundseth fully appreciate the nature of the creature.
"I didn't know it was a Humboldt squid," he said. "A man-eater." For the first time in recorded history, a Dosidicus gigas had been captured for study from the temperate waters of the northeastern Pacific. The invertebrate had never been seen this far north until late last year.
Now, as warmer weather again returns to the coast, scientists wonder whether a sequel will be available this summer. Call it Return of the Jumbo Flying Squid.
Some descriptions from witnesses sound like the plot to a horror movie -- water roiling with tentacles; otherworldly creatures suddenly launching into the air from beneath the surface; nightfall bringing to the surface vicious predators that slip back into the depths at daybreak, like vampires of the sea.
A Humboldt squid can grow to the size and weight of a hockey player. So, imagine Todd Bertuzzi with bulging eyes, eight arms, two tentacles, three hearts, a beak for a mouth, a brain wrapped around his esophagus and gullet with a willingness -- nay, eagerness -- to dine on his own kind every other meal, and you get a sense of how the squid has earned such a fearsome reputation.
Mexican fishermen call the creature el diablo rojo -- the red devil.
"They're just the kind of thing nightmares are made of," said Jim Cosgrove, the natural history manager at the Royal B.C. Museum.
"It's a big animal, a powerful animal, a hunter. They can drag you down. They're going to get a bad rep. That's nature's way."
Mr. Cosgrove made the official identification of the fisherman's catch last October. He knew it was not a neon flying squid, Ommastrephes bartrami, common in these waters, as soon as he saw the suckers. The Humboldt squid's suckers, which have a semi-circular row of small but razor-sharp teeth, swivel 360 degrees, corkscrewing into hapless prey.
The creature -- named RBCM 004-050-001 -- was fixed in formalin for eight days before being placed in a 60-per-cent solution of isopropanol. Once it was ready for permanent preservation, scientists measured the small female's length (1.36 metres) and weight (6.4 kilograms).
The Humboldt squid's range stretches from California and the waters off Mexico, where it supports a commercial fishery for export to Japan, to as far south as Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. It was first reported as far north as Oregon in 1997 and San Francisco in 1932.
