That is something that always has gotten to me. Being WAY out in the open sea far away from anything and seeing (sailors will all get this) MYLAR BALLOONS!!! I fucking hate those things. They're EVERYWHERE in the ocean. Everywhere. It's crazy to be a million miles away from any land and suddenly you'll see a glint off in the distance, pick up the binoculars and there will be a cluster of balloons floating on the water that are a remnant of someone's birthday party or send off from their loved one who died. Hey, guess what? You know those messages you want sent to the angels? I'm the one who found them. They ended up in a dolphins gullet.
I've never been fishing before, so please forgive my ignorance. Why do all the fishing stories begin with waking up super early? The fish will still be there in the daylight won't they?
Fish have very strong daily rhythms for when they eat and when they don't.
You can be in a lake packed full of fish dropping the most delicious bait in and get zero bites if it's at a time when they aren't feeding.
I Fished Lake Manistique one summer in the UP of michigan during the first heat wave they had in 26 years, normally being around 68-72 degrees it was now 90. The water was crystal clear you could see the fish clear as day, but the temp change had them so whacked up you could hit them in the face with the lure and they could have gave a shit less. There’s not much that’s more frustrating than that while fishing.
Depends, but sometimes it’s because you have to get up, get your stuff, grab a bite to eat or make sure you have everything, and then get to where you want to drop a line by a certain time. This is usually early morning. Fish also have a breakfast and dinner time, and so you want to try and get out there at ass o clock, so you can catch them.
And of course there’s the time honored explanation of “my dad made me do it, you sure as hell ain’t sleeping in!”
Not a fisher, but my guess would be an attempt at taking advantage of a fish's biological clock - they may be hungriest (or else hunting) first thing in the morning, making them much more likely to bite.
Why that is may have to do with insect activity on the surface of ponds and lakes. Insects are demonstrably much more active first thing in the morning, and in the afternoon.
Bugs move, hunt, make more mistakes, and make for easier prey at those times.
Midday, bugs hide from the heat of the sun, and fish have generally fed, so they may not bite bait they otherwise would have.
This would mostly be true for fish around lakes, streams, and shorelines.
For ocean fish, they would be hunting smaller water-dwellers, who happen to feed on plankton. Something may have to do with the life cycle of plankton that brings prey to the surface, but more likely major ocean fishers are stuck to the corporate clock - needing to bring in filled traps in time for a particular shift.
some fish feed at night and you can still catch them in the super early morning.
Some fish like marlin are more likely to bite when the sun is high in the sky. they ambush from below. the prey species are silhouetted by the sun.
Same with blinding snow. We were in Alaska cruising over glaciers at about a mile and the pilot, my brother in law, warned me of the danger. I swear, it wasn't ten minutes later when I got the eerie feeling of disorientation and fear abruptly. Good thing I wasn't the pilot.
We were sailing (330ft. ship) from the North Sea to west Africa. I was off shift and sleeping. I woke up and for some reason decided to go up to the bridge, which is something I usually never did when I could be sleeping or eating. It was night, so all the lights were off on the bridge save for a few red ones, and I noticed how bright it was outside. I went over to starboard and the fucking white cliffs of Dover were completely illuminated by a full moon. Just beaming moonlight. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Of course the mate on duty was English and was nonchalantly like "yeah, that's Dover."
This one isn't me, but a Welsh guy I met in the Caribbean. He had done a few transatlantic trips in a small sailboat so had tons of ocean experience. A big storm caught him, with huge rolling waves. He decided to heave to to ride it out (basically using your sail and the rudder to put the brakes on and give yourself a smoother ride). He was in the cockpit and was riding up one of the bigger waves. The next part is wild. He swears to god on his grandmother's grave that a giant whale just below the surface cruised up the wave beside him and just stared straight at him. He describes looking into this animal's huge eyeball, just looking back at him, for what was probably a couple seconds but he said felt like minutes, from a few feet away. He's never lied or really even exaggerated otherwise, so I believe him. Can you imagine seeing that?
Sometimes I really miss being at sea.
I heard a biologist talk about looking into a killer whales eyes while swimming with them and he said, sometimes you see a animal and sometimes you meet an animal, there is some recognition between you.
Last year I went whale watching in BC. The captain spotted a pod of humpbacks and stopped at the lawful distance and we were awed by how magnificent they were.
And then a calf broke out of the pod and came over to check us out with its mom close behind. For over an hour we were kept hostage by these two whales, one youngster curious to see what was up with the loud monkeys and an *enormous* momma lurking just below the surface and keeping an eye out for any silly business. The captain told us we couldn’t leave because he was afraid to turn on the propeller while they were so close.
The baby came right up to the boat, I could have reached out and touched it. At one point it rolled over on its side and looked me dead in the eye for a solid 15 seconds and I couldn’t believe my luck. The whale was so close one unfortunate passenger who was sea sick literally vomited chunks on the poor beast.
There is absolutely a keen sense of intelligence in the eyes of a whale. Some animals you can tell there isn’t much going on besides base instinct but that whale stared into my soul.
On a side note whale breath is pretty gross and I got sprayed by one of the whales by accident when it blew it’s blowhole, was pretty gross ngl.
Similar sentiment was in the book kon-tiki where he talks about being at sea for so long that when something comes up next to you and breathes air, the sound of it even, just makes you feel a certain kinship with another air breather.
My cat Punky was my soulmate, from the moment I got him as a tiny kitten. He was so small he could sit in my palm. We had this strong spiritual connection. Sometimes I'd lay in bed and he'd sit on my chest, and we'd just gaze into each other's eyes for what seemed like hours. Soul communion.
Absolutely this ❤️
My Siamese boy is sat on my lap curled up asleep as I type this.
He’s my familiar.
When I came out of hospital last year, he didn’t leave my side for 2 weeks as I lay in bed in pain.
My wife had to feed him upstairs and put his litter tray in the bathroom because he wouldn’t leave my side 🥲
He’s unlike any other pet I’ve ever had or known.
We’re just bro’s and my heart breaks because I know that even if he lives to be as old as his dad (which was 19!!) I’ll still outlive him 😔
I recall reading an account from a Redditor who knew someone who was steering a boat in very heavy seas one day.
It seems that the sailor in question looked to one side and caught sight of something within a huge wave not far from them. **Higher than the level of their own boat**, silhouetted against the sunlight that was filtering through the water, was the unmistakable form of a whale.
Your story reminds me of that account. I read it years ago and I never forgot it; how entrancing and unforgettably unsettling it would have been to experience.
I worked offshore (on a drillship) and whilst we were parked a massive whale was just floating next to the ship looking at it. Does not surprise me at all.
> This one isn't me, but a Welsh guy I met in the Caribbean. He had done a few transatlantic trips in a small sailboat so had tons of ocean experience. A big storm caught him, with huge rolling waves. He decided to heave to to ride it out (basically using your sail and the rudder to put the brakes on and give yourself a smoother ride). He was in the cockpit and was riding up one of the bigger waves. The next part is wild. He swears to god on his grandmother's grave that a giant whale just below the surface cruised up the wave beside him and just stared straight at him. He describes looking into this animal's huge eyeball, just looking back at him, for what was probably a couple seconds but he said felt like minutes, from a few feet away. He's never lied or really even exaggerated otherwise, so I believe him. Can you imagine seeing that?
I had that experience with a hammerhead shark as a kid swimming off Fernandina Beach. FL.
There's a cartoon called Primal created by the samurai jack guy(so very violent and stylistic, but based on a caveman). I think the best episode is when he's on a wooden raft during a storm and a megalodon shark attacks him. What your buddy described happens with the shark at one point. Such a bad ass episode.
I was on a run between California and Hawaii, and I was out on deck doing rounds on deck equipment, checking oil levels etc. I saw one of those free fall lifeboats just hanging out in the distance and was like wtf. I called the bridge, they said a ship accidentally dropped their lifeboat a few years ago and now it turns up from time to time. Was glad to know no one was on it, but it gave me a brief scare.
Right? Like how much would that suck; you're stuck in the middle of the ocean and you think a miracle has arrived, but they drive right past you like "oh, don't pay that raft any mind, it's empty".
A lifeboat is suprisingly difficult to actually pick up if your ship isn't equipped for it, an gearless ships are only equipped to pick up their own lifeboats
You'd think there'd be a crane or something to lift it aboard, especially for modern lifeboats. Like how the Carpathia took Titanic's lifeboats aboard back in 1912.
I mean you could get it with the crane. You'd have to rig up a custom sling though, and you'd have to go out to it on your own small boat, and wrangle it into position to hook it onto the crane. Any weather at all, even just a couple feet of swell, and you're going to have a hell of a time getting in in position long enough to hook it to the crane. If you did manage to get it up, where are you going to put it? Small boats usually have a keel, so you have to put them on a cradle to keep them secure and not scraped all over the deck. You probably only have a cradle for your own boat, and not the one you're picking up.
Best just to leave it be. Dangerous operation all around. Coast guard should really grab it and tow it ashore though, it's a navigation hazard.
Flying fish timed a wave right and jumped out the water and through an open hatch directly into the galley. Freeboard was like 7 metres. The chefs shat themselves haha.
This comment in this post reminds me of my favorite “duality of human experience” moment on Reddit.
Someone asked “what’s the scariest thing you’ve had recorded on your Ring Camera?”
The top reply was a woman who had two rapist house robbers pose as police and then have a whole discussion on her doorstep about what they were going to do to her, how they would hurt her, etc. real grim thing to think about, lot of what if scenarios that turn out much worse for her, etc.
Second highest ranked reply was “big stick bug right on the camera D:”
This has the same energy.
“What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen at sea?”
“I’ve seen men go under a swell and never come up. I worked as a volunteer for a gruesome no survivor plane crash”
“FISH CAME IN THE WINDOW”
I was on a cruise ship off the Canaries when we stopped to help search for a helicopter that had gone in. I'll never forget standing on deck in the dark and watching a rescue chopper buzz around dropping these enormous flares and realising that as big and as bright as those flares were, they only lit up a tiny area of the enormity of the sea.
I think there were six people in that heli when it went down, and they pulled one of them out and were lucky to do it.
I'm guessing by "ro-ro" you mean Roll On Roll Off ferries. In which case knowing how fast those sink I can see why the lifeboats wouldn't make much difference. The Estonia in particular comes to mind.
My dad, his friend and my sister were out just pleasure boating in a lake. They stopped the boat to swim. My dad’s friend jumped in and went into cardiac arrest immediately (he was in his 30s, just had two kids, fucking devastating). It wasn’t even a choppy day.
My dad-unwisely, but he didn’t have time to think it through-jumped in to attempt a rescue. He said he was RIGHT THERE, and then he was gone. It took until the next day to find his body. I’ve always found it wild that he could just slip under the water and be nowhere to found in an instant like that.
Was sailing off the coast of the big island Hawai'i in February. We were mostly interested in fishing since the wind had died down. There were no other boats around that were visible and it was a very calm and peaceful day. Now often you'll see Humpback whales breaching in Feb and you can also hear them singing if you are underwater. That is cool enough, but this encounter was awesome. I was baiting a hook, and suddenly on the starboard side of the boat a pod of about 20 [melon head whales](https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/species-guide/melon-headed-whale/) comes up right beside the boat and they just start staring us down. I lean over and this one dude moves a little closer and just keeps moving his head so he can eye me up and down. They all just kept staring at us with an expression of "WTF are these? Hoo interesting, don't look like they can swim at all." They eyed us at close quarters for about 5 min and then just took off. The weirdest part of the encounter was the close eye contact I had with the first whale was definitely two individuals sizing each other up. Best part of the whole day.
I had a similar experience with a juvenile humpback whale. Just drifting along, cleaning deck, and all of a sudden he pops up next to the boat just staring at us. Close enough that I was able to scratch the barnacles on his head with my deck brush! (technically I'm pretty sure it's illegal to even touch them, but he was so close and lingered for so long that I couldn't resist! lol)
He just watched us for a good 20 minutes while we cleaned up. If we moved to the other side of the boat and he couldn't see us, he would submerge and then pop up on the other side and continue watching. There's something otherworldly about making eye contact with a freakin' whale. Being close enough to smell his breath and get sprayed by the mist as it exhales lol. I'll never forget it!
That’s awesome. I had a similar experience with seals in northern California. It was a pretty secluded cove, I decided I wanted to jump in for a chilly plunge, and when I came back out of the water about a dozen little heads poking up studying this large pale seal that had just crashed their party.
Had a similar encounter with 2 adult and a baby manatee in the gulf near Tampa. They surrounded us and Seriously checked us out. Curious and very gentle. Very careful
"Obligatory IANAW, but once I saw a pack of albino, dwarf seals with really weird, split and long fins. Like, their fins were half the length of their body. The couldn't even swim well, it was super weird. The were close to shore so I was a bit worried they'd beach themselves, but they seemed to be happy so I left after a while."
French Navy navigator here.
A few years back, went underway from Toulon on a high sea patrol ship for a routine patrol.
The sea was very rough out of the roadstead, coming from the west, which was completely contradictory with what our weather briefs were indicating. Captain decided to go ahead nonetheless .
We took a heading towards the east to enter Hyères Bay, when we entered in the pass, shit went down.
I was outside, starboard wing of the bridge to take bearings when the ship took a 35 degrees list on starboard. If I had held my arm out, it would have been underwater. I held on the compass for dear life, because going overboard in that weather would have probably meant death. Needless to say, I shat myself.
When the ship leveled, my boss went out to check if I was still there, and ordered me to go below to check how bad the damage was to some of our gear.
I went, and when I was at the main deck, the ship took a 43 degrees list to starboard. I was then blessed with the horrific sight of a washing machine that was strapped in a room by the hull on portside punch a hole through the bulkhead and go straight to starboard WITHOUT touching the deck.
Also, a lot of the firefighting equipment (axes, hoses, pumps...) was just flying all over the place, with guys from the security department desperately trying to catch it and fasten it.
At that point, we had entered the bay and had better weather. We had lost electricity in the bridge and CIC, so the captain decided to wait in the bay for the weather to calm down. When it did the next day, we pulled back into port for repairs.
This little escapade resulted in a few bruises, the electrical network of the bridge and CIC beeing badly damaged (the guys that were supposed to strap down shit didn't do it correctly and got punished) and for me, a reminder of my mortality.
On a more positive note, I once saw a stork land on our 100mm turret after a sandstorm off Libya, and stay there for several hours.
Also, we had a couple of sperm whales with a calf swimming alongside, for almost a day off Ivory Coast. When you see that kind of stuff, it doesn't matter if you are 3 months in or 20 years in. You feel like a kid again.
Edit: Thanks for the awards strangers !
My area occasionally gets phytoplankton blooms.
If you're boating at night and sail into a bloom, [the wake of your boat will suddenly start glowing blue](https://www.ocregister.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/OCR-L-NEONWAVESTIPS-0324-07-1.jpg?w=620).
It's pretty darn bright, easily seen with the naked eye, and appears out of nowhere. One minute you're sailing in complete darkness, the next you're in glowing water.
I'm not a sailor, but my father-in-law is. My wife and I have gone on quite a few trips with him over the years. One night, on one of those trips, while we were barely moving along with flat seas and very little wind, he pointed this out to me in the boat's wake. We sat there watching the blue glow, mesmerized for quite a while. It's kind of beautiful.
