Sailor Stories Who've Seen Everything In Ocean (r/AskReddit)

sailors have read it what's the weirdest / creepiest thing you've seen at sea 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 brakes 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 away than the silhouette of a whale inside above him something about the immensity of whales in the ocean itself is very overwhelming and frightening that image is horrifying to me but I would love to see it anyway when diving a huge saner net drifting towards you it wasn't anchored or attached to anything just a huge whirling cloud of death full of barnacles and dolphin skeletons and decomposing fish diving more ways to dive and parachuting come to think about it the majority of activities has more ways to dive in parachuting they say 9 out of 10 people don't even make it to the ground 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 berth 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 turned 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 law fishing up near the Great Barrier Reef and my brother who gets seasick 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 went under the boat I've been told that unassisted swimmers don't resemble their prey on the other hand I've also been told that Santa Claus is real while that's true sharks tend to bite stuff they're curious about tiger sharks for example you want to stay well clear of because they'll take a bite out of anything toilets on boats are usually plumbed with seawater because it makes no sense to in your limited drinking water one night I was taking the watch on a long-haul sail up the US East Coast we were round in 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 freaked me out so much turns out there is photoluminescent for the plankton in the water which will glove pumped into a dark toilet bowl no longer scary actually pretty neat this huge turtle as big as evokes Virgin before it went right under our boats the stars when you're three days from the nearest land and it's a clear night more stars than you could ever imagined and enough shooting stars to make you run out of wishes it was also pretty cool being stuck in the Panama Canal with a los angeles-class submarine when they had to shut down the locks before we knew what was going on there were helicopters everywhere dropping off Marines to set up around the Loch California to Los Angeles 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 in the 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 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 I would expect a coroner to care significantly less not a sailor that I was on a fishing charter boat on Lake Harry it was around five a.m. 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 of 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 dear and by the boat yes a dear it looked to be a very large buck with at least ten points on his rack we were more than ten miles offshore so it made no sense at all can you say freaky that would be the most epic hunting story ever bear fishing story how was the fishing trip great I got a 10-point buck wait what fog 360 degrees of thick fog you can hardly see a couple feet in front of your face very creepy and water spouts there's a pretty cool though madam that fog must have been pretty hot in fact at 360 degrees I think it's referred to as steam well I'm no sailor but am in the military on 9 / 11 2013 I was on a ship in the Red Sea we were having a Simonian remembrance of 9 / 11 when up floats a dead body right next to the ship we were all locked down pretty quickly so that they could send out a couple small boats to retrieve it never did hear anything more about it pretty damn weird if you ask me though but layton back for a visit guys guys please take me back it's lonely down here I've been in the US Navy for almost a decade and I'm 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 to 40 nm off the coast of the Philippines it was just over the horizon and the ship lost power lights engines everything just went Islands 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 comes up until the engineers can get the power back up I'm doing my usual scanning HF freqs for anything coming out of the pie when my receiver starts picking up the most awful interesting terrific 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 our encrypted circuit without crypto and it wasn't that it raise 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 walk without a jelly-filled after about five minutes it suddenly stopped and the power came back on I will never forget the sounds I heard when I was 19 I had just gone to see 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 Straits of Florida because fiddle Castro had opened the doors and people were fleeing Cuba in droves it was called Operation Abel 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 0-3 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 ocean 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 of 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 Straits of Florida hoping someone would see him there we were on this two billion dollar missile loaded warship doing slow circles looking for people in the water all told my ship saved and or transported eighteen hundred people back to JIT mo for processing keeping in mind ship's crew was only about 400 people it left a big impression on 19 year old me a cigarette just saved a life sailing around in the Arabian Gulf you could look out and see flaming flares from all of the oil rigs you get so used to blackness when you're out to sea at night and suddenly you see massive pillars of fire rising from the ocean all around you I came across a man who'd hung himself on his boat five or six miles off shore about four or five years ago the eerie and truly creepy part was realizing what it was we just saw a boat out in the middle of oceans nowhere without anything other than blue the Rison in sight at the break of dawn and there was fairly thick fog as it had rained the night before realizing that the figure hanging from the boom was a man was one of the most haunting things I'll ever see my uncle was lost at sea while sailing he went missing near the moccasin there was a big search and lots of people involved and ml's going to all family with updates they found his boat sunk missing the raft my cousin told me that he thinks his dad committed suicide and sunk his boat beforehand on purpose he would have enjoyed this one last mystery so the point of my story is that sometimes I think people like