Unnerving Sailor Stories

sellers what's the creepiest scariest almost unnerving thing you've seen witnessed while at sea I worked on tugboats for about six years the back deck is considered a wet deck meaning it isn't unusual for it to be underwater at times we were making tow with an oil rig at sea with waves that were 14 - 16 feet and one hit us just right taking my coworker George and pulling him out to sea now it's 3 a.m. and pitch-black this is nearly always a death sentence about 20 seconds later which felt like an eternity another wave brought George back on deck clapping him safely on his a right next to the winch George laughed and got right back to work without missing a beat my dad and I were sailing in the Sea of Cortez it was early morning with some patchy surface fog I was 14 or 15 at the time we heard what sounded like applause in the distance but becoming louder we could soon see a patch of disturbed water getting closer and closer and hundreds of objects flying out of the water and splashing back down a few of them flew out hit the deck of the boat and bounced back into the water stingrays a whole school of them jumping out of the water for some reason it was weird and awesome two years ago I was about 150 miles offshore from Long Island NY in a 31-foot boat we were trolling for yellowfin tuna in the distance we saw two hog fins coming out of the water so we headed towards them thinking it was a couple of sharks as we got closer we realized it was one big shark there it was just cruising slowly at the surface not even the slightest bit disturbed by us approaching once we got up next to it we realized that this shark was almost as big as a boat it had to be at least 25 feet long in several thousand pounds I was in absolute shock as we passed it I'd never seen a shark even close to that big I've seen plenty of whales turkle's dolphins sharks all kinds of crazy things out at sea but never a predator this large it was definitely not a whale shark this thing was a killer I want to say that it was a tiger shot but the internet says they don't even get close to the big so I really just don't know I wish I could have gotten the picture of it but I was just frozen I couldn't even move I will never forget that moment the ocean is an incredible place a couple of years ago I was sailing as a cadet on a merchant vessel and I was scheduled on the evening watch the rest of the crew was enjoying dinner and I was to call if anything went wrong we were sailing over open ocean no land within a day sailing around us and all of a sudden I notice a Ryland coming up on my bow it was still far away but it shouldn't be there I looked at the maps checked my position multiple times and then I noticed the island did not appear on my radars I called down to the mess room to tell there was a weird island in front of us a chief mate came up and checked again the maps and positions he also noticed that the radars did not see the island we called the captain and when he came up he started laughing he was a rolled sailor with over 40 years of experience under his belt he explained us it was a far too morgana the real Island was more than a day sailing away in the direction we were heading at that moment after that incident he took over the watch and I went down it wasn't really creepy but it was strange John Spears plunging in and out of the sea low in the Gulf of Alaska I have seen some but one of the most terror inspiring things I've seen are what can happen with some of the loose logs from the logging trade sometimes when a big log gets loose from a raft it becomes partially waterlogged and floats small end up so you have this four foot diameter telephone pole in the sea sticking up 40 feet into the air no biggie shows up on radar and easy to spot now you've led that poll twenty years of floating around or so it rocks in such a way that it becomes filed to a point by wind and waves and looks quite menacing now put it in a gale with 25 foot waves 50 feet trough to peak and it becomes a towering spike of death that shoots up from the sea every 15 to 20 minutes out of nowhere 60 feet into the air only to plunge down into the dark depths waiting to skewer some unsuspecting boat in a few minutes when its rusts out of the ocean again it is a genuine terrifying site rare but not so ran that I haven't seen to in one season it's like the spike dig of Neptune looking for an opportunity to mess your shop in a particularly terrifying way a mate of mine I was working on a tuna boat with came across an aeroplane emergency life jacket floating in the water about 200 miles out at sea east coast of New Zealand not a sailor however this was at sea my dad went boating with some friends down near Rocky Point in Mexico in the mid 90s they went out late at night to drink it was incredibly dark apart from the boat lights when suddenly a helicopter flew above their boat and the local him took them out shut everything off immediately a helicopter hovered over some water in the distance and dumped a few bodies into the water before flying off when it was out of