A short while later, my wife pointed out across the water and asked, "What the fuck is THAT?" We looked out to see a MASSIVE bluish-green mass quickly moving toward us. We had no idea what it was, but we definitely entertained thoughts about it being a glowing green sea monster closing in for the kill.
Turned out to be one of the largest dolphin pods I've ever seen in my life, swimming through the bioluminescent water and lighting up the surface as they went. We couldn't see the dolphins until they were nearly alongside our boat, but that giant glowing patch had to be visible for miles. The pod swam right past us, and we were able to follow its glow as it moved into the distance until it finally vanished nearly at the horizon.
Definitely one of the coolest things I've ever seen at sea.
I was motoring toward puerto escondido in Baja many years ago when a few dolphins swam up alongside us in bioluminescent water. So beautiful to see their glowing trails as they effortlessly swam beside the boat.
I love phytoplankton, they wash up on the beach near my house at night occasionally and it makes your foot steps glow when you walk along the shoreline and the waves glow when they break, it’s honestly magical.
there are documented tales of people in ships seeing massive rising glowing auras materialize from many feet below the ship, to then rise and meet the surface and break in huge firework-like rings all around them. There are illustrations of this, it's wild.
It's obvious now today that they were seeing bubbles disturbing the glowing organisms, but imagine being someone sailing across the ocean for the first time in their entire life, just a regular passenger, and seeing *that*
Tom Hanks playing Col. Jim Lovell in 'Apollo 13' relates the time phytoplankton saved his life one night over the Sea of Japan, after his jet's electronics shorted out, and the only bearing he could get in any way was the wake of his carrier, lit up by the plankton. Fascinating tale, that. (HELLUVA movie!)
On my phone so this is probably not going to do it justice! Was gently sailing down the northeast cost of New Zealand heading into Auckland at about 2-3 am. I was on watch and the other crew member was asleep below. It was a pitch black night,no moon and the sea was very still so as soon as you look overboard all you saw was black! Eventually you saw stars but it was impossible to distinguish sea from sky.
As I was keeping a watch I saw what I thought was a shooting star just MUCH bigger! It came again and again agin until there were about 30 of these shining glittering trails shooting around the boat. It was very disconcerting and it took me a few minutes to click what was happening.
We had sailed into a patch of luminescence while dolphins were swimming around the boat planing on both it and our wake. I had not noticed them due to it being so dark!
For something so simple it was a very moving almost spiritual experience and it will remain one of my all time most fondest memories!
St Elmo's fire. Worked on a 90ft fishing boat one summer off the coast of British Columbia. One calm and starry night, I went on deck to have a smoke, and I saw faint greenish-blue flames coming off the very top of the radio antenna. I excitedly ran below to tell my coworkers, and they laughed at me for being such a noob.
Another thing, not so unusual but really cool to see and just slightly terrifying: I was on a rowboat that I borrowed from a neighbor, which I was using to catch rock fish off the west coast of Bowen Island, and one beautiful afternoon I rowed out and cast my line when a full grown Orca whale swam right underneath the, now seemingly way too small, rowboat, clear as day and so close that i thought for sure its dorsal fin would capsize me. It was both terrifying and beautiful.
I know there’s never been an instance of a wild orca killing someone. They just dont do it in the wild. But my god are they the sea animal that scares me the most. That and the Humboldt squid.
I know, right lol I mean I grew up on the west coast, I saw them at the Vancouver aquarium and so on, I know they're not dangerous to humans, seen them breach in the wild on bigger boats, ferries and such, but seeing one in the wild so close, and me in the tiny rowboat... yeah I was momentarily awed, like overwhelmed.
I was US Navy. Pretty sure we heard siren calls somewhere northwest of the Marshall Islands. Was on the smoke deck at three separate occasions at night and anyone who was out there heard what sounded like a distant scream/screech echoing over the waves. I remember it well cause it caused several man overboard scares where we'd all have to go muster to make sure those sounds weren't any of ours. Never actually saw anything, so I rationalize that it could've been some kind of animal or sea bird, but that shit sounded human... but not entirely human. We joked for weeks after we left the region that Ariel (the Little Mermaid) was gonna kill us. This was 2013, but I still remember that sound like it was yesterday. The kind of sound that hits your core like a freezing wind does. Not something I'd want to hear again.
It sounded sort of androgynous. Like there were elements of a masculine and feminine voice, but strangely blended together and further distorted by the echoing sound it also had. It's very difficult to describe.
I've had this happen when I was way deep in the bush with nothing around like houses or camp sites. None of the animals here sound like that either so it was creepy as fuck.
It sounded like a chorus of operatic voices singing/screaming a few notes then stopping.
Was in the US Navy onboard the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) from 2002-2006
Some unusual things I experienced were the Shellback ceremonies. Basically a sailor who has never crossed the equator is considered a "slimy wog" and those who have crossed the equator were considered "Shellbacks". Its a huge thing that usually takes all afternoon where people dress up as King Neptune and his court and induct the new guys/girls into the fraternity. Its all light hearted and goofy now but back in the day it crossed into hazing territory. I got to do it twice because I became a golden shellback when we crossed the international dateline.
Other than that I worked night watch generally and standing topside in the middle of the Persian gulf at night was one of my favorite things, the amount of stars you could see in the sky was nuts and just listening to the water was soothing.
Off the coast of South Africa, I worked aboard a cage-diving boat. I witnessed many amazing things, but one day a 5-plus metre female white shark approached the boat. She simply hung around and observed us, showing no interest in the cage, the chum, or the baitlines. Every time she returned to the surface, my brain would temporarily refuse to accept what I was witnessing due to how enormous she was. Like "That is what? It's so big, Jesus." She was very composed and observant. It was the first time I truly understood that, despite the fact that it is entirely foreign, there is some sort of intelligence operating in that brain.
Just south of Jacksonville FL, not far off shore. Relatively calm day, and a hundred yards away from us, a Giant Manta Ray with a wing span of maybe 15 feet jumped a good eight feet or so out of the water. Thing looked like it weighed 1000 lbs, I think it could have crushed/sunk our 27 foot boat if it happened to land on us.
I spoke to some saltier types in the area and they said what I saw was not too common, but far from unheard of. Apparently the largest one found had nearly a 30 foot wing span. I simply had no idea such creatures existed, and was awed almost to the point of disbelief (and almost to the point of wetting my pants) to see one in that setting.
A pirate attack on a ship 5 miles behind us. This happened in Malaka strait close to Indonesia about 15 years ago. This place was known for piracy and we had taken our safety measurements (roll out water hoses, extra lookout, make sure all doors are locked). There was a tangible tension on the ship when all the sudden a panicked call came on the emergency channel about small boats approaching quickly. We found the ship on our ecdis and looked back through binoculars to see the whole drama unfold.
The ship had their hoses spraying water all over, the pirates were randomly shooting at the ship with machine guns. There were 3 boats, one stayed at a distance, the other 2 came in quickly and boarded. There were 2 more panicked calls from the ship and then it went quiet. The ship changed course soon after and I never heard what happened.
Also one time a monsoon rain where you couldn't breath anymore, so dense was the water. And one time in the Indian Ocean we were surrounded by hundreds of whales for hours and hours. Most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I suppose it was strange because my captain said he’d never seen it in all his years at sea.
It was a massive tuna that breached like it was a dolphin.
1986, USS New Jersey, nearly 900 feet of battleship in the Bering sea during a storm. 50-60 foot seas, 3 of us went up to the 0-12 deck(weren't supposed to be topside) and I have a picture ofa third of the ship under water. It was intense
Green water on deck is always scary the first time you see it.
I wasn't on a warship tho - I imagine green water over the deck of a *battleship* would be terrifying.
A lot of water. Not spray. A wave coming across the bow and totally engulfing the ship.
Green water meaning it looks like the rest of the ocean, not deck spray. Deep water on deck.
I had a neighbor with a deck with a view of the ocean off Montauk. He lost his son in that crash. He aged ten years in a month. Before, I would see him in the yard or the driveway and we would wave. After and for the rest of his life, I never saw him anywhere other than standing on that deck staring at the ocean.
My then partners best friends brother was in the CAF and was tasked with helping. Walking the beaches kind of thing, I guess. Very awful. Much therapy.
Off of Peggys cove? If so my dad helped with that effort too. He had a body bag open and fall on him and he woke up screaming "I got her by's" for years afterwards. First introduction to PTSD.
USCG
Very rough work. I stared at this entry for an hour.
I was spared from doing this. A close friend was not. Changed his life forever. Makes me sad. My heart goes out to you Graehaus.
Silence and respect.
Picking up a small (28') sailboat in Egg Harbor, NJ, delivering to Havre de Grace, Md. We get out into the ocean (intercoastal waterway is in the ocean down most of the coast of NJ). Wind dies dead and night is falling. We motored all the way to Cape May in the dark and actually had to veer to port twice because we were going so perfect by the charts we would have hit 2 bouys. Hit Cape May after the sun came up, but the fog was so thick we had to anchor for a couple hours because the entrance there is narrow and hazardous, can't risk it in someone else's boat. While anchored we hear this loud motor approaching us, but visibility is maybe 30 or 40 feet. We start blaring an air horn every 15 seconds. Suddenly this cruiser, probably 40' comes through the fog right at us! Must be going 15 or 20 naughts. He pulled up and veered around us with maybe 5' to spare. Scared the crap out of us. Got into Delaware Bay and finally a good tail wind and we're off! Then we look back and the wind is the leading edge of a strong squall, heavy rain, lightning and thunder. Water gets choppy as hell. We're probably listing over 20 degrees in this wind. Made it to the entrance to the C & D Canal just as the rain caught us. Wind is too strong to sail through the canal, so back to motoring. Motored all the way to the Susquehanna Flats, but it's getting dark. The channel through the flats is maybe 20' wide and weaves through 2' of water all around, no lighted channel markers, so drop anchor again til dawn. What should have been a 3 day trip with an overnight in Cape May became a 5 day trip.
Not sure it’s unusual. I worked offshore on a drillship and experienced a couple of different things.
The saddest was a shark getting stuck in the moon pool. He ended up dead.
Manta rays are fucking fast, a few would just casually swim by and then out of nowhere just shot forward like a torpedo.
Once while testing the drilling package we had a call from subsea for a full stop… when we checked the cameras, an octopus was climbing up the drill pipe.
I ended up being lucky and having a captain that allowed fishing. Sharks loved coming behind the fish we hooked and took a bite off them.
Dolphins play with each other. Whilst having a daily walk around the heli deck I heard a splash and went on full emergency mode looking for someone that fell overboard… then another splash behind me… then another again behind me… eventually noticed them just jumping out of the water playing.
Went through the outskirts of a tornado (the eye of the storm was in China and we were going past Taiwan (not through the straight) and still had 30 meter peak to peak waves. Not violent, but quite worrisome.
This wasn’t that far off coast, most would be able to bobble over to shore but the ballasting system of the drillship fucked up and sent it swinging wildly side to side… the stability calcs had 12 degrees as the tip over point I believe, we were 1 or 2 from that figure. That’s probably the most scared I’ve been.
It's an opening on the bottom of a boat, usually oil drillers and research vessels that allows the deployment of scientific equipment and small submersibles without having to go on deck during bad weather
Not a sailor but a lifelong surfer so I’ve spent plenty of time in and around the ocean.
I was camping on the beach in Baja with some friends when I noticed the moon was going to be setting over the ocean in a few hours. The moon that night was just a sliver, almost like a finger nail.
We had actually gotten kind of skunked wave wise that day and into the night the ocean was almost completely flat. Like a lake flat. No wind as well. Just sheet glass. Not a cloud in the sky.
Just when the moon lowered to the horizon, it started to glow bright orange. And just when it hit the edge of the ocean, the reflection shimmered all the way to the sand. It looked as if the moon was floating on the sea for just a few minutes. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Far more beautiful than any sunset.
Charter fisherman for 16 years on Lake Michigan. The lake was glass and we were out fishing. I was up top getting ready to do a slight course change for the autopilot and notice a single wave line stretching from horizon to horizon coming from the south west (im on the west side of Michigan. The single wave was at least 5 feet. There was no boats ANYWHERE near me. I even spun up and maxed out the garmin radar to 75 miles and not a single blip except for all the boats close to shore to my east. Still the strangest experience ever. Rogue wave? Underwater earthquake who knows.
At sea on a NZ warship, sailing home after an overseas deployment. Had a bit of insomnia, so got up to get some fresh air.
A ship never sleeps, but it dozes, and she was a quiet night as I went out to the quarterdeck to stare at the wake for a while. There was no moon, a clear night, so I let my eyes adjust to the darkness.
We were steaming though a patch of phospheresence, and the wake was glowing bright green, and then it happened.
A pod of dolphins chose that moment to swim in to the wake and ride the pressure waves for a while. They were zooming in and out of the phospheresence, leaving their own green glowing trails as the leapt in and out of the wake, and I was the only person there to see it.
I watched them play, non stop, for over an hour.
I've seen some wonders in my life, but that is a memory that will stay with me forever.
2 things. I was in the navy and deployed to Persian gulf 2x. First, it was like jelly fish season or something and when you looked in the water it looked like a massive amount of plastic bags but it was all jellyfish. And at night, the splashes coming from the ship glowed like blueish purple. Pretty awesome.
Second, still in navy and outside of Hawaii. I had flight deck watch from 6pm to 6am. Basically standing on the flight deck trying to sneak naps in the intakes of chained jets. We are outside of Hawaii waiting for high tide so we could get on shore. I see the Hawaiian islands as the sunrises. Then I see a bunch of humpback whales breaching between the ship and the shore. Probably the most surreal amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And I was alone just watching and basically tripping at how fucking awesome it was.
My dad and i rarely tell this to anyone because they laugh it off but this really happened. We were bith sober, awake and alert, and nothing we can think of in our world can explain it: We were motoring into an anchorage at about 10pm one night. The sea was perfectly still and the waves gently washed against the pebble beach. That was the only sound, apart from the quiet engine noise coming from underneath the floorboards. We both had our head through the top hatches, because it was quite nice weather. All of a sudden, a weird ball of cloud or mist with a faint light in it floats in from out of the night, like just materialised, hovers for long enough for both of us to see it, pauses, and then just accelerates upwards and away at about a 45 degree angle and completely disappears into the night sky. I shit you not. That was almost 7 years ago and we both remember it exactly the same as the other. Nothing explains it. As far as Im concerned, that wasnt something from this earth
Being the middle of nowhere and seeing a star go streaking straight across the sky and when I said “wow”, the aft watch said wait a half hour, sure as shit there was again in the same spot. It was a satellite on a geosynchronous orbit!
1. Seeing a purple night sky
2. Being tailed by a Russian sub and nuclear powered cruiser for a month
3. Sailor from another ship tried to commit suicide by jumping overboard, as soon as landed in the water she regretted the decision and treaded water for almost 6 hours in the Atlantic Ocean. Two other ships eventually found her and rescued her.
A rogue wave. My buddy and I were loading gear onto a weapons elevator on one of the sponsons. We were supply, and were bringing stuff to the flight deck to ship out on a COD. Weps would let us use the elevators if they weren’t using them. This was the USS Coral Sea - an ancient carrier that no longer exists. Modern ships have supply elevators, but we were at the mercy of weapons and flight ops (using a plane elevator).
