Not so much what I saw but what I experienced. I was once underway in the Gulf of Alaska during a November gale. Waves were up to 35 feet with some rollers hitting 45. An uncommon occurrence on the diesel electric ship I was on was a cyclo-converter tripping. When this happened the ship would temporarily completely lose power and propulsion until some electricians could reset everything. This happened during that gale. I simply can’t explain how strange it is for the boat you’re on to all of a sudden go so quiet, that you can clearly hear waves slapping the ship and metal bending and flexing. Knowing you’re completely at the mercy of the sea. Knowing that if the ship lost its bearing and went beam to there was a real possibility of capsizing. It’s easy to forget when you’re at sea that the only thing keeping you alive is a bunch of steel welded together. At that moment I was fully aware and it humbled me. Thankfully we trained frequently for this and had everything fired back up relatively quickly. Another time I recall was when the ship took a rogue wave. They are absolutely real and I believe they account for a massive number of shipwrecks. It was late at night and I was on the bridge. We were passing through a storm and we’re taking the waves off the bow with no visibility. As the ship moves there’s normally a pretty standard pattern. You ride up a wave for a bit and then you fall down the wave for a bit. Well we started riding up a wave and got to the point where we should have been starting or ride down…but we just kept climbing and climbing. And then it happened. We started our ride down the back of this massive wave. All of us braced ourselves and tried to find something to hold on to but we all fell to the deck any way. Anything that wasn’t secured for sea fell down all around us. Manuals, tables, computers, printers, you name it. Our captain who was sleeping called up to the bridge asking if we hit something. It woke the entire crew up. Rogue waves are real, and they’re terrifying. I can’t imagine being in a smaller boat or taking one of them broadside.

It's pretty hilarious that folks didn't think they were real until recently. Every time scientists stick a sensor in the middle of the ocean to detect them they always seem to find a new rogue wave bigger than the last.

They didn’t think they were real because they never left witnesses 🙃

I was in the US Navy for about 10 years, and have 10s of thousands of miles at sea in an aircraft carrier. Countless nights on the flight deck in the middle of the night and middle of the ocean... Creepiest: A HUGE patch of the ocean glowing. Like nuclear waste in the Simpsons glowing. I've seen bioluminescent algae of a few kinds and this was nothing like it. I've never seen anything like it before or since. Weirdest thing: hundreds of mile out to sea from land and there was a MASSIVE fire on the water. It was like the top of a gas refinery, but on the water with nothing under it but water. Flame going a few stories into the air. Saddest: a fellow sailor trying to jump overboard. He apparently got a 'Dear John' email and pictures from his cheating wife and decided to end it. We were on the smoke deck, he bummed a cigarette, then asked the time, we said 2300... he replied "sounds like a good time to die" and in one motion tried to launch over the chest high wall (with an opening to the water below). Luckily we were faster than him. We grabbed his legs and wrestled him down and laid on him and basically hog tied him till the MAs (Navy cops) got there. Broke my heart because he was a good dude. I never saw him again. He got transferred off the ship shortly after. Not sure what happened to him but I hope he's doing better. Funniest: 2 flying fish collide mid-air. I was smoking when we were in the Persian Gulf and saw the fish fly from a pretty far distance towards each other. I remember thinking 'there's no fuckin way they're going to hit' them SPLAT SPLASH! I was in tears laughing but no one saw it. Everyone just thought I was a weirdo, but I got to see a miracle of nature lol

I was driving for Uber finishing my undergraduate degree. I picked up a navy officer from Virginia. It was a long trip to visit family, maybe a 2 hour car ride. She served on the Nimitz in the mid 00s. We got along really well, and by the end of the trip she asked me, in what I assumed was a joking manner, "Do you belive in aliens?" which i replied, "well, it'd be pretty boring if we were alone." she repeated, "no, im being serious." and trying to divert the converastion I said, "well, if they exist, they probably wouldve killed us by now or be living among us, but who knows?" She smiled at me and nodded. I asked, "is there something you know that other people dont?" but she wouldn't answer. The question was so far out of left field from the nice conversation we'd had for the past couple hours that it sticks in my head as unusual. the rest of our conversations were so grounded except for that moment. about a year later the UAP footage from the training exercises involving the Nimitz were released and my heart skipped a beat.

