About midnight
It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the catch of eleven people -- for , so far as can be ascertained , there were ten people in the second boat , and certainly these creatures gave no further signs of their presence off Sidmouth that day . The coast between Seaton and Budleigh Salterton was patrolled all that evening and night by four Preventive Service boats , the men in which were armed with harpoons and cutlasses , and as the evening advanced , a number of more or less similarly equipped expeditions , organised by private individuals , joined them . Mr. Fison took no part in any of these expeditions . About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of miles out at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth , and a lantern was seen waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down . The nearer boats at once hurried towards the alarm . The venturesome occupants of the boat -- a seaman , a curate , and two schoolboys -- had actually seen the monsters passing under their boat . The creatures , it seems , like most deep-sea organisms , were phosphorescent , and they had been floating , five fathoms deep or so , like creatures of moonshine through the blackness of the water , their tentacles retracted and as if asleep , rolling over and over , and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the south-east .