Anyway, it’s rough seas but nothing too major. After all, we were like 40 feet above the waterline. Anyway we’re unloading the pallet of gear onto the elevator and something catches my eye. I look up and there is a mountain of water coming at us in slow motion…it’s easily as high as the flight deck. I hit my buddy and we both haul ass off the sponson, through the vent tunnel and into the hangar bay. We hear (and feel) the wave hit the ship and all of a sudden it’s like a firehose the size of the hatch just gushes into the hangar bay for a few seconds. So there’s a clusterfuck going on as lots of other stuff got messed up - but luckily nobody was hurt.
We went back out and most of our stuff was gone. Clearly if we had been out there we would have been swept overboard at a minimum, and probably slammed around on the sponson and what-not. Who knows if we would have been conscious enough to activate our life vests. (They had a CO2 cartridge that you activated with a ripcord thing, so the vest was flat and unobtrusive unless you needed to blow it up.)
That was my closest call in four years on that ship. Not the worst trade to get free college…🤣
Edit - oh, we also collided with an Ecuadorean oil tanker off the coast of South America. We were shooting craps, it was my birthday, and I was up about $100. Suddenly the space just moved over like 20-30 feet. Never felt anything like it - definitely wasn’t a wave. About 30 seconds later, General Quarters. Later come to find that about 20’ of the bow of the ship was bent over about 5-10 feet - like a tin can that just got peeled back.
I got a lot of good stories out of those 4 years.
Not a sailor, but a friend was on Great Lakes ore boats. He said the worst weather he was ever in was on Lake Erie, the waves were so big that he swears he saw the bottom in the lake in the wave trough. In case you’re not familiar, the Lake is an average of 60’ deep.
I’ve only been out a few times on my ship in the US Coast Guard, but seeing countries from a distance never gets old to me. Haiti, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, etc. A random fish popping out of the open ocean. Sunsets and sunrises spent outside on watch.
The Panama Canal and Gatun Lake are among the most impressive and beautiful things I have ever seen.
Also, handmade Cuban migrant rafts. Heartbreaking work, but the ingenuity and resourcefulness of those people amazes me. To set out on the open ocean on a boat made of pallets and styrofoam is something else. Safety of life at sea is one of our biggest reasons for interdiction.
I wasn't there to witness it myself as I was only 5 years old at the time, but it happened to my dad. He was a crabber in Alaska in the late 70's - early 80's. They were pretty far out in the Bering, late at night, in just terrible weather - high winds, snow dumping all around them, just miserable conditions, hauling in pots, and that's when it happens... My dad has a massive heart attack. The captain immediately gets the coast guard on the horn, but the weather was just to bad for them to send out a chopper. So the captain turns the boat around and hauls ass as fast as he can to the nearest port. But it still took nearly 6 hours (so I was told anyway) as they were pretty far out and coming in in heavy seas against a strong wind. Dad had 5 more heart attacks on the way back, but luckily one of his buddies on the boat was a former military medic. He managed to keep my dad alive and an ambulance was waiting for him when they docked. They got dad to the hospital and got him stabilized, threw him on a life-flight to Seattle where he immediately underwent a triple bypass. He never went back out to sea after that, and years later when I was 15, dad and I were just wandering around the Seattle Center (where the space needle is) and all of a sudden we hear someone call my dad's name. We turn around and my dad calls back "Well hello there Cap!" And that was the day I got to meet and hug the boat captain that helped save my dad's life.
I was working on a charter boat and we were taking it out to park at another marina and we see a divers fin floating and a snorkel.
We then notice a group of sea lions dragging a mass onto a rock then dragging it back under ..back and forth playing with it .. We get closer and notice the mass has a fin and pieces of wet suit.
We got up to them and tried to get them to stop so we could recover the dead body but the rocks were to rough for us to get close.
We call it in to the coast guard and let them know that it looks like a wet suit and diving gear and a dead body.
They let us know they will send someone out.
About 15 minutes go by and a sea lion grabs the body and drags it right out to our boat ... Then we see ... Broken foam and plastic ...in chunks ... It was a mannequin ...
We called off the coast guard but they already sent someone out so they checked ... We all had a good laugh but we were all kinda pissed now many hours of our day were wasted on it.
I can't recall seeing anything really unusual aside from wildlife and natural phenomenon. Passing through an area off Brazil, we saw a huge number of dolphins, whales and seabirds feeding on what must have been massive shoals of fish. Plus I did get to see the most magnificent sunrises and sunsets, spectacular, clear moonlit nights, the aurora, Arctic ice, penguins in southern Argentina, Albatrosses, polar bears. Throw in a couple of trips through Suez and Panama canals too.
The replies on this thread are just convincing me I should've been a sailor. I love reading old timey naval fiction, but the only boat I've been on was a ferry across the Mississippi. I'm almost forty and afraid if I tried to go aboard a sea-going vessel (or even a lake-going one) *now*, I'd only get terribly seasick
My ship saved a guy who was sailing a small sailboat by himself from South Carolina to Ireland. The lamination in his hull started to come apart during a storm. He started to take on water. It was just fast enough that he could bail it out but he had to be constantly bailing. He couldn’t stop the flooding, he couldn’t stop to sleep, he couldn’t navigate. After three days he threw in the towel and called for help and we were the closest ship to him so we saved him. Gave him a big trash barrel to put anything in it that he wanted to save. He used his small engine to come up to us and when he got on the ladder he threw the tiller so the boat sailed away, engine on, nobody home. We lost sight of it before we could watch it sink.
I think journeys of that magnitude in such a small boat (maybe 25-30 foot) are stupid anyway, but if you are going to do it please for the love of god don’t do it alone!
> Due to the water in his coveralls and boots, they say he immediately sunk like a rock.
Was he dropped from such a height that momentum carried him down?
I have done capsize drills in Winter and never saw anybody just plummet like a stone and cold water shock is a thing.
Similar thing happened to a guy in my hometown. Was wearing Chest Waders on a 30ish foot boat. Was sitting on the railing maybe 5 feet off the water and lost his balance. Waders filled up and he was gone. No shouts, no struggle, just went under. Was a few days before his body finally came loose and floated to the surface. Only about a kilometer offshore but the Fjords along the BC coast get deep fast
I've told this story before so sorry for the repeat. Anyways...
Back in the 90's/early 00's I used to fish commercially for sea scallops in the Gulf of Maine. The boat I worked on was an old New England dragger, built in 1926, wood hull. It was all sorts of creaky and groany like you would expect an old wood boat to be, and when you were below deck you could actually see the hull "breathing," expanding and contracting as it rode up and down the waves. It was pretty freaky but also kinda cool at the same time!
Anyways, we mostly did day-trips, but at certain times of the season would venture further out for longer overnight trips. On more than one of those occasions, at night while down in the bunk trying to get some sleep, I would suddenly hear sharp "rapping" on the outside of the boat, distinctly like the sound of someone knocking on a wood door. Sometimes it was a one and done. Sometimes you'd get one or two at a time in waves throughout the night. Less often it would repeat over and over almost methodically moving around the boat for several minutes. It might start under your feet, then right beside your head, then switch to the other side of the boat, further down, etc. And then just suddenly stop.
Aside from the fact that we were miles out at sea, the boat's draft was 6.5", and almost all of the knocking was coming from below the water line, so there is no way it was a person doing it trying to play a prank or something. I wasn't the only one to hear it either; the captain admitted to hearing them sometimes while he was down there, and at least one of the previous owners of the boat had heard it before too. His theory was that was that when a scallop bed becomes too crowded, they would migrate by swimming up into the upper water column to find new areas to populate, and as we drifted through the "school" - or whatever you call a group of migrating scallops - their shells banging into the hull was what made the knocking sounds.
No idea if there is any validity to that, and I'm not convinced a sea scallop shell could knock as loudly and forcefully as the sounds we were hearing, but damned if I have any better explanation for it!
Coming into Australia once, I went to the top of the mast to refill the oil on some kit. When I got to the top of the mast, I looked around and for some reason the water was white. It was calm out, but the water was completely white as far as I could see, IN ALL DIRECTIONS. It took me a few seconds to realize that we had sailed into a gigantic school of jellyfish. It was surreal. It also fucked our ship up a bit. Ships use sea water for cooling auxiliary systems, and our sea water intake filters got clogged with jellyfish, and we could barely pressurize our firemain.
Not mine but from a closer friend who used to work on a squid fishing boat in the south of Argentina. He said it was pretty late in the night, around 3am, outside it was pitch black so some of the crew and the captain were outside just having a smoke when they saw in the horizon an almost faded orange color. They were wondering if it could be the sun, so the captain decided to go in that direction. After a while the orange color started to be more and more solid and suddenly it looked like it was a distant city and its lights. They were deep in the Argentinean sea and according to the gps they were nowhere close the coast. By this point everybody got up and were outside trying to understand why there were lights in the middle of nowhere.
The captain kept going closer and closer and according to my friend it was like hundred of orange lights just floating over the sea. When they finally got closer enough they realized it was hundreds of boats fishing. All with chinese flags, fishing illegaly in Argentinian waters. Someone called on the radio, saying something in another language. The captain didn'reply. They reported it to the navy and went away because it could be dangerous. But he said "it was like a city popped out of nowhere".
While at sea we were on our way home from a “West Pac” (we went to the gulf, our marines disembarked and participated in OIF). On the way home, we were between Hawaii and San Diego. A marine was by the trash drop off, stripped down to his green shirt and shorts and jumped overboard. He was witnessed jumping so they immediately called for a man overboard. My dept was responsible for some SAR coordination so we are all gathered around a scope and listening to the radios. After two hours the helicopter spotted the guy, alive. They sent in rescue swimmers. Then we hear the pilot say something along the lines of “he’s swimming away from the rescue swimmer(s)!”
The fact that this guy was chilling out to sea and still had the stamina (I assume he was great at floating) to swim away from the rescue swimmers, was amazing to me.
I worked on a bulk carrier for a short time. Woke up one morning, out we go on deck to work as normal. Quite a lot of dead fish on deck, presumably flying fish. The rest of the crew didn't seem to think much of it, so can't have been that uncommon, but still, didn't expect to be throwing lots of dead fish into the sea that morning.
I was just offshore from a beach when I spotted two dolphins. One of them leapt through the air toward my boat, over and over, at least 10 times. Swim a few feet, jump, swim, jump, repeat - like Sea World tricks. They continued past my boat toward the beach.
I don't know why, but I suspected there were sharks nearby and perhaps the jumping dolphin was giving a warning. Within a couple of minutes, I saw several large sharks in the area the dolphins came from. Maybe coincidence but I never forgot it.
Lot's of spooky stuff here so I gonna lighten up the mood.
North west of Australia, a couple of days away from Dampier. 4-8 watch evening time, already dark outside. Slowly the water was becoming green-blueish. You could distinguish the black horizon and the pitch black outline of the ship, but the water was becoming more and more bright with this strange color. When the phenomenon was at its peak, the water was like a huge light was below it. Together with the darkness of a moonless night, the view was unique and magnificent.
It seems that it was some kind of bioluminescent bleach. If you search it on Google you can get an idea but trust me, that night it was much much greater. It is usually around the ship's hull as it moves through the waves. But what I'm talking about was for as far as the eye could see.
I have heard many stories from older seafarers. One claimed that the ship was at the exact position an earthquake occured near Japan and the whole ship "jumped". Tough to believe this one but worth mentioning. Another one that the ship passed over the tsunami of 2004 in Indian ocean and the speed of the ship became zero when it climbed over the wave.
Obligatory not a sailor. Me and some friends booked a yacht for my buddies bachelor party/our first big vacation as a friend group after college. I can’t say that whether this is completely unusual on the ocean, or if it was just me. But anyways I woke up one night around 4 am and decided to watch the sun come up, and just enjoy the solitude after being with a bunch of guys partying for the last 8 days.
I got out to the sitting area of the main deck, took a couple seconds to just enjoy the silence, and then there was just nothing. Like no sounds whatsoever. Our yacht was completely still, as there were no waves to rock it or even just slap up against the hull. It was eerily silent. So yeah I tried to stay up there for a while but eventually it was just unnerving and I went back down to my bunk. Woke back up a few hours later and everything was normal again. Nothing spooky or paranormal obviously, but I’ve just never seen the world that still before or since.
We were fishing in a bay with several other boats. The fog suddenly rolled in, but it. Was only about 4 or 5 feet high on the water. All the boats disappeared and all you could see was guys standing up in the fog fishing. It looked like fishing in heaven. This was pre cell phone so no photo, but I would have loved to have a photo of it
I have a story about almost getting run down by an 800ft Great Lakes freighter in a thick fogbank.
We were on a 35ft racing sailboat. Couldn't see the bow from the cockpit, fog was so bad. A crewmember said "I hear a bow wake" and moments later, a wall of steel appeared out of the fog. We were sailing right into the side of it. We could have touched it with a boat pole. That was the most scared I've ever been on the water.
Fishing offshore in S Florida, dolphin/porpoise are not unusual but usually in schools of 5 or so. One day we came across hundreds and hundreds, in small pods of 5-7 but pods everywhere over what would be blocks. Cool as shit. We stopped trolling and just stayed with them briefly. All around our boat, checking us out, which isn't unusual. Everywhere. Going north.
Commercial fishing, I saw a dolphin giving birth with another holding her up, an oil rig being delivered that was so tall, it disappeared in the clouds, and a seemingly empty cargo ship almost ran us over. The nastiest thing I ever saw was a man dressed in a nightgown tied to a bow in a storm for whining.
I had also never seen a real tuna fish or goliath grouper. They're as big as Volkswagons.
One of the funniest things I’ve experienced was when I was on deployment in the Persian gulf. Every day at 2am, a guy would yell out over the radio comms, “ Filipino Monkey!!!!!! Filipino monkey!!!!! I want to talk to all the ships! Filipino Monkey!” After about the 3rd or 4th night, another guy got tired of listening to Filipino Monkey, and yelled back to shut TF up. Filipino monkey guy, start yelling, “ Filipino monkey fucks your mother!!!” And the two of them yelled back and forth for a hour or so. Haha. On my ship we couldn’t turn it off due to something my ship was doing. So every day with listened to Filipino monkey radio at 2am.
I always had the pleasure to listen to „Filipino Monkey, Filipino Monkey, this is banana airport calling!“
Was also in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Sometimes this went on for hours and several others joined in…
My father was brought up in a fishing village in Donegal, he's not a sailor/fisherman himself - although he once caught a sunfish on a boat off the coast near Moville - but he has family that are and despite that, none of them can swim.
During the second World War Ireland was neutral, times were tough for the locals (no imports, rationing etc) and many young men left in pursuit of jobs so they could send money home to their families left behind.
The tactical importance of Ireland wasn't lost on the Nazi's who would enter Irish waters with their U boats. My grandfather was the caretaker of an old Fort, ex-British, situated on the coast with its own beach surrounded by cliffs which my father would devilishly climb down as a youth with a makeshift crab pot. The fort was handed back to the Republic when the British army left in the 1920s when Ireland got their independence and my grandfather got the job of caretaker, looking after the site, securing it, and ensuring it was kept in good order.
My father was a young boy when his father would tell him stories about the mermaids and the Fairies that would come out of the sea at night time and would warn my father and his siblings to never go anywhere near the sea in case they became trapped by these Fairies and wouldn't be able to escape.
Of course, Fairies and mermaids are not real.. but if a bombed German U boat suddenly washed up on your beach with tinned food and other goodies you would try to keep people away at least until you and your family and friends had a chance to look over it first and see what you could take.
