Hello! I am so happy to have stumbled upon your page and to discover all of the sightings that you and so many have witnessed in the bay. I’m even more excited because now I have a place to share my own sighting with you.

In 2009, my friend, his father and my wife went fishing in the bay during the halibut run. It was relatively calm out and the water was clear. We had four fish on a stringer alongside the boat and our eyes were glued to the surface of the water while we fished, on the lookout for opportunistic sea lions. When we decided to finally move to another location my friends’ father went to grab the stringer of fish and I was on the opposite side of the boat, reeling in my line. Suddenly, my friends’ dad (I’m sorry I can’t remember his name) yells out in surprise and says to come look over the side of the boat. From my side I see something swimming right under us and away from me, descending as it went and I swear it looked like a giant snake. The girth of it was incredible; I’ll modestly say, five feet around and it seemed to go on for an impossibly long time. I turned around and my buddy, Ron is also looking at the thing and then we looked at one another in shock. The creature was a dark brown color and I did not see scales or any other features, unfortunately. I was too preoccupied with the size and abnormality of it to process anything else.

After reading some of your reports I have to say that I’m very grateful that the thing had not come up out of the water as seen by some people. I can’t imagine how scary that would be or how dangerous. What we saw was easily large enough to take a person. I’m not a marine biologist but I don’t need to be to tell me that what I saw was not a whale or group of sea lions or anything known. It was so close and the water so clear that we had nothing to obscure our perception which would contribute to a misidentification.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this and I look forward to this mystery being solved in the near future!

-Chris

ps. I don’t know the exact location of your fishing trip but we launched out of Berkeley marina if that helps