Whale Vomit

What is one whale’s vomit is another woman’s perfume.

At least, that's what I learned growing up as a little tike with a scuba diving family in Hawaii. I learned at age ten that if whale vomit floats on the ocean long enough, it becomes a perfume -- expensive perfume at that.

My father would run check-out dives on the weekends. And during one of those diving trips, he recovered whale vomit off the Maui Channel. Having been told that perfume was made of sperm whale vomit, I picked it up and sniffed its sweet smell. It was such a bizarre story that I've always remembered it. My family never acted on cashing in on the rather petrified gray matter. Like so many other things in life, we interacted with it and let it slip by.

But judging from this story about an Australian couple and the riches a single regurgitation of whale vomit brought them, my family could have been rich too – if only we had sold that lump of gray floating rock. If only...