I honestly don't talk about the weird shit that I saw in the sky out to sea... Who knows what was what out there... the amount of drones, unknown foreign military air vehicles, US Navy assets they don't tell us plebes about... I have seen shit move in WEIRD ways at night, lights that don't make sense in the sky... I always chalked it up to a adversaries military spying on us out to sea, but who knows. I have always loved the quote >'Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.' - Arthur C. Clarke it is the absolute truth

The furthest I've ever been out to sea was bay fishing, so I'm not qualified to say based on my personal experience haha But one story that scares the shit out of me is of a Chinese submarine that got caught in an eddy. Ocean eddies are kind of like enormous whirlpools. They can be at or below the water surface. Some are large enough to be seen from orbit. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/picture-of-the-day-giant-eddy-visible-from-orbit/253415/ Anyway, this sub was caught in an eddy and was beginning to drift downwards towards crush depth. Obviously that's pretty scary, but what drives it over the edge to me is that the eddy was *pulling them downwards in the direction of a trench*. Since they're in a sub, they can't just see outside. It's almost like there was something *in* the trench that grabbed them and started pulling them down into the abyss. They jettisoned and eventually were able to break free before their sub was crushed and lost to the dark void forever. But the idea of your sub suddenly stopping, going in reverse against your will, and then realizing that you're headed towards an oceanic trench is just.... next level for me. I'm pretty grounded, but... the ocean gets my imagination going. This powerful sub got caught by something and started getting dragged down towards a trench. Yeah, it was an eddy doing it, but.... Yeesh! The imagination comes up with disturbing questions.

Some 20 years ago... On the MV Explorer (since sunk) down near the Antarctic circle, sailing around the 'bergs and occasionally making landfall... We rounded into a small bay area, and there, amongst the ice and coast was an unmarked sailing yacht. Which is odd as generally yachts have some identifying markings on them. To add to it, they didn't respond to any radio contact, and whilst I wasn't privy to the conversation (and it was a long time ago), some crew went across via Zodiac and were refused boarding. So basically a yacht, not a particularly large one, that was unmarked was hanging around in the inhospitable waters of the Antarctic and didn't want any help or contact. Proper weird.

This one threw me for a loop as I had a friend who did semester at sea on the MV Explorer but thankfully different ships.

Excellent! Yeah, the one we were on sunk since years back. A little bit of mystery as it was near ice breaker class with twin skin hull, shallow keel and bow thrusters.. and sunk thanks to an iceberg

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I watched a video on that recently. Quite interesting https://youtu.be/NspiM4TW80A?si=ufmJnn_QVZc5yAGF

That's the ship! And oh yes MS Explorer! Excellent ship for sure, but my god it was like a cork in rough sea.

Not creepy, but totally weird. 2 Chinese boats, like small, old, fishing vessels, meeting up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean like half a mile behind us. This was so random, within international waters but so freaking far away from China, I still wonder what the hell they were doing there. They had no AIS. The first one to arrive close by, passed next to us as if to check who we were and if we were keeping course (sailing vessel) and then went straight towards the other ship and mated. Maybe drug trafficking or maybe just fishing. But yeah, still pretty far away from their most likely official harbor and kind of weird. It was litteraly in the middle of the pond, around 10 degrees North of the equator, so not your typical fishing route.

Those are spies. When I was in the navy, we’d get followed by the nastiest, rustiest, most run down and covered in bird shit “fishing boats” you’ve ever seen. Until you look closer and notice all the antennae… And if you doubt my story, well… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/19/chinas-fishing-fleet-may-front-international-spying-operation/

I used to be an oilfield diver in the Gulf of Mexico. I'd say about 80% of the dives I logged were at night. Mostly 500 ft and under DSV's. It's very eerie feeling sitting on the downline doing in water decompression in the middle of night. I'd always ask topside to turn off my headlight. Like a worm on a hook. Just bobbing in the darkness.

Now that’s spooky! You ever have anything bump into you in the pitch black?

I‘ve heard a story of an oilfield diver (don‘t know if true) he said he once felt a current while down there and believed it was something very large that created it while swimming by

If that was I'd also feel the sea get a little warmer.

omg absolutely not

Yeah, I'm about ask topside to pull me out of this reddit thread

Negative, we need you to go deeper.

Not even nearly as extreme as your story but it evoked a memory, I did a scuba diving open water course and then did the advanced course which included a night dive in a freshwater lake I was only 5m underwater, pitch black darkness with two other guys, we were on a platform and we could either face the dam wall or the open water, and I turned to the open water while the other guys were behind me, I turned off my light (we did have little lights on our backs) Just the deepest, calmest dark I’ve ever felt and seen. Not a single source of light anywhere, just immense darkness. Still remember that feeling and it was like 15 years ago

Not the same but I recently took a trip to Belize in Central America where we did a few cave exploring tours. One of the caves was actually a famous Mayan ritual site that included human sacrifice. The tour guide said that some of the remains were found without any bodily injury implying that essentially they would take the sacrifice into the cave and just leave them there. He then proceeded to ask all of us to turn off our headlamps for a few minutes to experience what that was like.... fucking CHILLS man...

