Whenever you set sail you have no idea what is waiting for you out in the deep blue ocean. The ocean is full of remarkable things that leaves you guessing. Here's just a few....
“If I stayed I would have witnessed something amazing…”
“I was coming on watch on the 2000-0000 and the Captain (“old man’) was covering the first mate’s watch as he had a long night with draught survey/ stability calculations. I remembered I’d left my laundry down in the dryer and asked the Captain if he would excuse me to go and grab my laundry (1 deck down), he agreed and I went down to the laundry for 2 minutes to put my clothes in my cabin and by the time I got back to the bridge the old man exclaimed “DID YOU F**KING SEE THAT?! DID YOU F**KING SEE THAT?!!!” I said “no captain, see what?” apparently a meteor flew across the ship’s bow not too far from us, in the 100 years of his and the lookout’s combined years at sea they both said they had never seen anything like it. I was kicking myself, If I stayed I would have witnessed something amazing.”
“I was caught in an electrical storm while fishing…”
“I was caught in an electrical storm while fishing. This was in Lake Ontario, running 8 foot graphite rods on downriggers. I was standing on the deck watching the rods, and I noticed blue sparks start jumping from rod to rod. A split second later, lightning struck directly behind the boat. That was probably the loudest natural sound I will ever hear in my life.”
“This was a darkness as dark as possible at sea…”
“A full solar eclipse. We saw one in the middle of the English Channel and it was the strangest thing. There was thin cloud but the sun was visible through it. We were within the total eclipse zone and could see the shadow coming from miles away. It looked like the biggest, most angry storm I’ve ever seen. Generally the darker the clouds the more it’s going to hurt. This was a darkness as dark as possible at sea during the day. Talked to my dad about it afterwards and we both felt a real uneasiness getting worse and worse the nearer it got. Our bodies and subconscious were readying us for dealing with a really sh*tty/dangerous situation. It was just like how people sometimes describe sending a ghost. A cold chill and feeling really on edge. It really was like a ghost storm. A lot of sailing becomes instinctual after a while and you get a feeling about what’s coming from watching the clouds and waves off on the horizon. The eclipse gave off every sign of absolute nastiness but passed without any real world effect other than darkness. Really creepy.”
“You start to see lights everywhere around you…”
“I’ve been sailing all my life and have somewhere around 6,000 sea miles as well as years and years of inland dinghy racing experience. The sea just does strange things sometimes. Wind against tide and underwater obstacles causing weird currents create unnatural waves and it starts to feel like the sea is just throwing water at you at random. Fog at sea at night really f**ks up your senses too. Everything is quiet and you can’t see anything but the boat immediately around you. You keep looking for lights on other ships and listening for fog horns or the sound of engines in the distance and your brain starts playing all manner of tricks on you. In a busy shipping lane it’s a serious business and in a very real way it could be life or death if you miss a ship that hits you and sinks you. You start to see lights everywhere around you. You start hearing engines creeping up on you. You stop your boat and cut the engine to see if you’re hearing anything real and you enter an even stranger world of sensory deprivation. It’s eerie as hell.”
“We both turn to see a figure dressed in black…”
“It was a foggy night off the shore of Long Island and I was on a 75 foot schooner. The fog was so thick that you couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of you. The captain tells me there is no point to continue my watch at the bow of the ship and him and I start talking at the stern. About that time there is thunk on the side of the ship. We both turn to see a figure dressed in black flowing robes walking towards us on the outside of the ship. The robes were scratching down the outside of the ship. It keeps coming closer and is high enough in the air that the top was about even with our heads. It turns out that it was just a black flag to mark a lobster pot, but for those first few seconds it was terrifying. Lol”
“On the other hand, he said seeing the…”
“My father raced a 42′ sailboat from Marion, MA to Bermuda, twice. He said the scariest part of it was just how utterly pitch-black dark it is out there on a cloudy moonless night. They had to reset a breaker or something like that, and had to turn the running lights off at one point; Dad said it was nearly impossible to tell if his eyes were open or closed. On the other hand, he said seeing the clear night sky full of stars with zero light pollution was absolutely breathtaking. It wasn’t until then that he understood how ancient celestial navigation was possible.”
