Sailing is one of those professions that either sounds very romantic or very awful, depending on your affinity for the sea.
Regardless of whether or not you’d actually go get your own sea legs, you’ve got to be at least a little bit curious about what’s out there, right?
I know I am, and these 13 stories from sailors really deliver.
13. I think I would have left, too.
Off the coast of Mombassa – a super pod of dolphins stretching as far as I could see in all 4 directions.
Porpoising like mad – hauling a**.
Chasing sardines or outrunning orcas.
12. Ghost ship?
A good friend of mine captains a beautiful Sportfish boat for his boss. Spends its winters in Florida and summers in New York. I usually fly down in the spring to FL to give a hand running it back north and we always have a ton of fun and fish on the way. One night on the journey we decide to keep steaming through the night to get to a spot we wanted to fish at first light the next morning. Probably ~100 miles offshore so there’s basically nobody around.
Little about the boat, absolute beast. Radar, AIS for ship tracking and info from other craft with AIS, FLIR night vision camera, depth Sounders…….literally every gadget to keep you safe even on the darkest of nights….
So we’re cruising along in absolute PITCH black night, just cruising 12-15 knots with every electronic on. Now, If you’ve never been offshore at night, you don’t know true black night. There’s nothing, like nothing. Spot lights, LED panels……you can see the waves a few feet in front of the boat and that’s it….we always have at least 2 guys up, one on the wheel and one keeping an eye on the electronics. So, somewhere off the Carolinas, we pick something up on radar….definitely a large boat. We had the range at like 10 miles on the machine, so we should definitely see this thing by now…..a guy could light up a smoke 5 miles away and you’ll see the lighter (THAT dark). But……nothing. No AIS readout on it so it’s not broadcasting its info. We keep getting closer and closer, miles counting down, blip getting bigger on the radar screen….still, nothing. Now we’re within a mile of this thing (whatever the F it could possibly be) and we have all eyes up top……..
Literally out of the most insane darkness is this broadside fucking NAVY SHIP. Absolutely massive. Not a single light on. Not a single person out on any of the decks. Just there. Floating. It creeped me so far the f*ck out.
11. What a way to go.
Got roped into sea trials for an aircraft carrier several years back when I worked for Huntington-Ingalls.
Couldn’t sleep one night and decided to go up to the flattop in the middle of the night to get some fresh air. It was eerily quiet and the water had this odd obsidian black mirror sheen. Kinda hypnotic.
Dunno how long I stood there but apparently it was long enough to warrant a roving watch to get my attention and escort me back below.
Got chewed out by my supervisor the following morning when he found out; turns out a lot of civvies and sailors over the years have fallen/”fallen” into the sea at night.
10. Stop playing with your dinghy!
Seamen jumping overboard to capture their dinghy which somehow got away from the ship.
9. That’s a mystery.
We found a human finger in a sea chest (basically a filter for sea water that’s used to cool fresh water etc).
The thing is though it must’ve been pulled in when deep at sea because the chest was cleaned every 2-4 weeks and we’d been deep Sea for 6 weeks at that point.
Was creepy and we reported it but nothing came of it.
8. So many questions!
I was in a cruise boat and we were chugging along the very busy waterways of Shanghai approaching the area where the Huangpu river joins the Yangtze.
The waterway is colossal and one of the busiest shipping routes, with traffic heading in all directions which creates a lot of large swells.
I looked over the edge and down about fifty feet away and there is a man, he was sitting precariously cross legged paddling along on a door.
7. I like this guy.
I wouldn’t say anything I saw was particularly strange. But maybe my standard for “strange” is a little skewed.
I saw a lot of wonderful things though, like massive schools of giant manta rays feeding in the bay, clouds of mayflies dying by the millions on our bow, sea birds in the absolute middle of nowhere, and the best view I’ve ever had of the milky way.
There were also some odd and funny things that were usually products of civilization more than anything, like giant cat fish eating our cooked sewage as we pumped it over the side, people boating in the shipping lanes on rafts made of garbage, and sailing through what looked like a post-apocalyptic hellscape while riders tried desperately to con the crew out of everything we owned. The most ridiculous thing I saw was using a 1000ft ro-ro to go trawling for tuna, while staying close enough to land to be able to pick up the playoffs for the captain.
Sailing is weird, and while there are some truly awesome sights like Saint Elmo’s fire and the like, the vast majority of the strange stuff you run into is just part of civilisation.
Edit: my buddy says “if you’re talking about sailors, there’s nothing strange to me anymore. Sailors have a reputation as weirdos for good reason. As far as everything else out there, it’s classified.”
6. A nightmare tour.
I’m not a sailor but one time I went on a glass bottom boat tour. The captain accidentally went the wrong way to come back in and took us out to sea. There were maybe 60 people staring down threw the glass bottom in a 3 foot swells.
Didn’t take long before people starting throwing up. Id say about 40 people puked on the glass. It was a nightmare. Barf sloshing around. Everyone moaning, kids crying, women screaming.
It was f*cking terrifying and disgusting. It was traumatic. I’ll always remember that
5. What happened down there?
A bunch of us were smoking on the starboard fuel deck, and we saw the front half of a shark float aft.
Like, cleanly cut, from about 4 inches behind the dorsal fin.
Conversations went kind of quiet as about 45 people just stared at it and wondered about ocean madness.
Good times!
4. Kinda spooky is wild.
Found this odd if not strange when I started sailing. On ships we can have days which are more or less than 24 hours.On multi day voyages clocks are advanced as we travel east and retarded as we travel west to adjust with local time.
The wall clock in our cabins were analog but the advancement or retardation was automated by some mechanism. For an hour of retardation the minute hand would smoothly glide anti-clockwise a full circle.
This was usually done at mid night. Kinda looked spooky if you were awake.
3. Everyone has to scratch that itch.
Was on bow watch on the tall ship Bounty back in 1997 sailing down the St Lawrence when the ship shuddered to the side by like 2 feet.
Looked over the railing to see a 65 foot Right Whale scratching it’s back on the side of our boat. I was about 10 feet from it and at 6’7″ I felt incredibly small.
Only time in my life I was completely speechless
2. Ah, the joys of the sea.
Not a sailor per se but I spent a couple of years recreationally sailing in the Gulf of Mexico. I rarely spent the night out on the boat, but was out almost every day. I was out one evening with a friend who was visiting.
I want to say it was between 10pm-11pm and the boat started violently rocking back and forth for a few seconds, even though waters were pretty calm. We can’t really see much but we saw these three really dark and large shapes swim underneath the boat.
Scared the sweet Jesus out of us, we definitely felt for a second that we were going to capsize and then likely die.
1. The hazing will be brutal.
A glowing iceberg.
I was on the bridge at night, it was getting fairly foggy out so we had to be extra vigilant. I started to see this little light on the horizon. I knew it wasn’t another ship or shore light because we were in the middle of the Arctic Ocean with no land for miles. I wanted to get a better visual on it so I didn’t report it right away. As time went on I could see this light getting bigger and it was looking pretty…. icebergy.
So as weird as it was to me; I reported it to my officer of the watch stating that it was a “glowing iceberg”.
Super confused he took a look in and what he told me….I will never live it down.
…it was the moon. I reported the moon.
How utterly fascinating!
If you’ve seen something super cool out on the water, please share the story with us in the comments.
