The Adventures of Leslie Binnacle the Barnacle

By Cathy J Sakas and Pedro S Baranda

Through The Adventures of Leslie Binnacle the Barnacle, the story of Leslie and friends helps us understand the complexities of life large and teeny in our Great Big Global Ocean.

Additionally, Leslie teaches us the true value of companionship, of caring for each other, and of taking responsibility for others and our Ocean. Thr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maudlin Pond Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781735619293

Cathy J Sakas

Author Cathy J. Sakas - Educator/Producer/Naturalist/Author Cathy's love of water began at birth on Virginia's southern Chesapeake Bay. She is happiest in, on or under water - salt, fresh or brackish. With a BS in Biology and MEd in Science, her career has been as naturalist/guide and producer, writer, host, and narrator of TV nature documentaries and now author. Cathy worked with NOAA Gray's Reef NMS as an ocean science educator, scientific diver, certified submersible pilot, and Aquanaut. Passionate about protecting our ocean and coast, she serves locally on several NGO boards and as Biologist-at-the-Design-Table for SCAD's Biomimicry Class. In her spare time, she sings for a local band, The World Famous Crabettes. With husband Christopher Morris she lives in the Treehouse he built in the woods along with wild animals and a few cats. They also spend time at their cozy beach-chic cottage on Tybee Island called Cottage of the Octopus Lair.

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Leslie

The Adventures of

Written by Cathy J. Sakas

Illustrated by Pedro S. Baranda

© 2022 Maudlin Pond Press, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher and author or in accordance with the provisions of the copyright, designs and patents act 1988 or under the terms of any license permitting limited copying issued by the copyright licensing agency.

Published by:

Maudlin Pond Press, LLC

PO Box 53, Tybee Island, Georgia 31328, USA

A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN: 978-1-7356192-8-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-7356192-9-3

Dedicated to All Who Have Sailed the Seven Seas and to Those Who Have Yet to Set Sail

Especially for my young cousins

Ayda Noelle Mills & Jeremy Noah Mills

Who are just setting out on their own

life’s course!

C.J.S.

And this is for my favorite Geese Flock:

Camila, Emilio, Paulina, Sandra and Ángel.

P.S.B.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Leslie´s First Adventure 2

Leslie’s Dream 14

Leslie Finds Her Permanent Home 27

Leslie Goes to Sea 40

Coral Life and a Close Call 54

Loggerhead and Hurricane 66

Entering Panama Canal 80

The Pacific Ocean 97

Leslie’s Dream Comes True 114

Map of Leslie’s Adventures 132

Afterword 134

Cathy’s Acknowledgements 136

Pedro’s Acknowledgements 138

About the Author 140

About the Illustrator 142

Preface

Storytelling is an artform developed eons ago that has endured through the ages. It is the first form of entertainment used by humans to convey life lessons.

Through The Adventures of Leslie Binnacle the Barnacle, the story of Leslie and friends helps us understand the complexities of life large and teeny in our Great Big Global Ocean.

Additionally, Leslie teaches us the true value of companionship, of caring for each other, and of taking responsibility for others and our ocean. Through Leslie we learn that acorn barnacles are hermaphroditic and that they mate to produce thousands of free-swimming larvae that go through several stages before making it to their end form as a sessile adult. We learn that those millions of barnacle larva have a critically important role near the base of the ocean food pyramid. We learn how difficult it is for a larva barnacle to even make it to adulthood. And then, when a sessile, firmly attached adult, the encrusting barnacle that is the bane of so many ship and boat owners, we learn that life’s perils just begin.

Through Leslie and friends, we learn that even the least among us can do our part to care for Planet Earth’s greatest feature, Our Ocean.

We hope you will learn from Leslie and friends.

Ready, Set, Hoist Your Sail!

Cathy & Pedro

Chapter 1

Leslie´s First Adventure

Leslie Binnacle is a barnacle and a very special

barnacle at that. Leslie, like most barnacles, is

neither male nor female, boy nor girl, man nor woman. Leslie Binnacle is both! But this does not make Leslie special because most barnacles are both male and female. What makes this barnacle special is where it goes and what it sees and what happens to it along the way.