“The scariest though is being on the…”
“I’ve been on large container ships up and down the coast here. Whenever you’re in the middle of a storm its quite exciting. Its hard to describe the sea in the middle of a storm. The swells get huge and rough. When lightning hits the sea you see it light up a huge area and start to froth. The scariest though is being on the bridge in a trough between two swells and seeing the water rising up on either side of you like a wall.”
“It freaked me out so much…”
“Toilets on boats are usually plumbed with sea water because it makes no sense to sh*t in your limited drinking water. One night I was taking the watch on a long haul sail up the US east coast. We were rounding the FL keys about to point towards Maine. I had to use the head, so I went below and pumped some water into the bowl. It was glowing in the dark. It freaked me out so much. Turns out there is photolumanescent phytoplankton in the water which will glow of pumped into a dark toilet bowl. No longer scary, actually pretty neat.”
“At this point we had all slowly moved to the…”
“Not a Sailor, but I was on a fishing charter boat on lake Erie, it was around 5am in the morning, and the water was scary calm and glass like, and it was so foggy you could not see more than 30 feet if that, we all started hearing this plopping sound, like somebody was slapping the water with open hands, it kept getting louder and closer, At this point we had all slowly moved to the other side of the boat not knowing WTF it was, even the boat captain was standing there in total silence as we all just stood there and listened to this plopping sound getting closer and closer, and to the shock of us all, a deer swam by the boat, yes a deer, it looked to be a very large buck with at least 10 points on his rack, we were more than 10 miles off shore so it made no sense at all! can you say FREAKY.”
“One of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever felt…”
“On the Pacific side of South America, I believe we were off the coast of Peru or Chile, can’t quite remember…….I was working the night shift so I was out on the flight deck to watch the sun come up. Strangest damn thing I’ve ever seen….the ocean was dead calm like a lake. Seriously, no ripples, no waves, just dead calm. Like you found a small pond up in the mountains that was completely undisturbed. The moon was bright in the sky still as the sun had not yet begun to rise but there was still a lot of light from it. The moon made it feel all the more eerie. And besides the noise from the ship, it was completely silent. One of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever felt.”
“So, power is out, emergency lights are on, and…”
“I’ve been in the US Navy for almost a decade and I am currently on my third deployment to the western pacific. I work on communications equipment and spend a fair amount of time just scanning different frequencies to see what I come across. A couple years back we were 30-40 NM off the coast of the Philippines, it was just over the horizon, and the ship lost power. Lights, engines, everything just went silent; I don’t want to say this is regular, but it’s happened enough throughout my career that it doesn’t bother me half as much as it should. So, power is out, emergency lights are on, and the UPS are keeping comms up until the engineers can get the power back up. I am doing my usual, scanning HF freqs for anything coming out of the PI when my receiver starts picking up….the most awful, interesting, horrific sounds I have ever heard in my life. I’ve heard all types of interference, it wasn’t that…I’ve heard people trying to go over a encrypted circuit without crypto, and it wasn’t that. It raised the hair on my neck and arms, and made me feel very, very small. It felt like I was sitting there for hours while these sounds crawled under my skin, like I was traveling through the warp without a Gellar field. After about 5 minutes it’s suddenly stopped and the power came back on. I will never forget the sounds I heard.”
“When we reached the coordinates…”
“A guy in Florida gave the boat I was on coordinates for somewhere between the Turks and Caicos banks and Hispaniola, saying there was something ‘mind-blowing’ out there and we had to check it. I guess he told the captain what it was, but he wanted to keep it a surprise. When we reached the coordinates, (which required some motoring,) we found a… source of constant bubbling. We didn’t really understand what it was until the captain threw a bucket over the side and filled it up from the bubbling water and drank out of it. It was a pillar of fresh water coming from some vent in the ocean floor. Bizarre. A guy in Florida gave the boat I was on coordinates for somewhere between the Turks and Caicos banks and Hispaniola, saying there was something ‘mind-blowing’ out there and we had to check it. I guess he told the captain what it was, but he wanted to keep it a surprise. When we reached the coordinates, (which required some motoring,) we found a source of constant bubbling. We didn’t really understand what it was until the captain threw a bucket over the side and filled it up from the bubbling water… and drank out of it. It was a pillar of fresh water coming from some vent in the ocean floor. Bizarre.”