sight the local turned everything back on and shrugged it off saying they did that all the time never seen it so close up before I did a double-handed overnight race last summer and had a 45-minute conversation with my grandfather while on watch I was the only one on deck and my grandfather had been dead for 3 years at that point I'm fairly certain hypothermia dehydration low blood sugar and exhaustion were all in play but it was super weird I'm not a sailor but my family owns a boat and I frequently go out on fishing trips in the sea with my dad it's usually more us talking about life with him doing most of the fishing well on one trip we were out about I think 10 miles from the beach my dad was telling me about how he got into and won a bar fight and I was just silently listening when a weird whistling howling sounds sort of surrounded us I can't really describe it it was like a cross between a whale and the sound of someone blowing air over an open bottle my dad looked pretty calm but I could tell he was freaked out too it went on for about another minute slowly becoming stronger until it just abruptly ended with a screech from somewhere in the water we never talked about it and I still wonder what was making that sound not a sailor but a marine on a ship we were cruising through the Pacific when we received and sauce from a boat from what I heard he was trying to cross the ocean by himself took a few days to find him I remember watching off the side of the ship the sails were imprinted with a Chinese flag small team was sent to board the small sailboat but when they arrived no one was one board we searched for a body for the following days but found nothing still don't know what happened to him I was pulling a small sailboat mast from the bottom of a lake during a storm waves had totaled the boat so I was about ten feet down and pulling the mast up and the weight of it pushed me down so I was basically standing at the bottom of the lake and could see the waves up top it was an overall weird frightening stimulating experience and then something big swam past me and brushed my leg must have been at least three feet long I eventually got the boat turned back over and the mast on board and we got towed him as we hit land I laid down on the beach and decided I wasn't going to go in the water for a couple days I was in a kayak and a swan bit me on the air does that count when I was about 19 maybe 20 my mom's boyfriend at the time decided to take us out on his boat one afternoon so that we could lounge around and swim in the ocean far from the shore we were super excited because the water was turquoise completely see-through and the perfect temperature that day so we found what seemed to be the perfect location dropped the anchor and had a snack before long we were completely surrounded by hundreds of giant milky white jellyfish there were so many that we couldn't see clear water anywhere around us their bells were easily five feet in diameter if not more we did not win that day not me but my uncle was once scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia he was doing doing some kind of study for the university he worked for something to do with how some predators in the ocean hunt by detecting the electrical activity of fish nervous systems so he finds this big field of sponges now for those who don't know sponges are basically like plants they don't move they are attached to where they grow and they filter water that moves through them straining out nutrients so there's this field with like a thousand sponges attached to the reef now my uncle raided and dive alone I mean he could but he didn't it's safer to have a dive buddy so he's looking at these images and his dive buddy is swimming away after some fish part of the study I guess and then the sponges start moving all at once they twist and Bend and as one each seems to reach out grab onto a different part of the reef let go of the old part raise back up on the new perch and they go back still again overall they moved about a foot and a half an unexplained undersea mass sponge migration work the shrimp boats in the Gulf back in the 70s 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the sea got dead calm I mean dead calm not a ripple or as well the sea was so calm that vibrations from the engine idling would make little ripples in the water the surface of the sea looked like a huge never-ending mirror extending out in all directions the visual memory I have of seeing that perfectly flat sea and the moonlight is deeply etched in my memory and I can see it today in my mind just as real as if it was happening now I could talk about 25-foot seas in the middle of a hurricane or a half dozen water spouts dancing around us during a summer squall or Sargassum seaweed as far as the eye could see so thick around the boat that you could walk on it or flying fish all taking flight at the same time like a flock of birds skimming across the water but none of that stuff had the impact on me like the dead calm of the sea 100 miles offshore so for clarity this is not me but my