The girl sees her father drive up to the dock. Her mother has been dead, from cancer, for a while. It’s been two years since she’s seen her father. He looks at the waters now, thinking of his own father who went insane from being out at sea. Since then, he has refused the water, though his daughter is drawn to it. She tells him that her things are still on the ship. He thinks about how it became that she turned out to be an explorer. While other daughters went out and got married, she has been restlessly traveling through the ocean, writing letters back.

The girl is on the deck, as land comes in. She smells this port, which is miles away from her home’s. She longs for deep waters again, wondering why everyone was pulled in here. She is told that it was engine problems. She feels at fault someone. For years, she has been confused by the ocean.

The girl tells her father the name of the boat, a European name which he despises. He wonders why she pledged herself to the thing which made his own father fearful. As they drive, the wind comes in. He thinks about how, as a kid, she looked out of his window, toward the sea.

All the girl cares about the sea. Now, she’s back on the ship’s deck, to be with the water. Her job is to study the deep sea and how it has been affected by mining. She has been supported by her university to travel, and now she’s on a ship with mostly Frenchmen to continue her work. The sea awakens her. She smells a strange smell. In the water, she makes out a mass which jerks around and arises like a limb. She thinks she’s losing her mind.

At home, the girl and her father sit at the dinner table. They don’t talk about much. She asks him if he needs anything. He asks for water. She gets up and grabs it. Without her mother, the conversations have become much lonelier.

On the deck, the girl can’t explain the thing with the limb coming out of the sea. Every morning, she sees it. It watches her as she watches it. By sunrise, it disappears. She wonders if it has something to do with all the mining. Eventually, she makes out its bodies, how its filled with things from the ocean. Back on the ship, she hardly talks to her crew. She feels like the thing with the limb is singling her out.

At home, the girl is called a wild creature by her father. He can no longer see her as he used to. She says she likes doing what she does. Her father talks about his own father. She asks if he was overwhelmed. He says that the sea did something to him.

The boat approaches shore. Now, the girl has been seeing the thing with the limb much more vividly. On deck, she waits for it to appear. The shadows form, and she realizes that the thing with the limb looks just like her. The girl then floats above the deck, into the sky, but someone then opens a door onto the deck, yelling, and she falls. The day passes dream-like. One crewmember says, hushed, that it’s a sickness of the deep sea.

At home, the girl asks her father if the sea is really haunted. He says yes. She says the spirits may be good. He says they were cursed. She says her work is unburying something. The phone rings. Her father picks it up.

The ship anchors. The girl unloads with everyone else and tries to find her father to no avail. She calls him, but no one answers. Later, she gets into a car which takes her home. At home, the girl asks her father if he finally gets it, but he doesn’t. He remembers once seeing an ancient look on his father, which his daughter now has. The girl charges him and hugs him, speaking from no longer herself. Meanwhile, the girl in the car rushes back into her house and sees both her father and her clone floating in the air, with blue light. Her father is being strangled, incapacitated. She grabs at the clone, and both fall down. The clone disappears. She, the real her, holds her father.

The next day, the ship keeps going. The girl and her father drive to shore, back to the deck. He approves of her going, even when she apologizes. He asks her about the sea. She tells him everything she knows. She feels everything in the water. She leaves for it, again.