Just below me at about 16m I see a long, narrow fish sliding into Erling's torchbeam. The next few minutes are chaos. We have found another stray from the deep, a creature we had been curious to see for years - the ratfish, or sea mouse. We had seen it before only in illustrations. Its Latin name, Chimaera monstrosa, originates from Greek mythology and refers to a fire-breathing goat with a snake's body and a lion's head.
Pictures show a creature with big, golden eyes and a whip-like tail.
In their efforts to take pictures while stopping themselves descending, the divers' fins stir up a lot of mud. Their lights keep flashing, and I stay above and out of the way until things calm down. The eyes of the ratfish are very sensitive, and the flashes obviously make them uneasy. Two of them head towards me. Their heads resemble those of dogs, and their big eyes sparkle with green brilliance in the light of my torch.