A Shark’s Best Friend

The comic strip “Sherman’s Lagoon” appears in more than 150 daily newspapers in 20 countries and six languages. Since 1991, fans have followed the oddball cast of anthropomorphic sea creatures who inhabit the seabed around a fictional South Pacific archipelago. The cast of characters is led by Sherman, the dim-witted great white shark, and includes Sherman’s bossy wife, Megan; nerdy best friend, Ernest; bachelor-father sea turtle, Fillmore; scheming hermit crab, Hawthorne, and other aquatic critters. They inhabit a world that lampoons the human experience with an outsider’s view – one that views humans as “beach apes,” and there’s no pasta on the menu for a character craving “something Italian” for dinner.

“Sherman’s Lagoon” delivers the gags, pop-culture references, and easy laughs readers expect from a serialized comic strip. But its creator doesn’t shy away from hot-button issues. Creator Jim Toomey’s fascination with the undersea world began as a child – when an aerial view of an island chain forever changed his way of thinking – and he’s pursued the boating lifestyle as an adult to stay closer to the undersea world he cherishes.

In 2015, Toomey, his wife, Valerie, and their two children, Madeleine, 12, and William, 9, embarked on a two-year cruise in a Lagoon 450 sailing catamaran (of course!) sailing more than 12,000 miles, visiting 32 countries and territories along southwestern Europe and the Mediterranean, before crossing the Atlantic to island hop the Caribbean and U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Toomey chronicled the once-in-a-lifetime family voyage in an aptly named travel memoir, “Family Afloat.” BoatU.S. Magazine caught up with Toomey to chat about “Sherman’s Lagoon” and the challenges and rewards of unplugged family life at sea.

BOATU.S.: Jim, you didn’t grow up in a boating family. How did you find your way into the boating lifestyle?

TOOMEY: My father was a retired Navy pilot and experienced aviator. So on family trips, instead of piling into a boat or station wagon, we’d pile into a single-engine airplane, and my dad would fly us to offbeat places. Those improvised family adventures inspired me to do more improvised travel as an adult, and boating was the perfect vehicle for it.

A move to San Francisco in my late 20s set it in motion. I joined the Olympic Circle Sailing Club in Berkeley and took my first Basic Keelboat lessons there in a J/24. I flunked my first on-the-water exam but, ever the optimist, persevered. Sailing on San Francisco Bay is a crash course in boating, no pun intended. On any day in the bay, you’ll encounter high winds, heavy seas, fast-moving commercial traffic, strong currents, and lots of right-of-way encounters with powerboats, sailboats, fishing boats, and ferries. I loved it. Now, many years later, I look back on a lifetime of travel and know that a boat took me to most of the special places I’ve been.

You’ve said these childhood family flying trips later helped inspire “Sherman’s Lagoon” as an adult?

We’d fly away to some far-flung destinations. On one of those Cessna flying trips, to the Bahamas, I developed a fascination for the ocean and got an idea for a comic strip at age 12. I’d never seen the ocean the way I saw it there. The water was shallow and crystal clear, and because we were flying low, I could make out the details of the seafloor. I saw hills and valleys, meadows and forests – all underwater. I realized that the ocean – fully 70% of our planet – had as much texture and detail as any land environment.

I could also see animals swimming in this magical seascape – manta rays, sea turtles, schools of fish. As we flew over a lagoon, I could clearly make out a shark, its dark body against the light sandy bottom. The image of that shark stayed with me, and eventually I populated that lagoon with imaginary sea creatures – a sea turtle, a hermit crab, and so on.

I was living in San Francisco when I developed the comic strip and named all the characters – Sherman, Fillmore, and Hawthorne – after San Francisco streets. Megan, Sherman’s wife, was the one exception; she’s named after Megalodon, the prehistoric shark. In a way, “Sherman’s Lagoon” is just a fish story that grew more outrageous with time.

“Sherman’s Lagoon” continues to be an enduring hit. How do you keep it fresh?

In many comic strips, even the wildly popular ones, there are frequently recurring setups. Lucy always pulls the football before Charlie Brown can kick it. Calvin is always drifting in or out of a fantasy about dinosaurs or space aliens. These setups make the strip more enjoyable because they deliver exactly what the reader wants, but they still deliver enough surprise to make the reader laugh.

I don’t have much of a formula, for better or worse. I’m constantly reaching for new story lines, many of them based on ocean oddities. I might send my characters to explore the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or attend the Christmas Island Hermit Crab Stampede. I might bring in real ocean animals that I discovered on the internet, like the headless chicken monster or the wandering meatloaf. These are real sea animals! The ocean is an endless source of fun and inspiration for me, and many sea animals seem to have come to earth already in cartoon form.

I’m constantly looking for ocean-related stories to use in the strip. Sometimes they’re about environmental issues. For example, a few years back I drew a series on shark finning – the practice of catching sharks, slicing off the valuable fins that are used to make shark-fin soup, and throwing the finned, still-living shark back in the ocean to die. It’s cruel and wasteful, and I saw the comic strip – with its shark characters – as the ideal platform for building public awareness of this issue.

