Lily Pond Fishing in San Francisco County, California
San Francisco North Area

438 Days out of Nantucket, our holds nearly full of oil, we sighted spouts in heavy fog. I was 2nd mate of the Rachel and was the first amongst the crew to lower away after them. Successfully harpooned the slowest one, and I was on one hell of a Nantucket Sleigh ride, pulled further and further away from the Rachel's other boats. Looking back, we saw some trouble amongst the other boats, so we had to cut loose and pull back for them. By the time we got there, it was a scene of utter carnage. Two of the four boats stove, and a mad black whale kicking up a mighty and terrible froth red from the combined blood of a harpooned whale and many of my less fortunate shipmates. We made straight for the Leviathan, and eye to eye with the immense and terrible beast, I drove my harpoon home. No good it did me. The creature wheeled on me with a burning rage unrivaled amongst any in the animal kingdom. My boat was smashed to smithereens and I fell... I fell... Into deep enveloping Ocean, my consciousness fading. Who knows by what grace of God or Fate that that empty and forbidding scrap of ocean did not become my final resting place. Somehow I did surface, alive and intact, around two cable lengths distant from the Rachel, just in time to see her rammed directly amidships by that self-same terrible whale who had already wreaked so much carnage amongst the crew. Drifting helplessly on the shattered remains of the ship's boat I once commanded, I watched as the whale again and again smote the ship with unrelenting fury. After perhaps half an hour, the Rachel was sliding beneath the waves to her watery grave, all hands lost. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. I'm giving this fishing area a rating of 1-Unsatisfactory because just as all my shipmates were entombed in those water depths, likewise were any material possession I owned and any chance and being paid for a hard two year's work forever removed from this earth.