Owly Shoals

My favorite spam e-mail sender here lately: Owly Shoals.

Come on, nobody is named Owly Shoals. There could be a thing called Owly Shoals, I guess, though that's kind of a reach...and that set me off, Captains Courageous-style:

There came a night, eighty miles off the coast of Hatteras, with a high wind and towering waves. The cabin-boy was lashed to the mizzen, and the Old Man gripped the ship's wheel as the foam from the wave-tops blew across the deck.

That was when the cabin-boy first heard it, faint at first but growing as the boat plowed on to the west: hooting. A multitude of hoots, coming to them on the wind.

"What is it, cap'n?" the cabin-boy asked.

"'Tis the Owly Shoals, boy," the grizzled Old Man said, "there's no trickier piece of sea between the Arctic and the Bahamas. We'll have to run a true course, or we'll all end up a ball of bones a thousand feet down."

The cabin-boy shivered as the hooting grew louder.