“Suddenly in the reflection…”
“When I was 19, I had just gone to sea for the first time with the US Navy. A few days after heading to the gulf of Mexico for a few weeks of Drug Ops, we were dispatched to the straights of florida because Fidel Castro had opened the doors, and people were fleeing Cuba in droves. It was called Operation Able Vigil. One night after standing watch all day over dozens of people who’d been pulled out of the water, I was standing on the 03 level of the ship with a chief, smoking a cigarette (it was the only exterior surface of the ship not coverage with refugees). It was a full bright moon that you could see reflecting on the oceans surface, and we were talking about how crazy this all was, and looking at all of the other Navy and Coast Guard ships on the horizon doing slow circles looking for people like we were. Suddenly in the reflection of the moon, we both saw something pass through the reflection. He looked at me, and I nodded that yes. I too had seen something. He took off like a shot to the bridge, and ship started to circle back towards the thing we’d seen. It was a person in a life preserver just floating in the middle of the straights of Florida, hoping someone would see him. There we were on this 2 billion dollar missile loaded warship doing slow circles, looking for people in the water. All told my ship saved, and/or transported 1800 people back to Gitmo for processing. Keeping in mind, Ships crew was only about 400 people. It left a big impression on 19 year old me.”
“It’s pretty wild to see, especially in the triangle…”
“During my time in the Navy, we once transited through the Bermuda Triangle at night. Being the Navy, there was plenty of people playing on the whole eeriness of our location as it was. But at one point I stepped outside to have a look. It is typically quite dark on a Navy ship in the middle of the ocean at night, so it was quite a shock to see the water actually glowing green where we were. It looked a lot like we were sailing through an ocean full of the chemicals you find in light sticks. It’s pretty wild to see, especially in the triangle. I found out later that it was most likely bioluminescence from plankton in the water.”
“I’m sitting with my feet off the edge of the boat, and…”
“When I was younger, my dad and I went deep sea fishing all the time. The creepiest thing that ever happened to me was when we decided to do a little more surface fishing further out on the open ocean, rather than fish for grouper and whatnot. So I’m sitting with my feet off the edge of the boat, and my dad hooks a fish. It seems pretty big, based on the way it was pulling, so I look over to see if he needs help. Then something slowly brushes my legs. I looked down and there was a 4-5′ barracuda brushing against my legs. I froze, and seconds later it shot off. When my dad felt the line go slack, he started reeling in faster. The barracuda had bitten off most of the fish. It was only a mouth on a hook, really. Pretty creepy.”
“First off my brother always gets sea sick…”
“First off my brother always gets sea sick whenever he’s on a boat. Stupidly he came on the boat with me to go fishing since he thought he wouldn’t get sick this time. We head out to go fishing near the great barrier reef. Well, my brother couldn’t handle it and starts to get sea sick. He decides to go for a swim to settle his stomach and less than a minute after getting back into the boat a 17 foot great white shark went under the boat. Wheww he got back in time.”
“Spectacular sights but also kinda terrifying…”
“Merchant seaman here. I have travelled world wide with over 50,000 miles under my belt having crossed the Atlantic, Indian and pacific oceans multiple times. The thing I have seen a few times that really creeped me out were while on watch at night. And on several occasions witnessed meteorites similar if not bigger to the ones caught on dash cams in Russia. Also seemingly close to the ship. Even audible to the human ear if outside on the bridge wings. Spectacular sights but also kinda terrifying.”
“It felt like I was sailing through space…”
“Sailing through the Bahamas, you can sometimes get relatively calm spots of water even if the wind is blowing a good 10-15 knots. One night it was that eery sort of calm, clear and I was at the helm by myself. We sailed through a patch of phosphorescent bacteria and the ocean glittered in such a way that you couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the water began, it felt like I was sailing through space.”
