Phil the Flying Shark

I'm not a huge bragger; I don't find joy in bragging about things that I have or so on. In fact, despite being a generally happy person, I feel a bit awkward whenever I talk about things that make me happy.

I'm going to break that habit for a moment, however, to explain how incredibly stoked I am about my new pet flying shark.

Sorry for the low quality - cell phone cameras, y'know.

Sometime last November my aunt called us to chat with my mom, as they do occasionally, and in that conversation she mentioned something called 'Air Swimmers'. I don't know exactly what my aunt said, but my mom mentioned the name and turned pointedly towards me, asking if I'd ever heard of them. As is usually the case on a week-day evening, I had a computer in my lap, so after telling mom that, no, I didn't know what an Air Swimmer was, I decided to google the phrase.

The first result was the Air Swimmer website. You can easily tell what they are just by seeing the pictures that pop up, but I was in a good mood, and thus a bit overdramatically shocked by what I was seeing. In a state of denial, I clicked to watch the product video.



If you didn't watch the video here are the highlights: THE FISH FLY.

Imagine me sitting there, watching this video with my hands over my mouth because of how amazed I was, while my mom tried to simultaneously hold a conversation with her sister and figure out what was wrong with me. When the video finished my mom, still on the phone, turned to ask me what they were, and all I could say to her was "THEY FLY, MOM. THEY'RE FLYING FISH."

Mom watched the video as well and seemed pretty amused, and when her conversation was finished she asked me, probably joking, if we should get one for Christmas (we were hosting the big family Christmas this winter, so we've been on the lookout for things to entertain everybody with). The obvious answer was "YES."

I was actually a bit shocked when mom seemed to be serious about the proposal. I guess she and my aunt had been talking about getting one for Christmas or something, because the next question she asked me was which one we should get.

This also seemed obvious to me: the shark. The flying clownfish looked nice and all, but who would want a flying clownfish when they could have a flying shark? The shark not only reminded me of Doctor Who's A Christmas Carol (appropriate, if we were going to be buying this for Christmas), but also of a friend of mine who has an affinity for sharks, and who would get a kick out of seeing it when she came home from school for Christmas break.

Unfortunately I never got to show off the shark to her. While we got the shark air swimmer timely enough, we realized we would need some quality grade helium to fly it with, and we never managed to get it filled in time for our Christmas weekend.

We did, as I mentioned in an earlier post, managed to get it filled in time for New Years Eve, though! My mom was organizing a big New Years Eve party at our church, and thought everyone would get a kick out of seeing our flying shark. She had it filled and assembled early in the day and handed it off to my dad to test out. At one point during the party, my mom asked the DJ to play the theme from Jaws while my dad flew the shark in from an open door, circled it around the room for a few minutes, and flew him back out again.

It was sometime soon after that when I realized the shark's name was Phil. Bored with the party, I ducked out towards the end to test the shark out for myself. After flying him around for a bit, it was easy to start feeling affectionate towards him (at least for me; I feel affection for a lot of inanimate objects). Somewhere between trying to figure out the controls and trying to stuff him, still filled with helium, into the passenger seat of my dad's truck, I started calling him Phil without even realizing it.

The controls for Phil are surprisingly intuitive. One thumb of the radio controller is a joystick labeled 'left' and 'right'; moving this joystick moves the tail, which will either turn in or, if used in quick succession, propel him forward. The other thumb is a joystick labeled 'rise' and 'dive'; moving this shifts a small weight on Phil's belly either forward or backward. While he's hovering the weight movement doesn't do much, but shifting the weight backward while he's moving causes his nose to poke upwards, the rest of the shark to follow.

When we got home from the New Year's Eve party, we placed Phil, tethered to the antennae of the controller, over the dining table in the kitchen. This proving to be in everyone's way, we moved him to the dining table in our front room, where he hovered for about a week.

We couldn't release the helium from Phil without risking a puncture in the material, so he's been slowly deflating since then, lowering until he was almost sitting on top of the table. We moved him around a bit more, to the hallway by our desktop computer, to a smaller table in our living room sitting area, and finally to my bedroom, where he now rests mostly on the floor.

I was surprised by how much Megabyte didn't seem to mind him.

I've been calling Phil my pet flying shark, and he really does feel like one, even if he is more boring than my cat (Megabyte at least cuddles and wakes me up in the middle of the night). I'm a bit sad to see him losing air, knowing one day he'll start wrinkling up and finally lie flat on the floor, to be put back in his box. I console myself with the knowledge that, come the next major party, I'll definitely be able to see my pet shark fly again.