to get as far from people as possible before they off themselves well once we were motoring my 32 foot challenger back to homeport and we were fighting a king's tide very very strong currents we couldn't raise the sails because we had some 25-knot winds and we weren't ready to handle that so we were very slowly motoring along and our homeport was in view when put the engine sputters and dies we had run out of gas now we were in a bit of a situation as the Kings tide started to pull us the other direction this in itself wasn't that scary but we were going about four knots backwards and soon we couldn't see homeport anymore it got dark very fast my dad radioed the Coast Guard and informed them of our predicament and location the Coast Guard was reluctant to help because we could just raise our sails and sail home but at the time my dad was the only one with any serious experience and the boat was new to us because we had only just gotten it we hadn't replaced the broken mast light yet because anyway it was dark now and even though he could have sailed now the wind has died we didn't have a mast light so my dad didn't feel comfortable sailing at night we had been out for around eight hours by then and it was freaking me out it was all dead silent when the radio crackling to life gave me a very real reason to freak out it was the coast good advising us to look outside I won't ever forget how I looked out and a square of the sky had been cut out and replaced with solid black we hadn't heard anything at all and this terrifyingly monstrous tanker was passing 20 meters next to us we had drifted into the shipping routes and our mast light wasn't working it was so creepy silent if we had been just a little more to the left the coast good came and got us pretty quick after that heard this from a mate Australian naval supply ship in the Great Southern Ocean next to another naval ship swell was so great the top of one ship's mast was deck level two the supply ship another told by a different mate they were fishing off the shelf off nsw boat big enough to hold six blokes a shark longer than their boat swam past they packed up and went home some things are too big and have too many teeth to fish near probably too late to get noticed my grandfather was in the Norwegian Merchant Navy during the Second World War technically non-combatants but still dangerous as this one time they were sneaking out of a port at midnight that had been closed by the Nazis they just pointed the ship out to sea in the pitch black and went no lights no nothing he was standing peering over the side inky the inky blackness when he saw like 20 get away a Nazi on the deck of a darkened patrol boat light a cigarette right in front of him and then disappear during World War two my dad a wireless operator on a minha Sweeper passed by a German pilot waving frantically from his still floating aircraft in the North Atlantic they were under strict orders not to start because of the danger of subs so they left the poor guy to certain death my dad died a couple of years ago but this incident haunted him throughout his life he wept about it even in his last few hours losing your ships service generator in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean late at night most of the electrical service to the ship is lost until the emergency diesel generator hopefully starts up when you're used to all the vibrations and sounds in your living spaces silence is deafening probably late to this but whatever I was working on a car carrier four years ago in the Middle East our typical route went through pirate waters at times and so we always picked up four X Marines as security in aqaba jordan before we went one night while we were going through pirate waters off of Yemen we started to have problems with the main engine so we stopped and had to drift for a bit to figure out what the problem was during this time I was working on the stern back end of the vessel I couldn't really see anything out in the ocean everything was dimly lit on the ship I don't know why but I got bored and turned on the spotlight and there he was this guy with a gun in a rusted little boat staring at me about 15 feet from the ship I just stared back at him kind of stunned I was afraid if I reached for the radio to call one of the Marines he'd shoot me the Marines had weapons so he looked at me and I looked at him and he sort of gave me a nod as if he was telling me well played and I gave him one back then he slowly wrote his boat back off into the deep pitch-black night I didn't know how many others there were but I did call it in on the radio as soon as I lost sight of him I still remember his face today that deep Stern concentrated look once thought I saw a small land mass on the horizon upon closer inspection it turned out to be a dead whale belly up with seagulls standing on it pecking away at its flesh when I was off the coast of Japan in 2007 I watched a whale die I couldn't tell the gender but I remember hearing those faint whale cries that you can sometimes hear at night beneath the surface the moon was full and I could see it on top of the water and I saw other whales passing around it do whales have funerals because it felt like a vigil saying goodbye you could hear the faint puffs of the blowhole spraying out water in a labored way I don't know if it was hurt or just old these other whales made a few passes and then they left and the whale wasn't spouting air anymore this was all in a 15-minute period as we cruised past I guess the whales may have been there longer but I feel that they know that they don't want to stay around dead bodies for long it was haunting and beautiful and I don't think I had ever cried as much as I had that night we were once ported out of Bahrain and we woke up to this god-awful smell I we tossed on our coveralls and headed for the weather deck to find a cargo ship on the next dock stacked five stories high with cages of live lambs hello help us grow for everyday videos subscribe hit the bell button like comment and share with your friends

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Keywords: ask reddit, askreddit, askreddit funny, askreddit new, best of /askreddit, best of reddit, dalpro, drifry, flumpy, foxfilms, funniest posts, jayben, r/, r/askreddit, r/askreddit new, reddify, reddit, reddit cringe, reddit stories, reddit top posts, sub reddit, subreddit, top comments, top posts, top posts of all time, top posts of/r, tz reddit, updoot reddit

Id: cm7guY2fWZo

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2019