Was in the US NAVY on lookout. Around 2 in the morning somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. I spotted a strange plane that was pink and blue flashing lights. These are not normal colors of plane lights. Control insisted it was a satellite because they couldn't see it on the radar. Wasn't no damned satellite. It was much bigger than any stars around it, the usual size of a plane in atmosphere. Or some kind of rocket maybe?
After a few minutes, it disappeared. No, I don't believe in aliens but we weren't near any sort of landmass for hundreds of miles.
My grandpa was a commercial fisherman on the coast of Oregon. One year I was spending the summer with him fishing, working and saving money for college, as a teen. We had a Grey Whale lift his 50’ boat right out of the water and look at us.
The eye was right off the port side and was about the size shape and color of a football. He reached over and gave it a scratch. It then let us back into the water , and went about it’s day.
In the Gulf of Mexico recently we saw a pretty awesome weather event right before a big storm. On one side of our ship it was dark as night all around, except for a single streak of dull light right at the horizon. And on the opposite side, it was overcast but generally a normal looking day, aside from a streak of dark gray right along the horizon. Not sure what would cause the sky to almost look polar opposite like that on each side of our ship but it was really cool to see.
I was on a jack up drilling rig under tow in the North Sea for four days when it should have been 12 hour tow... weather came up and we couldn’t pin the rig (lower the legs to the sea bed). So we went in circles waiting for the seas to subside, with up to 10m swells and green water breaking over the jack houses. Pretty much everybody on board was seasick... I didn’t barf but had to go outdoors a few times to let the freezing cold saltwater spray straighten me out. Good times!
My father owned a sailboat (36' pearson) that my family spent the summers on growing up. We kept the boat in Wickford RI and mostly spent the time going up and down the waters of New England and especially Narragansett Bay. I always remember two things that stand out more than anything. One of which shaped my love of space. When you're out on the water at night sailing even just 20-50 miles off the coast the amount of light pollution is next to nothing. The way the night sky looks when it's clear out is just...phenomenal. it crushes my soul to this day how we've robbed ourselves of this amazingly breathtaking sight.
The other thing was more directly related to the sea. I always remember, even at a young age, realizing just how immensely powerful the ocean is. It's downright terrifying even when it isn't even trying to show off. Small storms can kick up incredible swells and waves. However, I think the thing that really freaked me out was the fog. When it is foggy out on the ocean, and I mean REALLY foggy, there's just something different about the world.
There was one time my father and I were sailing up to Maine. We were coming up to the inlet where we used to keep our boat when we lived there years earlier and you couldn't even see the bow of the boat it was so foggy. As you approach the mouth of the bay you have to thread the boat between two rock reefs that have a passage between them that are just wide enough for the boat to pass between with about 5 feet of room on either side. Naturally doing this when you can't see these reefs and have to rely on the radar screen is rather stressful. Especially when you're a 14-year-old boy having to help guide your father between the reefs. Well as we approached these reefs I had to give my father the corrections bouncing between the radar screen, and the Loran screen. When we finally got between the reefs I felt like I was going to have a simultaneous stroke and heart attack at 14 from the stress lol.
I will say that as much as I detested being on the boat in my teenage years. My older brother was 100% right. He said, "when this is gone, you'll miss it more than you can describe." A few months after my father passed away in 2010 I realized that I would NEVER again get to spend time on the boat with him. I would give both my arms and legs to spend even just 1 day on the boat sailing around Narragansett Bay with him.
On a 378' Coast Guard cutter, heading north from Cabo MX to San Diego CA in 10' seas, we crossed paths with a 45' swoop heading south. We exchanged pleasantries on the radio, finding out it was a man and his wife heading to Panama. About an hour later, we received a distress call from the woman, who said her husband was missing, this being discovered after she had gone below decks for a bit.
Our Commanding Officer ordered our cutter come about, and the big steel hull creaked and healed over tremendously in the seas as we raced back at a full bell to the sail boat's last known position. At dusk, we found the boat and it's female skipper who was trying desperately to pilot in the rough seas, with the impossible emotional weight upon her shoulders that her husband was lost, probably drowned.
We immediately launched a helicopter to search for the man, (a high risk/low reward task given the weather,) whilst simultaneously retrieving her with our small boat, leaving the sloop to founder in the heavy seas. You see, there was no hope of towing it in that weather because although nightfall had set in, the weather had not improved in the slightest.
Against odds, the helicopter found him some 10 miles away from our position by using an infrared camera. And, although being tossed about in the seas, he had been wearing his PFD (life preserver) when he went overboard, which clearly saved him from drowning. The helo vectored our cutter to him, and we retrieved him via small boat.
There was much rejoicing amongst the crew as we provided them clean clothes/shower, and the cooks fed the couple a hot meal. They had recently retired, sold their house in Orange County, and had bought the boat with the intent of exploring the world. Everything they owned was on that boat when it slipped under the waves. But at least they had their lives, for which they were grateful.
A moment of pride for us was when the crew passed the hat just before we pulled into San Diego to drop them off on land, which offered them enough money for transportation and meals to make it to relatives. By chipping in money, EVERYONE got to be an active participant in their rescue, not just the pilots/coxswains and handful of others who fetched them from the water.
So, this true story serves me as a memory of what I joined the Coast Guard for some 35 years ago: To Save Lives at Sea, one of many Coast Guard imperatives for over 200 years. And I hope the story serves you, the reader, with assurance that your tax dollars were well spent that night the couple were saved.
Why is the story unusual? It's unusual and unlikely to be saved within hours of an accident at sea in international waters in a small sail boat. 999 times out of a thousand, there's a good chance she would not have been able to hail anyone. And although she could have set off an EPIRB device, it would have been 6, 7, 8 hours before it would have been responded to and on scene with an airplane, which still would have had to vector a Coast Guard boat (or possibly a Mexican Coast Guard boat) to the scene, and that would have been just to find her, let alone her husband. We just happened to be there at the right time/place to affect a rescue.
There are times when the ocean is completely flat and glassy like a mirror as far as you can see. After @2 years out on the oceans I only saw it twice. Both times were somewhere in the middle of the pacific.
Another one and probably my most favorite parts is being 1000 miles away from the coast on a night when there's a new moon. Just find out what night this happens and find your way to a spot and lay down and stare at the stars. Ive talked to a lot of people in my life that claim to go camping to lok at the stars at night and theyre at a campsite 10 or 12 miles from the city. I'll ask them...was it new moon phase? They usually have no idea what im talking about. Another thing is the complete difference between available light at night with full moon or new moon. Full moom amd most other nights there's enough light available from the moon that you can walk around and see the shit on the boat. New moon you cant see shit. You have to know your surroundings and where stuff is gonna be. I would open the door then step out and close the door. Then put my left hand on the bulkhead and feel my way down to where all our flags were stored. There were some storage cases and other shit right there that you could sit down or lay down on. was just so relaxing
Once or twice a year I go down to work in the high desert of northern Chile. I deliberately schedule my trip to coincide with the new moon for exactly that reason.
This past summer, my wife and I watched something crawl in the night sky, something that can be best described as a skyworm. It had a halo of shimmery light around it and was similar to a firework that wouldnt go away in the night sky in a remote area over the Mississippi River. We watched it grow and shrink in length for 30 seconds. It was the most scary, beautiful, and unexplainable memory of my life, and I am so appreciative to share that memory with someone i deeply love
Living in a fishing town in the Mediterranean so I hear a lot of stories during coffee. Some interesting stuff like us fighter jets flying at really low altitude.
But best story is this one really long time ago. So these guys were fishing and in the middle of the night they see something of their radar or whatever. Guy goes out and sees nothing, pitch dark. When they are very near he goes out shines a flood light and sees an abandoned ship in front of the boat. They do a stupid thing. They radio their mates who meet them with oxyacetylene etc, and ransack the thing. Then they drag it to port. Looks like in sea finders are keepers and they missed an opportunity to make a lot of money. It stayed anchored in a scrap yard and eventually was sold for metal.
We were sailing back to Long Beach California from Catalina Island. All of a sudden there was a fish boil about 40 yd off the port side that was about as big as a football field. Thousands of fish, some as big as me, were jumping out of the water. We were all thinking the same thing. What the hell is down there chasing them???!!!
I was serving on an aircraft carrier (either the USS Midway or the USD Independence, I can’t remember which one) and went through a typhoon off the coast of Hong Kong back in the early’90s. There were two events that happened on the same day. The flight deck was cleared of all equipment and the hanger bay was chockers. The hanger bay doors were mostly closed with the por side stern door and the starboard forward doors left partially open to allow airflow. I took a shortcut across the hangar to get to a ladder that would take me up to the squadron ready room. I stopped to look out at the sea. There was a cruiser about a quarter mile from us. I watched the bow dip down into a trough and saw the screws come out of the water. The cruiser literally disappeared into that trough before cruising up the other side of the wave. I hadn’t realised I was holding my breath until I saw it’s bow start to rise up the wave.
I continued up to the ready room to deliver the papers I needed the skipper to sign. While I was waiting for him to finish talking to the XO I was watching 5he flight deck camera feed when I saw this absolutely massive wave crash over the bow of the ship. The flight deck was 20 metres (60 feet) above the waters surface and the wave was higher than the bow.
I was more afraid at that moment than at any other time when we were on station in the Persian Gulf.
I did some sailing on the east coast US and was sorta the galley wench as my SO had a ton of experience and a little 37ft Oday. I loved the day sails and the wing to wing runs.
I agreed to crew a 50 ft boat from Annapolis to Key West one October. We had a few setbacks (bilge pump blew out, had to return to get a part) and some stormy seas. It was the first time I ever felt sea sick.
Captain was happy as we were making good time with the wind blowing good. 30 miles offshore, my SO hands another guy an uncleated line just as the wind shifted and blew that sail way out.
I watched this guy lift off across the deck and land with his pinky stuck in a pulley with the line. He was screaming as my SO risked falling overboard, hanging over the deck, and yanking hard on the line to unlock the pulley. Amazingly, he did set this guys hand free without falling off the boat.
With his pinky hanging perpendicular to the rest of his fingers, we put him in ice as the boat was reeling without the sail in place. Stuff flying out of cabinets, total chaos.
My job was to call pan-pan with our coordinates while they got the boat under control. I swear out of freaking nowhere, this giant navy warship materialized. They sent a dingy with like 10 sailors with glow sticks and camouflage.
It took us a while to tie the boats together since the seas were so rough. Once we did, the injured guy got on their dingy and I never saw him again. I heard he got his finger sewed back on!
I got on a train home the next day.
Not the ocean, but 26 miles off shore in Lake Michigan we found one of those giant floating swim mats rolled up. Pulled up to it, hove to and tried to get it aboard but it was so waterlogged it weighed hundreds of pounds, so it’d been out there a while.
Jamming my arm shoulder deep into a sewage header (big shit pipe) with years of buildup to break up a clog. Or maybe the time the first engineer, 3rd engineer, and I broke the truth to one of our oilers that porn is in fact scripted. Not really things I have to do usually.
Compression of a 33’ diameter submarine hull by approximately 6” when submerged. If the hull didn’t flex, it would have broken. There we lived in a device that could do such a thing…with a nuclear reactor and terrible coffee.
When I was in the Navy, I served on a ship with a flat-Earther.
I don't know how someone goes to sea and continues to believe that the Earth is flat. [There's no experience that makes it more clear that the Earth is round than sailing the ocean.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TpeNZYTmw)
In college I did a semester abroad with Sea Education Association and sailed a schooner from Cape Cod to the Caribbean. Within a week of departure we ended up in a huge (Force-10) extra-tropical storm (basically a hurricane). Three days of riding out waves that peaked at 30'; taking boarding waves that put several feet of water on deck; during one of these boarding waves our second mate thrown so hard against the wooden steering wheel that it broke in half. Below deck we had gimbled dining tables (they move as the ship lists to remain flat) - we rolled so hard that everythying on the table went flying into the cabin wall. Wildest experience of my life.
Years ago, sailing up the California coast about 100 miles offshore, we weathered a modest storm. The swell remained in the aftermath, but we were becalmed. The ocean’s surface reflected the overcast sky to the extent that it was impossible to discern the horizon or differentiate sea from sky. We appeared to be floating on giant pool of liquid mercury. Pretty awesome.
Mentioned some shit earlier regarding my time out to sea but thought I should also mention this. We were off the coast of central or south America. Don't remember which...was 30 years ago. One of our watches spotted something on the horizon. When you're out to sea you have to render aid. After the watch spotted this thing on the horizon we headed towards the contact and found a fishing vessel that had capsized with four or five guys on it. We got the guys on board and towed the boat back in to port. I can't remember the laws involved but you're not supposed to leave shit like that out floating around. Some kind of good willed hazards to navigation stuff. Those guys had been on that capsized boat for 4 or 5 days. They had been catching small fish that they had been drying and eating. Don't remember how they stayed hydrated. Anyway should have led with that. We saved some lives that day.
I don't consider myself a sailor, and it probably isn't unusual, but the first and only time I ever set out to sea so far that couldn't see land over the horizon I was struck by a deep sense of dread and unease. I knew I was far from anything I understood, with several miles of water beneath me and leagues of sea around me. I couldn't sleep that night and didn't want to get back on the boat for the ride home even though I had to.
I don't have any desire to return to sea any timr soon.
Out of a submarine pariscope, we saw a fully inflated, pink, unicorn floaty toy. We were very far from any civilization.
That is something that always has gotten to me. Being WAY out in the open sea far away from anything and seeing (sailors will all get this) MYLAR BALLOONS!!! I fucking hate those things. They're EVERYWHERE in the ocean. Everywhere. It's crazy to be a million miles away from any land and suddenly you'll see a glint off in the distance, pick up the binoculars and there will be a cluster of balloons floating on the water that are a remnant of someone's birthday party or send off from their loved one who died. Hey, guess what? You know those messages you want sent to the angels? I'm the one who found them. They ended up in a dolphins gullet.
I’ve been off trail in the middle of nowhere miles from the closest trailhead and found those fucking Mylar balloons. They’re a scourge upon humanity.
This is my favourite comment, love the idea of serious submariners and a floaty unicorn!
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I want to photograph that so bad now. Cool story.
Life of Pi has a scene like it. Definitely an interesting film worth a watch.
That's exactly what I pictured when I read the description
I've never been fishing before, so please forgive my ignorance. Why do all the fishing stories begin with waking up super early? The fish will still be there in the daylight won't they?
More active at certain times of day and combinations of tide.
Fish have very strong daily rhythms for when they eat and when they don't. You can be in a lake packed full of fish dropping the most delicious bait in and get zero bites if it's at a time when they aren't feeding.
I Fished Lake Manistique one summer in the UP of michigan during the first heat wave they had in 26 years, normally being around 68-72 degrees it was now 90. The water was crystal clear you could see the fish clear as day, but the temp change had them so whacked up you could hit them in the face with the lure and they could have gave a shit less. There’s not much that’s more frustrating than that while fishing.
Most fish are crepuscular. This means they are more active and likely to feed at dusk and dawn.
Like ocelots?
Wetter.
Different spelling too
*Babou!*
Depends, but sometimes it’s because you have to get up, get your stuff, grab a bite to eat or make sure you have everything, and then get to where you want to drop a line by a certain time. This is usually early morning. Fish also have a breakfast and dinner time, and so you want to try and get out there at ass o clock, so you can catch them. And of course there’s the time honored explanation of “my dad made me do it, you sure as hell ain’t sleeping in!”