“My uncle looked up to see the sun behind a wave and…”
“I have family who sailed around the world. One day in the North Atlantic, their sailboat was going over some GIGANTIC swells. They didn’t have breaks at the top, so it was safe, but the boat was rising and falling way beyond the neutral. At the bottom of a trough my uncle looked up to see the sun behind a wave and the silhouette of a whale inside, above him.”
“Haze cleared up about an hour later, and…”
“My father and I were sailing from Key West to Tampa, takes about a week. Like midnight we saw running lights ahead of us, green and red. Was too dark and hazy to see anything besides the lights, followed them for 3 hours or so before we heard a really loud noise, kinda like when an old wood door opens but REALLY REALLY deep, then the lights were gone. Haze cleared up about an hour later, and we could see ocean in every direction during the sunrise. Nothing there.”
“I called all hands on deck and we stopped the boat dead…”
“At about 3am, I was alone at the helm, with everybody else asleep down below. Suddenly, I hear a beep from the radar, which had been set to warn about anything within a quarter mile of our vessel. Looking around, I couldn’t find anything obvious within that range, so I put the boat on autopilot and went down below to investigate. Typically, other ships show up as little blobs, but for some reason, the radar was registering a long, solid line, the length of the screen, directly in front of us. And it was getting closer… fast. Heart racing, I went back on deck to see what could possibly be registering such a bizarre signature. Eyes slowly adjusting, I looked into the dark, peering as hard as I could to make out something, anything…and then I saw it. Not more than 100 yards ahead was a 20-foot-high, unlit, rock-solid wall. Right there in the middle of the ocean, looming and, by this point, making its presence known by the sound of waves lapping against it. I was absolutely petrified. Mind you, this was before chart plotters were widely used, and we were navigating with paper charts. I was utterly confused, and supremely terrified. I called all hands on deck and we stopped the boat dead, pulled down the sails and started the engine. Slowly, painstakingly, we picked our way through what was by that time increasingly apparent: a full-on construction zone. Our charts were only 2 years old, but apparently, Singapore had undergone a monumental land reclamation (or perhaps “newclamation” since it was never there to begin with) project in the meantime. Even once we found our way out, nobody slept for the rest of the night. To this day the image of magically appearing dark walls in the middle of the ocean haunts my dreams.”
“We were getting tossed around like a rag doll and…”
“Coast Guard here, I’ve sailed the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific. Two Stories. The Strangest would be a UFO, I sh*t you not. I was on mid watch 0000-0400 or midnight to 4 am. I was the lookout and noticed this light in the distance, we weren’t by land and the radar didn’t show anything, I watched this light gain and lose altitude and go back and forth for over an hour. I was pretty transfixed by this thing, I wish it could of gotten closer. The Scariest would be 60ft waves. We were off the Oregon coast when a big a** storm came down from the Gulf of Alaska. We were getting tossed around like a rag doll and nobody was allowed to go outside but you could still go to the bridge and such. Well I went up there and saw waves passing us that were 10ft higher than the bridge. I went up on deck to where the lookout was and for as far as the eye could see there were massive waves. That storm f**ked our boat up, a lot of stuff got bent or smashed, lost all the gear off the fan tail. It was crazy, made me feel very small.”
“My dad said he offered a free lobster to the coroner…”
“Not me, but my father back in his commercial fishing days noticed that there was a t-shirt in the middle of his net after one tow. After a little investigation he found that it was not a shirt, but a human torso wearing a shirt. He said he was terrified that he would open the net and a head would roll out onto his feet, but it didn’t happen. His captain radioed ahead and they brought the torso back to the docks, where they were met by the police and a coroner. They were eventually able to identify the body (based on the clothing) as a victim of a plane crash that had occurred fairly recently. My dad said he offered a free lobster to the coroner, who graciously accepted it until he found out that it had been found in the net with the body. After that he got angry and told him to throw it back.”