A young sailor, who spent a night in wild waters off the WA coast, has blamed the giant ocean sunfish for causing the incident.
You may remember, it was the same fish that knocked a whole boat out of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race in 2023.
Xavier Doerr was attempting to circumnavigate the country solo to break Australia’s most difficult offshore sailing world record when the fish also known as “floating garbage” collided with his boat.
“I was surfing down a wave and I collided with what I believe was a sunfish,” Mr Doerr said.
“(It) caused me to capsize and subsequently have a strong impact with my head.”
While Mr Doerr did not call the fish names, a rant went viral a few years ago about the “world’s dumbest fish” the ocean sunfish and was shared more than 70,000 times on Facebook.
Scout Burns, the rant’s owner called the sunfish the “biggest joke played on Earth”, “useless” and “floating garbage”.
Her rant prompted the nerdiest debate on social media with marine biologists chiming in to say the sunfish was an evolutionary marvel — citing the fact the fish grows so huge eating just jellyfish.
And this fish is seriously huge, the average weight of a sunfish is about a tonne.
The mola mola, as it’s also known, is called the “toppled car fish” in Taiwan, the “swimming head” in German and “cut short” in the Philippines.
The Taiwanese aren’t wrong with their description, the Guinness world record for heaviest bony fish goes to the sunfish with one of the heaviest weighing 5071 pounds, and measuring six to 10ft.
Big enough to take out Mr Doerr’s 6.5m yacht which has now been left adrift in the Southern Ocean.
Burns warned of their stupidity in her rant saying: ”If they are so huge, they must at least be decent predators. No. No. The most dangerous thing about them is, as you may have guessed, their stupidity.
“They have caused the death of one person before. Because it jumped onto a boat. On a human. And in 2005 it decided to relive its mighty glory days and do it again, this time landing on a four-year-old boy.”
Anyway, you can read the rant below and once more revel in the marvel of the world’s dumbest fish.