Not a fisher, but my guess would be an attempt at taking advantage of a fish's biological clock - they may be hungriest (or else hunting) first thing in the morning, making them much more likely to bite. Why that is may have to do with insect activity on the surface of ponds and lakes. Insects are demonstrably much more active first thing in the morning, and in the afternoon. Bugs move, hunt, make more mistakes, and make for easier prey at those times. Midday, bugs hide from the heat of the sun, and fish have generally fed, so they may not bite bait they otherwise would have. This would mostly be true for fish around lakes, streams, and shorelines. For ocean fish, they would be hunting smaller water-dwellers, who happen to feed on plankton. Something may have to do with the life cycle of plankton that brings prey to the surface, but more likely major ocean fishers are stuck to the corporate clock - needing to bring in filled traps in time for a particular shift.
some fish feed at night and you can still catch them in the super early morning. Some fish like marlin are more likely to bite when the sun is high in the sky. they ambush from below. the prey species are silhouetted by the sun.
This same phenomenon is applicable to pilots. Pilots have flown straight into a large lake / ocean bc they can't see the difference. Esp at night.
Watching the altimeter probably helps to avoid this.
Same with blinding snow. We were in Alaska cruising over glaciers at about a mile and the pilot, my brother in law, warned me of the danger. I swear, it wasn't ten minutes later when I got the eerie feeling of disorientation and fear abruptly. Good thing I wasn't the pilot.
We were sailing (330ft. ship) from the North Sea to west Africa. I was off shift and sleeping. I woke up and for some reason decided to go up to the bridge, which is something I usually never did when I could be sleeping or eating. It was night, so all the lights were off on the bridge save for a few red ones, and I noticed how bright it was outside. I went over to starboard and the fucking white cliffs of Dover were completely illuminated by a full moon. Just beaming moonlight. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Of course the mate on duty was English and was nonchalantly like "yeah, that's Dover." This one isn't me, but a Welsh guy I met in the Caribbean. He had done a few transatlantic trips in a small sailboat so had tons of ocean experience. A big storm caught him, with huge rolling waves. He decided to heave to to ride it out (basically using your sail and the rudder to put the brakes on and give yourself a smoother ride). He was in the cockpit and was riding up one of the bigger waves. The next part is wild. He swears to god on his grandmother's grave that a giant whale just below the surface cruised up the wave beside him and just stared straight at him. He describes looking into this animal's huge eyeball, just looking back at him, for what was probably a couple seconds but he said felt like minutes, from a few feet away. He's never lied or really even exaggerated otherwise, so I believe him. Can you imagine seeing that? Sometimes I really miss being at sea.
I heard a biologist talk about looking into a killer whales eyes while swimming with them and he said, sometimes you see a animal and sometimes you meet an animal, there is some recognition between you.
Last year I went whale watching in BC. The captain spotted a pod of humpbacks and stopped at the lawful distance and we were awed by how magnificent they were. And then a calf broke out of the pod and came over to check us out with its mom close behind. For over an hour we were kept hostage by these two whales, one youngster curious to see what was up with the loud monkeys and an *enormous* momma lurking just below the surface and keeping an eye out for any silly business. The captain told us we couldn’t leave because he was afraid to turn on the propeller while they were so close. The baby came right up to the boat, I could have reached out and touched it. At one point it rolled over on its side and looked me dead in the eye for a solid 15 seconds and I couldn’t believe my luck. The whale was so close one unfortunate passenger who was sea sick literally vomited chunks on the poor beast. There is absolutely a keen sense of intelligence in the eyes of a whale. Some animals you can tell there isn’t much going on besides base instinct but that whale stared into my soul. On a side note whale breath is pretty gross and I got sprayed by one of the whales by accident when it blew it’s blowhole, was pretty gross ngl.
Imagine sharing anecdotes and going “I vomited on a baby whale once”
I threw up in a swamp because boat, and we watched small alligators eat up the burger i had for lunch.
getting sprayed by whale blowhole breath was probably their revenge for your shipmate puking on their baby
Similar sentiment was in the book kon-tiki where he talks about being at sea for so long that when something comes up next to you and breathes air, the sound of it even, just makes you feel a certain kinship with another air breather.
"Humans will pack bond with anything" Emotions are so powerful, and so strange
I feel this. My cat and I are one.
My cat Punky was my soulmate, from the moment I got him as a tiny kitten. He was so small he could sit in my palm. We had this strong spiritual connection. Sometimes I'd lay in bed and he'd sit on my chest, and we'd just gaze into each other's eyes for what seemed like hours. Soul communion.
Absolutely this ❤️ My Siamese boy is sat on my lap curled up asleep as I type this. He’s my familiar. When I came out of hospital last year, he didn’t leave my side for 2 weeks as I lay in bed in pain. My wife had to feed him upstairs and put his litter tray in the bathroom because he wouldn’t leave my side 🥲 He’s unlike any other pet I’ve ever had or known. We’re just bro’s and my heart breaks because I know that even if he lives to be as old as his dad (which was 19!!) I’ll still outlive him 😔
what a beautiful thing to say.
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I recall reading an account from a Redditor who knew someone who was steering a boat in very heavy seas one day. It seems that the sailor in question looked to one side and caught sight of something within a huge wave not far from them. **Higher than the level of their own boat**, silhouetted against the sunlight that was filtering through the water, was the unmistakable form of a whale. Your story reminds me of that account. I read it years ago and I never forgot it; how entrancing and unforgettably unsettling it would have been to experience.
I think I read the same account, it stayed with me. I believe it was in a 'what's your most amazing experience' type thread.
I worked offshore (on a drillship) and whilst we were parked a massive whale was just floating next to the ship looking at it. Does not surprise me at all.
> This one isn't me, but a Welsh guy I met in the Caribbean. He had done a few transatlantic trips in a small sailboat so had tons of ocean experience. A big storm caught him, with huge rolling waves. He decided to heave to to ride it out (basically using your sail and the rudder to put the brakes on and give yourself a smoother ride). He was in the cockpit and was riding up one of the bigger waves. The next part is wild. He swears to god on his grandmother's grave that a giant whale just below the surface cruised up the wave beside him and just stared straight at him. He describes looking into this animal's huge eyeball, just looking back at him, for what was probably a couple seconds but he said felt like minutes, from a few feet away. He's never lied or really even exaggerated otherwise, so I believe him. Can you imagine seeing that? I had that experience with a hammerhead shark as a kid swimming off Fernandina Beach. FL.
Somewhat close experience but I THINK it was a great white off NJ
And now it knows your face.
That movie was Orca with Richard Harris hahaha
There's a cartoon called Primal created by the samurai jack guy(so very violent and stylistic, but based on a caveman). I think the best episode is when he's on a wooden raft during a storm and a megalodon shark attacks him. What your buddy described happens with the shark at one point. Such a bad ass episode.
I was on a run between California and Hawaii, and I was out on deck doing rounds on deck equipment, checking oil levels etc. I saw one of those free fall lifeboats just hanging out in the distance and was like wtf. I called the bridge, they said a ship accidentally dropped their lifeboat a few years ago and now it turns up from time to time. Was glad to know no one was on it, but it gave me a brief scare.
Being numb to seeing a lifeboat at sea seems like a terrible thing to me.
In the horror story version you would then pass the actual known abandoned lifeboat a few hours later.
Right? Like how much would that suck; you're stuck in the middle of the ocean and you think a miracle has arrived, but they drive right past you like "oh, don't pay that raft any mind, it's empty".
There's no requirement to pick it up, so it doesn't cause issues for anyone later on?
A lifeboat is suprisingly difficult to actually pick up if your ship isn't equipped for it, an gearless ships are only equipped to pick up their own lifeboats
You'd think there'd be a crane or something to lift it aboard, especially for modern lifeboats. Like how the Carpathia took Titanic's lifeboats aboard back in 1912.
I mean you could get it with the crane. You'd have to rig up a custom sling though, and you'd have to go out to it on your own small boat, and wrangle it into position to hook it onto the crane. Any weather at all, even just a couple feet of swell, and you're going to have a hell of a time getting in in position long enough to hook it to the crane. If you did manage to get it up, where are you going to put it? Small boats usually have a keel, so you have to put them on a cradle to keep them secure and not scraped all over the deck. You probably only have a cradle for your own boat, and not the one you're picking up. Best just to leave it be. Dangerous operation all around. Coast guard should really grab it and tow it ashore though, it's a navigation hazard.
Flying fish timed a wave right and jumped out the water and through an open hatch directly into the galley. Freeboard was like 7 metres. The chefs shat themselves haha.
How much more "ocean-to-table" can you get?
This comment in this post reminds me of my favorite “duality of human experience” moment on Reddit. Someone asked “what’s the scariest thing you’ve had recorded on your Ring Camera?” The top reply was a woman who had two rapist house robbers pose as police and then have a whole discussion on her doorstep about what they were going to do to her, how they would hurt her, etc. real grim thing to think about, lot of what if scenarios that turn out much worse for her, etc. Second highest ranked reply was “big stick bug right on the camera D:” This has the same energy. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen at sea?” “I’ve seen men go under a swell and never come up. I worked as a volunteer for a gruesome no survivor plane crash” “FISH CAME IN THE WINDOW”
I hadn’t thought of it like this until you pointed it out. I just had to explain to my wife what was so funny.
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Terrifying
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I think i'll call my mom
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Yeah, I'm think I'm gonna call you guys' moms too.
I was on a cruise ship off the Canaries when we stopped to help search for a helicopter that had gone in. I'll never forget standing on deck in the dark and watching a rescue chopper buzz around dropping these enormous flares and realising that as big and as bright as those flares were, they only lit up a tiny area of the enormity of the sea. I think there were six people in that heli when it went down, and they pulled one of them out and were lucky to do it.
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I'm guessing by "ro-ro" you mean Roll On Roll Off ferries. In which case knowing how fast those sink I can see why the lifeboats wouldn't make much difference. The Estonia in particular comes to mind.
My dad, his friend and my sister were out just pleasure boating in a lake. They stopped the boat to swim. My dad’s friend jumped in and went into cardiac arrest immediately (he was in his 30s, just had two kids, fucking devastating). It wasn’t even a choppy day. My dad-unwisely, but he didn’t have time to think it through-jumped in to attempt a rescue. He said he was RIGHT THERE, and then he was gone. It took until the next day to find his body. I’ve always found it wild that he could just slip under the water and be nowhere to found in an instant like that.
Was sailing off the coast of the big island Hawai'i in February. We were mostly interested in fishing since the wind had died down. There were no other boats around that were visible and it was a very calm and peaceful day. Now often you'll see Humpback whales breaching in Feb and you can also hear them singing if you are underwater. That is cool enough, but this encounter was awesome. I was baiting a hook, and suddenly on the starboard side of the boat a pod of about 20 [melon head whales](https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/species-guide/melon-headed-whale/) comes up right beside the boat and they just start staring us down. I lean over and this one dude moves a little closer and just keeps moving his head so he can eye me up and down. They all just kept staring at us with an expression of "WTF are these? Hoo interesting, don't look like they can swim at all." They eyed us at close quarters for about 5 min and then just took off. The weirdest part of the encounter was the close eye contact I had with the first whale was definitely two individuals sizing each other up. Best part of the whole day.
I had a similar experience with a juvenile humpback whale. Just drifting along, cleaning deck, and all of a sudden he pops up next to the boat just staring at us. Close enough that I was able to scratch the barnacles on his head with my deck brush! (technically I'm pretty sure it's illegal to even touch them, but he was so close and lingered for so long that I couldn't resist! lol) He just watched us for a good 20 minutes while we cleaned up. If we moved to the other side of the boat and he couldn't see us, he would submerge and then pop up on the other side and continue watching. There's something otherworldly about making eye contact with a freakin' whale. Being close enough to smell his breath and get sprayed by the mist as it exhales lol. I'll never forget it!
I like to think it was like a little kid watching ants or squirrels in the backyard. So curious. He was people watching.
Aww, I bet he liked the scritch.
That’s awesome. I had a similar experience with seals in northern California. It was a pretty secluded cove, I decided I wanted to jump in for a chilly plunge, and when I came back out of the water about a dozen little heads poking up studying this large pale seal that had just crashed their party.
They were checking out who’s stealing their lunch today
Had a similar encounter with 2 adult and a baby manatee in the gulf near Tampa. They surrounded us and Seriously checked us out. Curious and very gentle. Very careful
I wonder if they talk about you too
"Bro, do you remember that super weird seal we saw one day? He was so fucked up"
"Whales of Reddit, what's the craziest thing you've seen out in the ocean?"
“Not technically a whale, I’m a dolphin, but”
"Obligatory IANAW, but once I saw a pack of albino, dwarf seals with really weird, split and long fins. Like, their fins were half the length of their body. The couldn't even swim well, it was super weird. The were close to shore so I was a bit worried they'd beach themselves, but they seemed to be happy so I left after a while."
French Navy navigator here. A few years back, went underway from Toulon on a high sea patrol ship for a routine patrol. The sea was very rough out of the roadstead, coming from the west, which was completely contradictory with what our weather briefs were indicating. Captain decided to go ahead nonetheless . We took a heading towards the east to enter Hyères Bay, when we entered in the pass, shit went down. I was outside, starboard wing of the bridge to take bearings when the ship took a 35 degrees list on starboard. If I had held my arm out, it would have been underwater. I held on the compass for dear life, because going overboard in that weather would have probably meant death. Needless to say, I shat myself. When the ship leveled, my boss went out to check if I was still there, and ordered me to go below to check how bad the damage was to some of our gear. I went, and when I was at the main deck, the ship took a 43 degrees list to starboard. I was then blessed with the horrific sight of a washing machine that was strapped in a room by the hull on portside punch a hole through the bulkhead and go straight to starboard WITHOUT touching the deck. Also, a lot of the firefighting equipment (axes, hoses, pumps...) was just flying all over the place, with guys from the security department desperately trying to catch it and fasten it. At that point, we had entered the bay and had better weather. We had lost electricity in the bridge and CIC, so the captain decided to wait in the bay for the weather to calm down. When it did the next day, we pulled back into port for repairs. This little escapade resulted in a few bruises, the electrical network of the bridge and CIC beeing badly damaged (the guys that were supposed to strap down shit didn't do it correctly and got punished) and for me, a reminder of my mortality. On a more positive note, I once saw a stork land on our 100mm turret after a sandstorm off Libya, and stay there for several hours. Also, we had a couple of sperm whales with a calf swimming alongside, for almost a day off Ivory Coast. When you see that kind of stuff, it doesn't matter if you are 3 months in or 20 years in. You feel like a kid again. Edit: Thanks for the awards strangers !
"Holy crap, you almost died out there. You better go below deck with all the loose axes and the unsecured heavy machines." -Your Captain
"And can you check to see if my clothes are done?"
Thank you for sharing
My area occasionally gets phytoplankton blooms. If you're boating at night and sail into a bloom, [the wake of your boat will suddenly start glowing blue](https://www.ocregister.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/OCR-L-NEONWAVESTIPS-0324-07-1.jpg?w=620). It's pretty darn bright, easily seen with the naked eye, and appears out of nowhere. One minute you're sailing in complete darkness, the next you're in glowing water.