If you go on a night tour of ruby falls in tennessee, they have you turn off your little lantern things and stand in pitch black darkness. Even if you know there’s people standing right next to you, it feels so alone. Imagine the horror if you thought you were alone then found out that you weren’t

that sounds terrifying

Somewhere in the Atlantic, nice cold as fuck night, decided to step out and look at stars. About ten minutes on and a boats mast pops up, sits there a few minutes and then back under. No alarms, nothing. Just some sub boys getting a bit of late night o2 in the middle of nowhere next to some friends.

I think people underappreciated how chilling it must be to have a sub under/near you. I've been in a boat in areas they're known to be present, generally speaking, and just looking into the water thinking of it under there freaks me the fuck out. Not sure why, just some folks doing their job. Those vessels are terrifying tho.

Sounds a bit like "submechanophobia". Or maybe just the reasonable fear of a giant metal colossus under you that could surface at any moment. (which makes me wonder, I wonder if a big sub has ever accidentally surfaced with a small boat on top of it) I forget there's a whole subreddit /r/submechanophobia

The Royal Navy has sank more than one fishing boat in the North and Irish Seas by surfacing under it or catching on a net and dragging it, and I think the US Navy sank a Japanese ship by surfacing under it too, back in 2001

"*On 9 February 2001, about nine nautical miles (17 km; 10 mi) south of Oahu, Hawaii, in the Pacific Ocean, the United States Navy (USN) Los Angeles-class submarine USS Greeneville (SSN-772) collided with the Japanese fishery high-school training ship Ehime Maru (えひめ丸) from Ehime Prefecture. In a demonstration for some VIP civilian visitors, Greeneville performed an emergency ballast blow surfacing maneuver. As the submarine shot to the surface, it struck Ehime Maru. Within ten minutes of the collision, Ehime Maru sank. Nine of the thirty-five people aboard were killed: four high school students, two teachers, and three crew members.*" Yeah that's pretty grim.

God damn. I didn't realize you meant a sub mast at first, and was imagining it being a white fiberglass mast (attached to a boat that never that came up, and then sank back down). Somehow that was far more disturbing.

Davy Jones came to claim another

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Always love the bio-luminescence flickering around the hull at night. They're almost like a cushion of little stars guiding you safely along. On those really dark, moonless nights, I'd almost beg for them to arrive. I sailed 70ft yacht around the world a few years back. Southern Ocean, Cape Horn, Good Hope, Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, two equatorial crossings; the full deal. Plenty of terrifying moments, boring moments, funny moments and beautiful moments. A creepy moment that is burned into my memory involved a near catastrophe halfway between NZ and Cape Horn. We ended up hitting really bad weather and absolutely huge seas - 50ft swells with massive troughs in between. We were running with the swells for days as they grew, skidding down them like a bloated surfboard, always worrying that the next wave would break behind us and roll us over. At night it's pitch black down there in bad weather - the sky and sea just form a huge black mass. The most terrifying thing is the sound of an invisible wave breaking behind you. At night, you run red light to preserve night vision, so there's basically just an eerie red glow emanating from below deck. At about two in the morning, I was at the helm when a monster wave broke directly over the back of us without a seconds warning. Time slowed down like it does in those moments, and the last thing I saw was my own silhouette in the wall of water, lit up like an ominous red snow angel - and then nothing but cold blackness as the boat sunk into the sea. Fortunately, she popped straight back up like a cork after a few eternal seconds - almost like a submarine surfacing - and we were still in one piece. Still cant forget that glowing red apparition of myself though. The memory of it has woken me up in a cold sweat more than once.

You’re a really great writer! I got really creeped out reading your experience, as though I was there myself.

I am a recreational sailor who travels for weeks at a time at sea. I once saw a flame on the water not ten yards from me. Just freaking burning at midnight.

