In 2011, sculptor Bill Hunt submitted a proposal for a piece of permanent public art to the Oak Harbor Arts Commission. It was a harbor seal family on a bed of kelp. The Commission rejected it and asked for something more memorable. Hunt gave them just that. In 2015 his new sculpture was unveiled: a monstrous Pacific octopus in a stormy ocean, attacking the submarine Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
The octopus is made of hammered copper, the Nautilus is steel, the ocean is painted cement that had to be repainted when its original color turned out to be not ominous enough. Hunt designed it so that one octopus tentacle appears to have snaked under the pavement to emerge several feet away, wrapping itself around a pole at a pedestrian crosswalk.
The Oak Harbor Arts Commission is pleased with sculpture. Oak Harbor's mayor is not, citing the town's adjacent U.S. Navy base as a reason not to have public art of a monster dragging down a submarine. But he was outvoted; the monster will stay.