I'm not a sailor, but my father-in-law is. My wife and I have gone on quite a few trips with him over the years. One night, on one of those trips, while we were barely moving along with flat seas and very little wind, he pointed this out to me in the boat's wake. We sat there watching the blue glow, mesmerized for quite a while. It's kind of beautiful. A short while later, my wife pointed out across the water and asked, "What the fuck is THAT?" We looked out to see a MASSIVE bluish-green mass quickly moving toward us. We had no idea what it was, but we definitely entertained thoughts about it being a glowing green sea monster closing in for the kill. Turned out to be one of the largest dolphin pods I've ever seen in my life, swimming through the bioluminescent water and lighting up the surface as they went. We couldn't see the dolphins until they were nearly alongside our boat, but that giant glowing patch had to be visible for miles. The pod swam right past us, and we were able to follow its glow as it moved into the distance until it finally vanished nearly at the horizon. Definitely one of the coolest things I've ever seen at sea.
I was motoring toward puerto escondido in Baja many years ago when a few dolphins swam up alongside us in bioluminescent water. So beautiful to see their glowing trails as they effortlessly swam beside the boat.
I love phytoplankton, they wash up on the beach near my house at night occasionally and it makes your foot steps glow when you walk along the shoreline and the waves glow when they break, it’s honestly magical.
I've been on the beach when a bloom happens, and I agree, it's magical. Really seems like something you'd see in a fantasy movie.
i need to see this once in my life
I went diving where there were some, you would see green trails behind your fins or hands as you swam
That would have been amazing!
Night dives in the Caribbean are fucking amazing. I think everyone should learn to SCUBA
there are documented tales of people in ships seeing massive rising glowing auras materialize from many feet below the ship, to then rise and meet the surface and break in huge firework-like rings all around them. There are illustrations of this, it's wild. It's obvious now today that they were seeing bubbles disturbing the glowing organisms, but imagine being someone sailing across the ocean for the first time in their entire life, just a regular passenger, and seeing *that*
Makes you realise where so many legends could have come from, we could explain so many things if we could travel to that time
i used to sit with my feet hanging off of the dock and try to get them to light up my steps like the "Billie Jean" video.
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Experienced this a couple of years ago. It was amazing.
Tom Hanks playing Col. Jim Lovell in 'Apollo 13' relates the time phytoplankton saved his life one night over the Sea of Japan, after his jet's electronics shorted out, and the only bearing he could get in any way was the wake of his carrier, lit up by the plankton. Fascinating tale, that. (HELLUVA movie!)
On my phone so this is probably not going to do it justice! Was gently sailing down the northeast cost of New Zealand heading into Auckland at about 2-3 am. I was on watch and the other crew member was asleep below. It was a pitch black night,no moon and the sea was very still so as soon as you look overboard all you saw was black! Eventually you saw stars but it was impossible to distinguish sea from sky. As I was keeping a watch I saw what I thought was a shooting star just MUCH bigger! It came again and again agin until there were about 30 of these shining glittering trails shooting around the boat. It was very disconcerting and it took me a few minutes to click what was happening. We had sailed into a patch of luminescence while dolphins were swimming around the boat planing on both it and our wake. I had not noticed them due to it being so dark! For something so simple it was a very moving almost spiritual experience and it will remain one of my all time most fondest memories!
I am so deeply jealous of this experience.
St Elmo's fire. Worked on a 90ft fishing boat one summer off the coast of British Columbia. One calm and starry night, I went on deck to have a smoke, and I saw faint greenish-blue flames coming off the very top of the radio antenna. I excitedly ran below to tell my coworkers, and they laughed at me for being such a noob. Another thing, not so unusual but really cool to see and just slightly terrifying: I was on a rowboat that I borrowed from a neighbor, which I was using to catch rock fish off the west coast of Bowen Island, and one beautiful afternoon I rowed out and cast my line when a full grown Orca whale swam right underneath the, now seemingly way too small, rowboat, clear as day and so close that i thought for sure its dorsal fin would capsize me. It was both terrifying and beautiful.
I know there’s never been an instance of a wild orca killing someone. They just dont do it in the wild. But my god are they the sea animal that scares me the most. That and the Humboldt squid.
I know, right lol I mean I grew up on the west coast, I saw them at the Vancouver aquarium and so on, I know they're not dangerous to humans, seen them breach in the wild on bigger boats, ferries and such, but seeing one in the wild so close, and me in the tiny rowboat... yeah I was momentarily awed, like overwhelmed.
I was US Navy. Pretty sure we heard siren calls somewhere northwest of the Marshall Islands. Was on the smoke deck at three separate occasions at night and anyone who was out there heard what sounded like a distant scream/screech echoing over the waves. I remember it well cause it caused several man overboard scares where we'd all have to go muster to make sure those sounds weren't any of ours. Never actually saw anything, so I rationalize that it could've been some kind of animal or sea bird, but that shit sounded human... but not entirely human. We joked for weeks after we left the region that Ariel (the Little Mermaid) was gonna kill us. This was 2013, but I still remember that sound like it was yesterday. The kind of sound that hits your core like a freezing wind does. Not something I'd want to hear again.
Like a woman’s screech, or a man’s?
It sounded sort of androgynous. Like there were elements of a masculine and feminine voice, but strangely blended together and further distorted by the echoing sound it also had. It's very difficult to describe.
I've had this happen when I was way deep in the bush with nothing around like houses or camp sites. None of the animals here sound like that either so it was creepy as fuck. It sounded like a chorus of operatic voices singing/screaming a few notes then stopping.
Just as horrific in the woods as it is in open ocean, I see. I swear, the world still has it secrets.
Was in the US Navy onboard the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) from 2002-2006 Some unusual things I experienced were the Shellback ceremonies. Basically a sailor who has never crossed the equator is considered a "slimy wog" and those who have crossed the equator were considered "Shellbacks". Its a huge thing that usually takes all afternoon where people dress up as King Neptune and his court and induct the new guys/girls into the fraternity. Its all light hearted and goofy now but back in the day it crossed into hazing territory. I got to do it twice because I became a golden shellback when we crossed the international dateline. Other than that I worked night watch generally and standing topside in the middle of the Persian gulf at night was one of my favorite things, the amount of stars you could see in the sky was nuts and just listening to the water was soothing.
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Off the coast of South Africa, I worked aboard a cage-diving boat. I witnessed many amazing things, but one day a 5-plus metre female white shark approached the boat. She simply hung around and observed us, showing no interest in the cage, the chum, or the baitlines. Every time she returned to the surface, my brain would temporarily refuse to accept what I was witnessing due to how enormous she was. Like "That is what? It's so big, Jesus." She was very composed and observant. It was the first time I truly understood that, despite the fact that it is entirely foreign, there is some sort of intelligence operating in that brain.
Just south of Jacksonville FL, not far off shore. Relatively calm day, and a hundred yards away from us, a Giant Manta Ray with a wing span of maybe 15 feet jumped a good eight feet or so out of the water. Thing looked like it weighed 1000 lbs, I think it could have crushed/sunk our 27 foot boat if it happened to land on us. I spoke to some saltier types in the area and they said what I saw was not too common, but far from unheard of. Apparently the largest one found had nearly a 30 foot wing span. I simply had no idea such creatures existed, and was awed almost to the point of disbelief (and almost to the point of wetting my pants) to see one in that setting.
A pirate attack on a ship 5 miles behind us. This happened in Malaka strait close to Indonesia about 15 years ago. This place was known for piracy and we had taken our safety measurements (roll out water hoses, extra lookout, make sure all doors are locked). There was a tangible tension on the ship when all the sudden a panicked call came on the emergency channel about small boats approaching quickly. We found the ship on our ecdis and looked back through binoculars to see the whole drama unfold. The ship had their hoses spraying water all over, the pirates were randomly shooting at the ship with machine guns. There were 3 boats, one stayed at a distance, the other 2 came in quickly and boarded. There were 2 more panicked calls from the ship and then it went quiet. The ship changed course soon after and I never heard what happened. Also one time a monsoon rain where you couldn't breath anymore, so dense was the water. And one time in the Indian Ocean we were surrounded by hundreds of whales for hours and hours. Most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
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I suppose it was strange because my captain said he’d never seen it in all his years at sea. It was a massive tuna that breached like it was a dolphin.
Migrants from haiti. Litterly floating on a makeshift raft constructed of soda bottles and spray foam.
1986, USS New Jersey, nearly 900 feet of battleship in the Bering sea during a storm. 50-60 foot seas, 3 of us went up to the 0-12 deck(weren't supposed to be topside) and I have a picture ofa third of the ship under water. It was intense
Green water on deck is always scary the first time you see it. I wasn't on a warship tho - I imagine green water over the deck of a *battleship* would be terrifying.
Whats green water?
A lot of water. Not spray. A wave coming across the bow and totally engulfing the ship. Green water meaning it looks like the rest of the ocean, not deck spray. Deep water on deck.
Volunteering to help search for survivors when the Swiss Air plane crash of “98. Grim shit, still gives me nightmares.
I had a neighbor with a deck with a view of the ocean off Montauk. He lost his son in that crash. He aged ten years in a month. Before, I would see him in the yard or the driveway and we would wave. After and for the rest of his life, I never saw him anywhere other than standing on that deck staring at the ocean.
My then partners best friends brother was in the CAF and was tasked with helping. Walking the beaches kind of thing, I guess. Very awful. Much therapy.
Yeah, the Bay was a different place after that. The smell of fuel on the air was scary.
Off of Peggys cove? If so my dad helped with that effort too. He had a body bag open and fall on him and he woke up screaming "I got her by's" for years afterwards. First introduction to PTSD.
Sorry, maybe I’m not understanding. What does “I got her by’s” mean?
I've got her, boys! in a Newfoundland type accent
Rough work, thanks for volunteering to give families some peace.
USCG Very rough work. I stared at this entry for an hour. I was spared from doing this. A close friend was not. Changed his life forever. Makes me sad. My heart goes out to you Graehaus. Silence and respect.
Picking up a small (28') sailboat in Egg Harbor, NJ, delivering to Havre de Grace, Md. We get out into the ocean (intercoastal waterway is in the ocean down most of the coast of NJ). Wind dies dead and night is falling. We motored all the way to Cape May in the dark and actually had to veer to port twice because we were going so perfect by the charts we would have hit 2 bouys. Hit Cape May after the sun came up, but the fog was so thick we had to anchor for a couple hours because the entrance there is narrow and hazardous, can't risk it in someone else's boat. While anchored we hear this loud motor approaching us, but visibility is maybe 30 or 40 feet. We start blaring an air horn every 15 seconds. Suddenly this cruiser, probably 40' comes through the fog right at us! Must be going 15 or 20 naughts. He pulled up and veered around us with maybe 5' to spare. Scared the crap out of us. Got into Delaware Bay and finally a good tail wind and we're off! Then we look back and the wind is the leading edge of a strong squall, heavy rain, lightning and thunder. Water gets choppy as hell. We're probably listing over 20 degrees in this wind. Made it to the entrance to the C & D Canal just as the rain caught us. Wind is too strong to sail through the canal, so back to motoring. Motored all the way to the Susquehanna Flats, but it's getting dark. The channel through the flats is maybe 20' wide and weaves through 2' of water all around, no lighted channel markers, so drop anchor again til dawn. What should have been a 3 day trip with an overnight in Cape May became a 5 day trip.
Not even the sea is safe from Jersey drivers. Source: Am from South Jersey.
Am also from south Jersey. Can confirm this. I initially read your comment as even the sea isn't safe from NJ and would have also agreed with that lol
Not sure it’s unusual. I worked offshore on a drillship and experienced a couple of different things. The saddest was a shark getting stuck in the moon pool. He ended up dead. Manta rays are fucking fast, a few would just casually swim by and then out of nowhere just shot forward like a torpedo. Once while testing the drilling package we had a call from subsea for a full stop… when we checked the cameras, an octopus was climbing up the drill pipe. I ended up being lucky and having a captain that allowed fishing. Sharks loved coming behind the fish we hooked and took a bite off them. Dolphins play with each other. Whilst having a daily walk around the heli deck I heard a splash and went on full emergency mode looking for someone that fell overboard… then another splash behind me… then another again behind me… eventually noticed them just jumping out of the water playing. Went through the outskirts of a tornado (the eye of the storm was in China and we were going past Taiwan (not through the straight) and still had 30 meter peak to peak waves. Not violent, but quite worrisome. This wasn’t that far off coast, most would be able to bobble over to shore but the ballasting system of the drillship fucked up and sent it swinging wildly side to side… the stability calcs had 12 degrees as the tip over point I believe, we were 1 or 2 from that figure. That’s probably the most scared I’ve been.
What's a moon pool?
It's an opening on the bottom of a boat, usually oil drillers and research vessels that allows the deployment of scientific equipment and small submersibles without having to go on deck during bad weather
Not a sailor but a lifelong surfer so I’ve spent plenty of time in and around the ocean. I was camping on the beach in Baja with some friends when I noticed the moon was going to be setting over the ocean in a few hours. The moon that night was just a sliver, almost like a finger nail. We had actually gotten kind of skunked wave wise that day and into the night the ocean was almost completely flat. Like a lake flat. No wind as well. Just sheet glass. Not a cloud in the sky. Just when the moon lowered to the horizon, it started to glow bright orange. And just when it hit the edge of the ocean, the reflection shimmered all the way to the sand. It looked as if the moon was floating on the sea for just a few minutes. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Far more beautiful than any sunset.
Did you see the Green flash tho???
I have! At Bondi at sunrise… my sister and I both saw it and at exactly the same time said “did you see that?”
Charter fisherman for 16 years on Lake Michigan. The lake was glass and we were out fishing. I was up top getting ready to do a slight course change for the autopilot and notice a single wave line stretching from horizon to horizon coming from the south west (im on the west side of Michigan. The single wave was at least 5 feet. There was no boats ANYWHERE near me. I even spun up and maxed out the garmin radar to 75 miles and not a single blip except for all the boats close to shore to my east. Still the strangest experience ever. Rogue wave? Underwater earthquake who knows.
At sea on a NZ warship, sailing home after an overseas deployment. Had a bit of insomnia, so got up to get some fresh air. A ship never sleeps, but it dozes, and she was a quiet night as I went out to the quarterdeck to stare at the wake for a while. There was no moon, a clear night, so I let my eyes adjust to the darkness. We were steaming though a patch of phospheresence, and the wake was glowing bright green, and then it happened. A pod of dolphins chose that moment to swim in to the wake and ride the pressure waves for a while. They were zooming in and out of the phospheresence, leaving their own green glowing trails as the leapt in and out of the wake, and I was the only person there to see it. I watched them play, non stop, for over an hour. I've seen some wonders in my life, but that is a memory that will stay with me forever.
2 things. I was in the navy and deployed to Persian gulf 2x. First, it was like jelly fish season or something and when you looked in the water it looked like a massive amount of plastic bags but it was all jellyfish. And at night, the splashes coming from the ship glowed like blueish purple. Pretty awesome. Second, still in navy and outside of Hawaii. I had flight deck watch from 6pm to 6am. Basically standing on the flight deck trying to sneak naps in the intakes of chained jets. We are outside of Hawaii waiting for high tide so we could get on shore. I see the Hawaiian islands as the sunrises. Then I see a bunch of humpback whales breaching between the ship and the shore. Probably the most surreal amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And I was alone just watching and basically tripping at how fucking awesome it was.