First, let us start from the very beginning of Leslie’s life. Since Leslie Binnacle was both a boy and a girl, we will refer to Leslie as she because she has he written into its spelling. That way we will know and remember in this case that she means both boy and girl, which is what Leslie Binnacle the Barnacle was.

Leslie’s parents were barnacles that had attached themselves to a piling, a large wooden pole that held up one end of a dock. From their dock, on a busy river in Savannah, Georgia, known as the Savannah River, Leslie’s parents saw many large ships go up and down the river on their way to and from the Atlantic Ocean. While tied up to the docks, the ships’ cargos from faraway countries would be unloaded and then reloaded with cargo from the United States. Then off they would steam to deliver their cargo to other ports.

Leslie’s parents watched longingly as the giant ships came and went.

While the ships tied up to the dock on their home piling, they talked, in barnacle language of course, to the barnacles attached to the ships. They listened intently as a ship’s barnacle told them of all the places she had been and all the things she had seen.

Leslie’s parents always wished they had attached themselves to a ship rather than an old piling that never went anywhere, so they decided to encourage their

offspring to try a life different from their own and, above all, not to attach themselves to a

piling in the Savannah River!

When the time came to mate,

Leslie’s parents did just that. Even though they were both male and female, they exchanged their male parts with each other and

combined them with their female

parts inside their bodies to

create more little barnacles, many, many more little

barnacles. When the time came for Leslie to leave the body of her parent, she did so with about 12,999

others. Can you imagine having 12,999 brother-sisters?

Well, Leslie did! And as they were leaving, their parents kept repeating, "Swim away, our offspring, with our blessings. Go far away from these

pilings, for a life of great adventure.

Attach to a turtle, a whale, a ship, a piece of driftwood, anything that moves and not to a piling!!!"

Leslie did not know what they meant but decided to remember what her parents said anyway. What did attach mean and what exactly did they mean by a ship, a turtle, or a whale or, for that matter, a piece of drift wood anyway? She just knew she had no intention of settling down!

Now that Leslie Binnacle’s life had begun, she did not look like the barnacle you and I know as a hard-shelled domed white crustacean. She looked weird. As a nauplius larva, she looked like a swimming cyclops because she had only one eye right between her first pair of antennae. She had a second pair of antennae that were shorter than the ones with the eye between them. She also had four pairs of legs she used to swim and move through the water. Two hard shells shaped like half circles covered her soft body parts.

In other words, Leslie Binnacle became the strangest looking barnacle you have ever seen! Leslie and her 12,999 brother-sisters quickly set about to begin their lives. They swam not only with one another but also with the 13,000 offspring from each adult barnacle attached to that piling in the Savannah River.

With all the adult barnacles releasing their offspring at the same time, there were millions of little swimming barnacle larvae everywhere. There were so many in fact, they turned the water cloudy!

Before too long the currents swept them away from the dock pilings and their parents. It did not matter to Leslie one little bit, she enjoyed swimming up and down, sideways, forwards, and backwards. She just could not imagine how her parents had let themselves become attached to that piling when swimming delighted her so very much. How boring their lives must have been!

No sooner than Leslie Binnacle thought those very thoughts, she caught something out of the corner of her eye that would soon change her mind. A giant school of tiny fish with one bright stripe down their sides surrounded her, her friends, and her brother-sisters.

Somehow Leslie Binnacle, the Almost Barnacle,

knew that this could

not be a good

situation. She

looked about

for a way to escape but did

not see a

break in

the wall of

fish.

Then, as if by a silent command, the tiny fish all at once started swimming through the mass of larval barnacles. The fish were everywhere. The dwarf herring sucked Leslie and her brother-sisters and friends into their mouths since they were tiny planktonic organisms, the fishes’ favorite food.

Leslie panicked. She swam upwards right into another herring coming straight at her. So, she

reversed course and swam downwards only to hit another herring on the back. Its dorsal fin proved to be the perfect place to hang and seemed to be the safest