uncle he served on an aircraft carrier in ww2 he was cleaning the flight deck when a plane went off the deck now the way he described it was that he didn't have enough speed and keine just did a 90 degree turn down off the ship the carrier ran him over and they spent hours looking for but to find nothing as if nothing happened that haunted him for years of just the thought of that guy getting run over by the ship one of my co-workers fled to the US from Vietnam in a small boat as a young child she was one of the boat people we were complaining about little SH when she explained why she almost never got upset she was only seven when this happened she and her sister father mother and grandfather were in a small fishing boat in the middle of the ocean they had been out of food for several days she and her sister v managed to catch an albatross on the boat her father said it was bad luck to kill one and released it she said as she watched it fly away she knew then that she and her family were going to starve to death she hated her father at that point too the next day they were picked up by a trawler and taken to California she still wears an albatraoz necklace for good luck I was engineer and first mate on a converted LC m80 in the fish trade we operated in the Gulf of Alaska Prince William Sound and Bristol Bay fisheries as a tender taking salmon and herring from smaller boats and villages in for processing on land we had a regular school windlass on the back and for some reason the company thought this made us equipped to tell a 220 foot barge from Whittier up through the Aleutian Islands at false pass and around to Bristol Bay and back each year the Gulf of Alaska can be a cruel place sometimes and at four knots max speed we got caught in a doozy we tried sheltering behind an island can't remember we were working our way up the Aleutian Peninsula but even so we're unable to hold against the wind and got pulled out the little windows on the back deck was getting pulled off and ripping a hole in the engine room in the process eventually in 25-foot seas we let go the barge and just tracked it and followed it on radar figuring we'd recover it when things calm down in a few days in the horrific days that followed during which I must have vomited twice my body weight law we nearly got rolled once and took on about 10,000 gallons of water in one of our camp ments sir good times on the last really bad night I was on watch in the wheelhouse while the captain slept about 3:00 a.m. and we were rolling 33 37 degrees losing two knots against the gale by the Loran yes it was a while ago Lowell if the barge popping in and out on radar about four miles in hourly suddenly the whole ship reverberating shook with a thunderous boom and I was sure we were done we'd obviously hit something hard I woke the captain and the deckhand our entire crew allall 15 minutes later still no sign of flooding in any compartments or other alarms but I noticed the lure and lost signal and I wasn't having any luck on the SSB trying to call in for a possible rescue there right law the deck lights wouldn't come on and we had a couple of popped breakers in the nav lights after a while it became obvious we weren't sinking so we went about our watches just keeping an eye on things at first light I roped off and went on deck to see WTF and then I saw what had happened the ww2 surplus LC m80 had a deck house at bulwark level and a pillared house in stateroom built above that so the roof of the pillared house was a good 25 feet above the water mounted to the steel of the pillared house was a 4-inch steel pipe that went up a few feet to a 3-inch steel crossmember forming a large T on which our radio and navigation antennas as well as our mast lights were mounted it was gone the whole thing bent over at 90 degrees and broken off as if by the hand of God himself also gone whether life rafts which were also mounted on the roof structure the massive four inch steel mast had been bent over and torn off it wasn't like it was corroded and just broke there was obviously massive force involved and even the reinforced steel plate of the mast step on the cabin roof was distorted it took us about a week but eventually the Seas abated and we were able to bring the barge in under tow to the shelter of the peninsula once again we made the next thousand miles without much except flat seas and beautiful vistas such is the life of the Mariner when we eventually got into Dillingham everyone was quite surprised as we had been declared lost at sea and the Coast Guard had already given up the search days before both our life rafts had been found empty with their Rapids deployed and we were all assumed dead I still have no idea what monstrous thing must have reached out of the sea and broken off that mast but whatever it was was inches away from taking out the wheelhouse where I was blindly staring out into the rain tortured darkness on that night still haunts me [Music]

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Id: LCteYfDVo6M

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020