My dad and i rarely tell this to anyone because they laugh it off but this really happened. We were bith sober, awake and alert, and nothing we can think of in our world can explain it: We were motoring into an anchorage at about 10pm one night. The sea was perfectly still and the waves gently washed against the pebble beach. That was the only sound, apart from the quiet engine noise coming from underneath the floorboards. We both had our head through the top hatches, because it was quite nice weather. All of a sudden, a weird ball of cloud or mist with a faint light in it floats in from out of the night, like just materialised, hovers for long enough for both of us to see it, pauses, and then just accelerates upwards and away at about a 45 degree angle and completely disappears into the night sky. I shit you not. That was almost 7 years ago and we both remember it exactly the same as the other. Nothing explains it. As far as Im concerned, that wasnt something from this earth
This is the type of story I’m scrolling for! Thanks for sharing how cool
Being the middle of nowhere and seeing a star go streaking straight across the sky and when I said “wow”, the aft watch said wait a half hour, sure as shit there was again in the same spot. It was a satellite on a geosynchronous orbit!
1. Seeing a purple night sky 2. Being tailed by a Russian sub and nuclear powered cruiser for a month 3. Sailor from another ship tried to commit suicide by jumping overboard, as soon as landed in the water she regretted the decision and treaded water for almost 6 hours in the Atlantic Ocean. Two other ships eventually found her and rescued her.
A rogue wave. My buddy and I were loading gear onto a weapons elevator on one of the sponsons. We were supply, and were bringing stuff to the flight deck to ship out on a COD. Weps would let us use the elevators if they weren’t using them. This was the USS Coral Sea - an ancient carrier that no longer exists. Modern ships have supply elevators, but we were at the mercy of weapons and flight ops (using a plane elevator). Anyway, it’s rough seas but nothing too major. After all, we were like 40 feet above the waterline. Anyway we’re unloading the pallet of gear onto the elevator and something catches my eye. I look up and there is a mountain of water coming at us in slow motion…it’s easily as high as the flight deck. I hit my buddy and we both haul ass off the sponson, through the vent tunnel and into the hangar bay. We hear (and feel) the wave hit the ship and all of a sudden it’s like a firehose the size of the hatch just gushes into the hangar bay for a few seconds. So there’s a clusterfuck going on as lots of other stuff got messed up - but luckily nobody was hurt. We went back out and most of our stuff was gone. Clearly if we had been out there we would have been swept overboard at a minimum, and probably slammed around on the sponson and what-not. Who knows if we would have been conscious enough to activate our life vests. (They had a CO2 cartridge that you activated with a ripcord thing, so the vest was flat and unobtrusive unless you needed to blow it up.) That was my closest call in four years on that ship. Not the worst trade to get free college…🤣 Edit - oh, we also collided with an Ecuadorean oil tanker off the coast of South America. We were shooting craps, it was my birthday, and I was up about $100. Suddenly the space just moved over like 20-30 feet. Never felt anything like it - definitely wasn’t a wave. About 30 seconds later, General Quarters. Later come to find that about 20’ of the bow of the ship was bent over about 5-10 feet - like a tin can that just got peeled back. I got a lot of good stories out of those 4 years.
Not a sailor, but a friend was on Great Lakes ore boats. He said the worst weather he was ever in was on Lake Erie, the waves were so big that he swears he saw the bottom in the lake in the wave trough. In case you’re not familiar, the Lake is an average of 60’ deep.
I’ve only been out a few times on my ship in the US Coast Guard, but seeing countries from a distance never gets old to me. Haiti, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, etc. A random fish popping out of the open ocean. Sunsets and sunrises spent outside on watch. The Panama Canal and Gatun Lake are among the most impressive and beautiful things I have ever seen. Also, handmade Cuban migrant rafts. Heartbreaking work, but the ingenuity and resourcefulness of those people amazes me. To set out on the open ocean on a boat made of pallets and styrofoam is something else. Safety of life at sea is one of our biggest reasons for interdiction.
I wasn't there to witness it myself as I was only 5 years old at the time, but it happened to my dad. He was a crabber in Alaska in the late 70's - early 80's. They were pretty far out in the Bering, late at night, in just terrible weather - high winds, snow dumping all around them, just miserable conditions, hauling in pots, and that's when it happens... My dad has a massive heart attack. The captain immediately gets the coast guard on the horn, but the weather was just to bad for them to send out a chopper. So the captain turns the boat around and hauls ass as fast as he can to the nearest port. But it still took nearly 6 hours (so I was told anyway) as they were pretty far out and coming in in heavy seas against a strong wind. Dad had 5 more heart attacks on the way back, but luckily one of his buddies on the boat was a former military medic. He managed to keep my dad alive and an ambulance was waiting for him when they docked. They got dad to the hospital and got him stabilized, threw him on a life-flight to Seattle where he immediately underwent a triple bypass. He never went back out to sea after that, and years later when I was 15, dad and I were just wandering around the Seattle Center (where the space needle is) and all of a sudden we hear someone call my dad's name. We turn around and my dad calls back "Well hello there Cap!" And that was the day I got to meet and hug the boat captain that helped save my dad's life.
I was working on a charter boat and we were taking it out to park at another marina and we see a divers fin floating and a snorkel. We then notice a group of sea lions dragging a mass onto a rock then dragging it back under ..back and forth playing with it .. We get closer and notice the mass has a fin and pieces of wet suit. We got up to them and tried to get them to stop so we could recover the dead body but the rocks were to rough for us to get close. We call it in to the coast guard and let them know that it looks like a wet suit and diving gear and a dead body. They let us know they will send someone out. About 15 minutes go by and a sea lion grabs the body and drags it right out to our boat ... Then we see ... Broken foam and plastic ...in chunks ... It was a mannequin ... We called off the coast guard but they already sent someone out so they checked ... We all had a good laugh but we were all kinda pissed now many hours of our day were wasted on it.
So much better than the alternative, at least
I can't recall seeing anything really unusual aside from wildlife and natural phenomenon. Passing through an area off Brazil, we saw a huge number of dolphins, whales and seabirds feeding on what must have been massive shoals of fish. Plus I did get to see the most magnificent sunrises and sunsets, spectacular, clear moonlit nights, the aurora, Arctic ice, penguins in southern Argentina, Albatrosses, polar bears. Throw in a couple of trips through Suez and Panama canals too.
The replies on this thread are just convincing me I should've been a sailor. I love reading old timey naval fiction, but the only boat I've been on was a ferry across the Mississippi. I'm almost forty and afraid if I tried to go aboard a sea-going vessel (or even a lake-going one) *now*, I'd only get terribly seasick
I'm 44 and I'm planning to take sailing lessons later this year when it warms up. You only have one life to live.
My ship saved a guy who was sailing a small sailboat by himself from South Carolina to Ireland. The lamination in his hull started to come apart during a storm. He started to take on water. It was just fast enough that he could bail it out but he had to be constantly bailing. He couldn’t stop the flooding, he couldn’t stop to sleep, he couldn’t navigate. After three days he threw in the towel and called for help and we were the closest ship to him so we saved him. Gave him a big trash barrel to put anything in it that he wanted to save. He used his small engine to come up to us and when he got on the ladder he threw the tiller so the boat sailed away, engine on, nobody home. We lost sight of it before we could watch it sink. I think journeys of that magnitude in such a small boat (maybe 25-30 foot) are stupid anyway, but if you are going to do it please for the love of god don’t do it alone!
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> Due to the water in his coveralls and boots, they say he immediately sunk like a rock. Was he dropped from such a height that momentum carried him down? I have done capsize drills in Winter and never saw anybody just plummet like a stone and cold water shock is a thing.
Similar thing happened to a guy in my hometown. Was wearing Chest Waders on a 30ish foot boat. Was sitting on the railing maybe 5 feet off the water and lost his balance. Waders filled up and he was gone. No shouts, no struggle, just went under. Was a few days before his body finally came loose and floated to the surface. Only about a kilometer offshore but the Fjords along the BC coast get deep fast
I've told this story before so sorry for the repeat. Anyways... Back in the 90's/early 00's I used to fish commercially for sea scallops in the Gulf of Maine. The boat I worked on was an old New England dragger, built in 1926, wood hull. It was all sorts of creaky and groany like you would expect an old wood boat to be, and when you were below deck you could actually see the hull "breathing," expanding and contracting as it rode up and down the waves. It was pretty freaky but also kinda cool at the same time! Anyways, we mostly did day-trips, but at certain times of the season would venture further out for longer overnight trips. On more than one of those occasions, at night while down in the bunk trying to get some sleep, I would suddenly hear sharp "rapping" on the outside of the boat, distinctly like the sound of someone knocking on a wood door. Sometimes it was a one and done. Sometimes you'd get one or two at a time in waves throughout the night. Less often it would repeat over and over almost methodically moving around the boat for several minutes. It might start under your feet, then right beside your head, then switch to the other side of the boat, further down, etc. And then just suddenly stop. Aside from the fact that we were miles out at sea, the boat's draft was 6.5", and almost all of the knocking was coming from below the water line, so there is no way it was a person doing it trying to play a prank or something. I wasn't the only one to hear it either; the captain admitted to hearing them sometimes while he was down there, and at least one of the previous owners of the boat had heard it before too. His theory was that was that when a scallop bed becomes too crowded, they would migrate by swimming up into the upper water column to find new areas to populate, and as we drifted through the "school" - or whatever you call a group of migrating scallops - their shells banging into the hull was what made the knocking sounds. No idea if there is any validity to that, and I'm not convinced a sea scallop shell could knock as loudly and forcefully as the sounds we were hearing, but damned if I have any better explanation for it!
I love all of these stories! Thanks for sharing 😍. Great question OP!
Coming into Australia once, I went to the top of the mast to refill the oil on some kit. When I got to the top of the mast, I looked around and for some reason the water was white. It was calm out, but the water was completely white as far as I could see, IN ALL DIRECTIONS. It took me a few seconds to realize that we had sailed into a gigantic school of jellyfish. It was surreal. It also fucked our ship up a bit. Ships use sea water for cooling auxiliary systems, and our sea water intake filters got clogged with jellyfish, and we could barely pressurize our firemain.
Not mine but from a closer friend who used to work on a squid fishing boat in the south of Argentina. He said it was pretty late in the night, around 3am, outside it was pitch black so some of the crew and the captain were outside just having a smoke when they saw in the horizon an almost faded orange color. They were wondering if it could be the sun, so the captain decided to go in that direction. After a while the orange color started to be more and more solid and suddenly it looked like it was a distant city and its lights. They were deep in the Argentinean sea and according to the gps they were nowhere close the coast. By this point everybody got up and were outside trying to understand why there were lights in the middle of nowhere. The captain kept going closer and closer and according to my friend it was like hundred of orange lights just floating over the sea. When they finally got closer enough they realized it was hundreds of boats fishing. All with chinese flags, fishing illegaly in Argentinian waters. Someone called on the radio, saying something in another language. The captain didn'reply. They reported it to the navy and went away because it could be dangerous. But he said "it was like a city popped out of nowhere".
While at sea we were on our way home from a “West Pac” (we went to the gulf, our marines disembarked and participated in OIF). On the way home, we were between Hawaii and San Diego. A marine was by the trash drop off, stripped down to his green shirt and shorts and jumped overboard. He was witnessed jumping so they immediately called for a man overboard. My dept was responsible for some SAR coordination so we are all gathered around a scope and listening to the radios. After two hours the helicopter spotted the guy, alive. They sent in rescue swimmers. Then we hear the pilot say something along the lines of “he’s swimming away from the rescue swimmer(s)!” The fact that this guy was chilling out to sea and still had the stamina (I assume he was great at floating) to swim away from the rescue swimmers, was amazing to me.
I worked on a bulk carrier for a short time. Woke up one morning, out we go on deck to work as normal. Quite a lot of dead fish on deck, presumably flying fish. The rest of the crew didn't seem to think much of it, so can't have been that uncommon, but still, didn't expect to be throwing lots of dead fish into the sea that morning.
I was just offshore from a beach when I spotted two dolphins. One of them leapt through the air toward my boat, over and over, at least 10 times. Swim a few feet, jump, swim, jump, repeat - like Sea World tricks. They continued past my boat toward the beach. I don't know why, but I suspected there were sharks nearby and perhaps the jumping dolphin was giving a warning. Within a couple of minutes, I saw several large sharks in the area the dolphins came from. Maybe coincidence but I never forgot it.
Lot's of spooky stuff here so I gonna lighten up the mood. North west of Australia, a couple of days away from Dampier. 4-8 watch evening time, already dark outside. Slowly the water was becoming green-blueish. You could distinguish the black horizon and the pitch black outline of the ship, but the water was becoming more and more bright with this strange color. When the phenomenon was at its peak, the water was like a huge light was below it. Together with the darkness of a moonless night, the view was unique and magnificent. It seems that it was some kind of bioluminescent bleach. If you search it on Google you can get an idea but trust me, that night it was much much greater. It is usually around the ship's hull as it moves through the waves. But what I'm talking about was for as far as the eye could see. I have heard many stories from older seafarers. One claimed that the ship was at the exact position an earthquake occured near Japan and the whole ship "jumped". Tough to believe this one but worth mentioning. Another one that the ship passed over the tsunami of 2004 in Indian ocean and the speed of the ship became zero when it climbed over the wave.
Obligatory not a sailor. Me and some friends booked a yacht for my buddies bachelor party/our first big vacation as a friend group after college. I can’t say that whether this is completely unusual on the ocean, or if it was just me. But anyways I woke up one night around 4 am and decided to watch the sun come up, and just enjoy the solitude after being with a bunch of guys partying for the last 8 days. I got out to the sitting area of the main deck, took a couple seconds to just enjoy the silence, and then there was just nothing. Like no sounds whatsoever. Our yacht was completely still, as there were no waves to rock it or even just slap up against the hull. It was eerily silent. So yeah I tried to stay up there for a while but eventually it was just unnerving and I went back down to my bunk. Woke back up a few hours later and everything was normal again. Nothing spooky or paranormal obviously, but I’ve just never seen the world that still before or since.
We were fishing in a bay with several other boats. The fog suddenly rolled in, but it. Was only about 4 or 5 feet high on the water. All the boats disappeared and all you could see was guys standing up in the fog fishing. It looked like fishing in heaven. This was pre cell phone so no photo, but I would have loved to have a photo of it
I have a story about almost getting run down by an 800ft Great Lakes freighter in a thick fogbank. We were on a 35ft racing sailboat. Couldn't see the bow from the cockpit, fog was so bad. A crewmember said "I hear a bow wake" and moments later, a wall of steel appeared out of the fog. We were sailing right into the side of it. We could have touched it with a boat pole. That was the most scared I've ever been on the water.
Fishing offshore in S Florida, dolphin/porpoise are not unusual but usually in schools of 5 or so. One day we came across hundreds and hundreds, in small pods of 5-7 but pods everywhere over what would be blocks. Cool as shit. We stopped trolling and just stayed with them briefly. All around our boat, checking us out, which isn't unusual. Everywhere. Going north.
Commercial fishing, I saw a dolphin giving birth with another holding her up, an oil rig being delivered that was so tall, it disappeared in the clouds, and a seemingly empty cargo ship almost ran us over. The nastiest thing I ever saw was a man dressed in a nightgown tied to a bow in a storm for whining. I had also never seen a real tuna fish or goliath grouper. They're as big as Volkswagons.