When that series ran, I created a Sunday cartoon that encouraged readers to draw their favorite shark and mail it to the National Marine Fisheries Service, which was at the time trying to convince Congress to create a law to stop the sale of shark fins in the U.S. NMFS received about 5,000 cartoons in the mail, which, they said, helped plead their case. The law eventually passed, and I like to think Sherman played a small role in that story. Since then, I’ve taken on other environmental issues such as climate change, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, and destructive bottom trawling. I frequently work with NOAA and many nonprofits on storylines and ideas.

You’ve used this platform to advocate for environmental conservation and keep it funny. How do you keep that balance?

I prioritize. I put ocean threats into two general categories: problems we can address today and bigger, long-term problems that require collective action and more complex solutions. We can change our eating habits today. Some seafood is being harvested sustainably and some isn’t. We can educate ourselves about sustainable fishing and contribute to that solution starting with our next meal.

Single-use plastics, like water bottles and grocery bags, can end up in the ocean where they contaminate and kill animals. As consumers, we can use less plastic starting now. Overfishing and plastic pollution are two big ocean threats that we can turn around quickly with more public awareness. My characters tell these stories with subtlety, humor, and humanity.

From weekend sailors to a liveaboard family adventure

A 22-month cruise through unfamiliar waters is a challenge for any skipper. How did you and Valerie transform from self-described “weekend sailors” to competent bluewater captains?

To rent a sailboat at my San Francisco sailing club, I had to pass a few courses including Basic Keelboat, Basic Cruising, Coastal Navigation, and Coastal Passage Making. Later, when Valerie and I were living in Annapolis, Maryland, I joined a program offered by the U.S. Naval Academy that trains adults to help with teaching hundreds of midshipmen the basics of seamanship. That was the extent of my formal training.

Our kids were young, we had a lot of job demands, and didn’t have much time for boating. Prior to those hectic days, we owned a sail catamaran for a couple of years, kept it in a charter fleet in Puerto Rico, and used it every few months. We explored the Spanish Virgin Islands, still one of the best-kept secrets in cruising. Before then, Valerie had virtually no boating experience, and I was strictly a weekend sailor. We didn’t really get good at setting an anchor, sailing in rough weather, standing a night watch, and many other cruising basics until we bought Sacre Bleu, a Lagoon 450 catamaran, and set off on our extended cruise.

On a small boat in a big ocean, there are family dynamics happening on many levels. How did you all make out together over your two-year cruise?

For the kids, their two years cruising allowed them to grow and learn at their own pace without the distractions and pressures of social media, video games, television, and other electronics. We gave the kids some independence, such as letting them operate the dinghy by themselves. They quickly developed confidence that extended into other parts of their lives. They had to create their own entertainment. If something broke, they had to fix it with the limited supplies around them. There was no internet, no shopping mall, no fast food.

They both learned to cook because it was the only way they could eat what they wanted. Madeleine threw herself into art, and with the art supplies we had onboard, taught herself kirigami [a variation of origami that includes cutting of the paper], knitting, watercolor, and more. William developed a love for building. He eventually got bored with his Lego kits and began to mix and match pieces and improvise structures. He taught himself ukulele and piano. Boredom is an underrated gift for children; faced with a lot of time and no easy distractions, they’re forced to use their imaginations.

Life on the ocean brought random gifts. One day, sailing off the coast of Spain, we found ourselves being escorted by a pod of pilot whales. The kids sat on the bow directly over these big animals as they huffed and puffed and swam in front of the boat. The whales eventually took off, but the kids remained on the bow staring at the water, mesmerized by their close encounter with nature. The curiosity they developed that day has stayed with them.

On the other hand, all that together time can bring its own stress within the small confines of the boat. We each found a way to establish our own space when we wanted to be alone – a skill that came in handy when Covid lockdown confined us all to the house. Family meals on the boat were different from meals at home; there were no distractions, so all four of us could talk about the experiences we shared as a family.

Now that you’ve been home awhile, what’s your boating life now?

Sacre Bleu was the perfect boat for our purposes at the time – coastal and offshore cruising – but her mast is 75 feet, too high to pass under most bridges in the eastern U.S. We sold her after we ended the cruise and got a 36-foot Windsor Craft picnic boat that we take out on day trips, sometimes with the kids, sometimes with friends. We’re shopping for a new sail catamaran to replace Sacre Bleu.

Do you and your family have more boating adventures planned?

We look forward to going on more overnight adventures on the Chesapeake Bay and beyond. The Chesapeake is a wonderful place, and there are many destinations that we visit regularly, like St. Michaels and Oxford, and some that are still on our bucket list, like Tangier Island.

Now that both our kids are off to college, we’re empty nesters. That frees us up to try more ambitious cruises, maybe back in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, maybe elsewhere. We loved all the places we visited on our 2015-17 cruise, but two stood out: the Cyclades Islands of Greece and the Bahamas. Both were magical, and the best way to see them is by boat