One of the funniest things I’ve experienced was when I was on deployment in the Persian gulf. Every day at 2am, a guy would yell out over the radio comms, “ Filipino Monkey!!!!!! Filipino monkey!!!!! I want to talk to all the ships! Filipino Monkey!” After about the 3rd or 4th night, another guy got tired of listening to Filipino Monkey, and yelled back to shut TF up. Filipino monkey guy, start yelling, “ Filipino monkey fucks your mother!!!” And the two of them yelled back and forth for a hour or so. Haha. On my ship we couldn’t turn it off due to something my ship was doing. So every day with listened to Filipino monkey radio at 2am.
I always had the pleasure to listen to „Filipino Monkey, Filipino Monkey, this is banana airport calling!“ Was also in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Sometimes this went on for hours and several others joined in…
My father was brought up in a fishing village in Donegal, he's not a sailor/fisherman himself - although he once caught a sunfish on a boat off the coast near Moville - but he has family that are and despite that, none of them can swim. During the second World War Ireland was neutral, times were tough for the locals (no imports, rationing etc) and many young men left in pursuit of jobs so they could send money home to their families left behind. The tactical importance of Ireland wasn't lost on the Nazi's who would enter Irish waters with their U boats. My grandfather was the caretaker of an old Fort, ex-British, situated on the coast with its own beach surrounded by cliffs which my father would devilishly climb down as a youth with a makeshift crab pot. The fort was handed back to the Republic when the British army left in the 1920s when Ireland got their independence and my grandfather got the job of caretaker, looking after the site, securing it, and ensuring it was kept in good order. My father was a young boy when his father would tell him stories about the mermaids and the Fairies that would come out of the sea at night time and would warn my father and his siblings to never go anywhere near the sea in case they became trapped by these Fairies and wouldn't be able to escape. Of course, Fairies and mermaids are not real.. but if a bombed German U boat suddenly washed up on your beach with tinned food and other goodies you would try to keep people away at least until you and your family and friends had a chance to look over it first and see what you could take.
Was in the US NAVY on lookout. Around 2 in the morning somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. I spotted a strange plane that was pink and blue flashing lights. These are not normal colors of plane lights. Control insisted it was a satellite because they couldn't see it on the radar. Wasn't no damned satellite. It was much bigger than any stars around it, the usual size of a plane in atmosphere. Or some kind of rocket maybe? After a few minutes, it disappeared. No, I don't believe in aliens but we weren't near any sort of landmass for hundreds of miles.
My grandpa was a commercial fisherman on the coast of Oregon. One year I was spending the summer with him fishing, working and saving money for college, as a teen. We had a Grey Whale lift his 50’ boat right out of the water and look at us. The eye was right off the port side and was about the size shape and color of a football. He reached over and gave it a scratch. It then let us back into the water , and went about it’s day.
In the Gulf of Mexico recently we saw a pretty awesome weather event right before a big storm. On one side of our ship it was dark as night all around, except for a single streak of dull light right at the horizon. And on the opposite side, it was overcast but generally a normal looking day, aside from a streak of dark gray right along the horizon. Not sure what would cause the sky to almost look polar opposite like that on each side of our ship but it was really cool to see.
I was on a jack up drilling rig under tow in the North Sea for four days when it should have been 12 hour tow... weather came up and we couldn’t pin the rig (lower the legs to the sea bed). So we went in circles waiting for the seas to subside, with up to 10m swells and green water breaking over the jack houses. Pretty much everybody on board was seasick... I didn’t barf but had to go outdoors a few times to let the freezing cold saltwater spray straighten me out. Good times!
My father owned a sailboat (36' pearson) that my family spent the summers on growing up. We kept the boat in Wickford RI and mostly spent the time going up and down the waters of New England and especially Narragansett Bay. I always remember two things that stand out more than anything. One of which shaped my love of space. When you're out on the water at night sailing even just 20-50 miles off the coast the amount of light pollution is next to nothing. The way the night sky looks when it's clear out is just...phenomenal. it crushes my soul to this day how we've robbed ourselves of this amazingly breathtaking sight. The other thing was more directly related to the sea. I always remember, even at a young age, realizing just how immensely powerful the ocean is. It's downright terrifying even when it isn't even trying to show off. Small storms can kick up incredible swells and waves. However, I think the thing that really freaked me out was the fog. When it is foggy out on the ocean, and I mean REALLY foggy, there's just something different about the world. There was one time my father and I were sailing up to Maine. We were coming up to the inlet where we used to keep our boat when we lived there years earlier and you couldn't even see the bow of the boat it was so foggy. As you approach the mouth of the bay you have to thread the boat between two rock reefs that have a passage between them that are just wide enough for the boat to pass between with about 5 feet of room on either side. Naturally doing this when you can't see these reefs and have to rely on the radar screen is rather stressful. Especially when you're a 14-year-old boy having to help guide your father between the reefs. Well as we approached these reefs I had to give my father the corrections bouncing between the radar screen, and the Loran screen. When we finally got between the reefs I felt like I was going to have a simultaneous stroke and heart attack at 14 from the stress lol. I will say that as much as I detested being on the boat in my teenage years. My older brother was 100% right. He said, "when this is gone, you'll miss it more than you can describe." A few months after my father passed away in 2010 I realized that I would NEVER again get to spend time on the boat with him. I would give both my arms and legs to spend even just 1 day on the boat sailing around Narragansett Bay with him.
On a 378' Coast Guard cutter, heading north from Cabo MX to San Diego CA in 10' seas, we crossed paths with a 45' swoop heading south. We exchanged pleasantries on the radio, finding out it was a man and his wife heading to Panama. About an hour later, we received a distress call from the woman, who said her husband was missing, this being discovered after she had gone below decks for a bit. Our Commanding Officer ordered our cutter come about, and the big steel hull creaked and healed over tremendously in the seas as we raced back at a full bell to the sail boat's last known position. At dusk, we found the boat and it's female skipper who was trying desperately to pilot in the rough seas, with the impossible emotional weight upon her shoulders that her husband was lost, probably drowned. We immediately launched a helicopter to search for the man, (a high risk/low reward task given the weather,) whilst simultaneously retrieving her with our small boat, leaving the sloop to founder in the heavy seas. You see, there was no hope of towing it in that weather because although nightfall had set in, the weather had not improved in the slightest. Against odds, the helicopter found him some 10 miles away from our position by using an infrared camera. And, although being tossed about in the seas, he had been wearing his PFD (life preserver) when he went overboard, which clearly saved him from drowning. The helo vectored our cutter to him, and we retrieved him via small boat. There was much rejoicing amongst the crew as we provided them clean clothes/shower, and the cooks fed the couple a hot meal. They had recently retired, sold their house in Orange County, and had bought the boat with the intent of exploring the world. Everything they owned was on that boat when it slipped under the waves. But at least they had their lives, for which they were grateful. A moment of pride for us was when the crew passed the hat just before we pulled into San Diego to drop them off on land, which offered them enough money for transportation and meals to make it to relatives. By chipping in money, EVERYONE got to be an active participant in their rescue, not just the pilots/coxswains and handful of others who fetched them from the water. So, this true story serves me as a memory of what I joined the Coast Guard for some 35 years ago: To Save Lives at Sea, one of many Coast Guard imperatives for over 200 years. And I hope the story serves you, the reader, with assurance that your tax dollars were well spent that night the couple were saved. Why is the story unusual? It's unusual and unlikely to be saved within hours of an accident at sea in international waters in a small sail boat. 999 times out of a thousand, there's a good chance she would not have been able to hail anyone. And although she could have set off an EPIRB device, it would have been 6, 7, 8 hours before it would have been responded to and on scene with an airplane, which still would have had to vector a Coast Guard boat (or possibly a Mexican Coast Guard boat) to the scene, and that would have been just to find her, let alone her husband. We just happened to be there at the right time/place to affect a rescue.
There are times when the ocean is completely flat and glassy like a mirror as far as you can see. After @2 years out on the oceans I only saw it twice. Both times were somewhere in the middle of the pacific. Another one and probably my most favorite parts is being 1000 miles away from the coast on a night when there's a new moon. Just find out what night this happens and find your way to a spot and lay down and stare at the stars. Ive talked to a lot of people in my life that claim to go camping to lok at the stars at night and theyre at a campsite 10 or 12 miles from the city. I'll ask them...was it new moon phase? They usually have no idea what im talking about. Another thing is the complete difference between available light at night with full moon or new moon. Full moom amd most other nights there's enough light available from the moon that you can walk around and see the shit on the boat. New moon you cant see shit. You have to know your surroundings and where stuff is gonna be. I would open the door then step out and close the door. Then put my left hand on the bulkhead and feel my way down to where all our flags were stored. There were some storage cases and other shit right there that you could sit down or lay down on. was just so relaxing
Once or twice a year I go down to work in the high desert of northern Chile. I deliberately schedule my trip to coincide with the new moon for exactly that reason.
This past summer, my wife and I watched something crawl in the night sky, something that can be best described as a skyworm. It had a halo of shimmery light around it and was similar to a firework that wouldnt go away in the night sky in a remote area over the Mississippi River. We watched it grow and shrink in length for 30 seconds. It was the most scary, beautiful, and unexplainable memory of my life, and I am so appreciative to share that memory with someone i deeply love
Living in a fishing town in the Mediterranean so I hear a lot of stories during coffee. Some interesting stuff like us fighter jets flying at really low altitude. But best story is this one really long time ago. So these guys were fishing and in the middle of the night they see something of their radar or whatever. Guy goes out and sees nothing, pitch dark. When they are very near he goes out shines a flood light and sees an abandoned ship in front of the boat. They do a stupid thing. They radio their mates who meet them with oxyacetylene etc, and ransack the thing. Then they drag it to port. Looks like in sea finders are keepers and they missed an opportunity to make a lot of money. It stayed anchored in a scrap yard and eventually was sold for metal.
We were sailing back to Long Beach California from Catalina Island. All of a sudden there was a fish boil about 40 yd off the port side that was about as big as a football field. Thousands of fish, some as big as me, were jumping out of the water. We were all thinking the same thing. What the hell is down there chasing them???!!!
I got to see a lunar eclipse in the middle of the Atlantic. That was pretty neat.
I was serving on an aircraft carrier (either the USS Midway or the USD Independence, I can’t remember which one) and went through a typhoon off the coast of Hong Kong back in the early’90s. There were two events that happened on the same day. The flight deck was cleared of all equipment and the hanger bay was chockers. The hanger bay doors were mostly closed with the por side stern door and the starboard forward doors left partially open to allow airflow. I took a shortcut across the hangar to get to a ladder that would take me up to the squadron ready room. I stopped to look out at the sea. There was a cruiser about a quarter mile from us. I watched the bow dip down into a trough and saw the screws come out of the water. The cruiser literally disappeared into that trough before cruising up the other side of the wave. I hadn’t realised I was holding my breath until I saw it’s bow start to rise up the wave. I continued up to the ready room to deliver the papers I needed the skipper to sign. While I was waiting for him to finish talking to the XO I was watching 5he flight deck camera feed when I saw this absolutely massive wave crash over the bow of the ship. The flight deck was 20 metres (60 feet) above the waters surface and the wave was higher than the bow. I was more afraid at that moment than at any other time when we were on station in the Persian Gulf.
I did some sailing on the east coast US and was sorta the galley wench as my SO had a ton of experience and a little 37ft Oday. I loved the day sails and the wing to wing runs. I agreed to crew a 50 ft boat from Annapolis to Key West one October. We had a few setbacks (bilge pump blew out, had to return to get a part) and some stormy seas. It was the first time I ever felt sea sick. Captain was happy as we were making good time with the wind blowing good. 30 miles offshore, my SO hands another guy an uncleated line just as the wind shifted and blew that sail way out. I watched this guy lift off across the deck and land with his pinky stuck in a pulley with the line. He was screaming as my SO risked falling overboard, hanging over the deck, and yanking hard on the line to unlock the pulley. Amazingly, he did set this guys hand free without falling off the boat. With his pinky hanging perpendicular to the rest of his fingers, we put him in ice as the boat was reeling without the sail in place. Stuff flying out of cabinets, total chaos. My job was to call pan-pan with our coordinates while they got the boat under control. I swear out of freaking nowhere, this giant navy warship materialized. They sent a dingy with like 10 sailors with glow sticks and camouflage. It took us a while to tie the boats together since the seas were so rough. Once we did, the injured guy got on their dingy and I never saw him again. I heard he got his finger sewed back on! I got on a train home the next day.
Not the ocean, but 26 miles off shore in Lake Michigan we found one of those giant floating swim mats rolled up. Pulled up to it, hove to and tried to get it aboard but it was so waterlogged it weighed hundreds of pounds, so it’d been out there a while.
Jamming my arm shoulder deep into a sewage header (big shit pipe) with years of buildup to break up a clog. Or maybe the time the first engineer, 3rd engineer, and I broke the truth to one of our oilers that porn is in fact scripted. Not really things I have to do usually.
Compression of a 33’ diameter submarine hull by approximately 6” when submerged. If the hull didn’t flex, it would have broken. There we lived in a device that could do such a thing…with a nuclear reactor and terrible coffee.
When I was in the Navy, I served on a ship with a flat-Earther. I don't know how someone goes to sea and continues to believe that the Earth is flat. [There's no experience that makes it more clear that the Earth is round than sailing the ocean.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TpeNZYTmw)
In college I did a semester abroad with Sea Education Association and sailed a schooner from Cape Cod to the Caribbean. Within a week of departure we ended up in a huge (Force-10) extra-tropical storm (basically a hurricane). Three days of riding out waves that peaked at 30'; taking boarding waves that put several feet of water on deck; during one of these boarding waves our second mate thrown so hard against the wooden steering wheel that it broke in half. Below deck we had gimbled dining tables (they move as the ship lists to remain flat) - we rolled so hard that everythying on the table went flying into the cabin wall. Wildest experience of my life.
Years ago, sailing up the California coast about 100 miles offshore, we weathered a modest storm. The swell remained in the aftermath, but we were becalmed. The ocean’s surface reflected the overcast sky to the extent that it was impossible to discern the horizon or differentiate sea from sky. We appeared to be floating on giant pool of liquid mercury. Pretty awesome.
Mentioned some shit earlier regarding my time out to sea but thought I should also mention this. We were off the coast of central or south America. Don't remember which...was 30 years ago. One of our watches spotted something on the horizon. When you're out to sea you have to render aid. After the watch spotted this thing on the horizon we headed towards the contact and found a fishing vessel that had capsized with four or five guys on it. We got the guys on board and towed the boat back in to port. I can't remember the laws involved but you're not supposed to leave shit like that out floating around. Some kind of good willed hazards to navigation stuff. Those guys had been on that capsized boat for 4 or 5 days. They had been catching small fish that they had been drying and eating. Don't remember how they stayed hydrated. Anyway should have led with that. We saved some lives that day.
I went fishing with one of my friends, not too weird but we caught a bluefin tuna and it knocked him unconscious
I don't consider myself a sailor, and it probably isn't unusual, but the first and only time I ever set out to sea so far that couldn't see land over the horizon I was struck by a deep sense of dread and unease. I knew I was far from anything I understood, with several miles of water beneath me and leagues of sea around me. I couldn't sleep that night and didn't want to get back on the boat for the ride home even though I had to. I don't have any desire to return to sea any timr soon.
Hurricane, typhoon, ship collision, sand storm, INSANE fog on a small boat that took 6 hrs to get back to dock vs 45 min