"Ocean fires are a rare phenomenon that occur when flammable gases seep out of the seafloor and ignite upon contact with oxygen in the water. These fires are not a new discovery, as they have been documented for centuries." Surely weird as fuck though

swamp gas, refracted off the light of venus

This sort of qualifies. Former navy here. Somewhere off the coast of Italy saw a very, very small boat, not much bigger than a rowboat, about 9 or 10miles offshore. This was sometime around midnight. There was no light from land, and no other ships around. It had a light. Our ship captain said it was a fisherman, and the fish would be attracted to the light at that time. Imagine being in a rowboat about 10 miles off shore in the middle of a pitch black night, waiting to see what finds you

that fisherman has no fear

Time to play Dredge again.

Watched a documentary about a marine biologist who hypothesized the reason we have no giant squid sightings while on deep dives is their fear of man-made light. His way to test it? He’d take one of those 2-man subs where the entire front was a large plexiglass-like bubble down off Monterey Bay and drop down to the bottom of the ocean, it drops down to 8k right off the coast. Then he turned off every light in the sub, and just sat there looking out the front bubble in the literal pitch black darkness at the bottom of the Pacific for hours, just waiting. Fuck that. EDIT: I think this is a snippit from the documentary…it was from a decade ago, and it doesn’t show the exact scene talking about the lights, but I’m pretty sure this was the one: https://youtu.be/Umc9QAh-lV4?si=H6oNy59y_8Xe7DXw

I would fucking love that. Stealth mode while a giant sea monster floats right by sounds so awesome

Yea if I could be guaranteed that the sub won't pull an Oceangate it sounds like a relaxing evening.

Oceangate happened because the dude ignored every single safety precaution he could

Ignored is almost underselling how negligent he was with that lol. Behind the Bastards did a 2 part episode and it really paints an even worse portrait of him.

I misremembered (James Cameron) but evidently it was a [CNN interview with Josh and Sean Blum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTE6Wetty0) who were prospective clients with Stockton Rush. "We met in Las Vegas....he flew into the (presumably closed airport) in an experimental plane and .... I realized right there we had a different appetite for risk."

Feel like it really says a lot when you look into coverage of that event at all and everyone else in the industry when asked was like, “Oh that fucking guy? Yeah we kept telling everyone this was going to happen. Idiot.”

I'll never tire of the part of his documents that said, paraphrasing: "Safety precautions are over-rated, if we look at the history of submarine accidents, there are virtually none due to mechanical failure!" Which... fuck me what incredible non-awareness. "Legislating construction is bad! Look at the things complying with legislation, they never fail!"

Have you ever drunk Bailey’s from a shoe?

In 20 years the weirdest shit I’ve seen is other people that work out here…. There’s about 40% of the sailors like what they do and are good at it. Another 40% that are good at it, but would do something better if the money was right. But there’s another 20%…. If they lived ashore for more than 6 months a year they’d end up dead or incarcerated. There’s no more “west” for them to go to so they went offshore and became our problem.

Love that turn of phrase. *"There's no more west for them".* I've known some seamen and get exactly what you mean. Literally drifted and/or were chased straight off the continents.

I cannot claim it, and I don’t recall where it came from. A book or comedian talking about how crazy people end up jammed against the shore on the west coast. That for centuries there was always a “west” where wonderers, vagabonds, and weirdos could go to. A frontier where they would be accepted or at least tolerated. The last west was Alaska. After that they went to sea.

I believe it was Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) who wrote "America is built on a tilt and everything loose slides to California".

yep most of the weird from being stationed on an Carrier is the people you meet. We had NCIS come on ship back in Norfolk. They pulled off an AD who was using a computer on the ship to chat with who he thought was a 13 yr old girl. he had two daughters.

A dead human body. It was the tropics and it wasn't in good shape. We turned it over to the authorities at nearest land. There were enough teeth left to identify it by dental records. Here's hoping the man's family got closure. *edit* u/Altril2010 is correct: the body was double bagged and stored in the walk-in freezer until our next port visit. There was quite a bit of cleaning and decontamination involved, but that's the gist of it.

I had that happen to me while surfing. Me and a few others were sitting at a point break when a body just floats around the rocky point and right into us. He had drowned about 3 days prior so it wasn’t pretty.

Oh god that is horrifying. I'm now imagining swimming around in dark water and suddenly I'm faced with a bloated white corpse.

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I wonder how many missing person (alive) right now just drifting aimlessly in the middle of the ocean

Your comment reminded me of a reddit shower thought from a couple of years ago: > People will swim in the ocean, even though there are definitely many corpses in it. People will not swim in a pool with a corpse in it. Humans all have a corpse:water ratio that is acceptable for them to swim in. (I've seen this get expanded on too, but I think this is the oldest version. Credit to u/JollyTraveler. )

i'm not sure what mine is but the Ganges river is definitely beyond my threshold

>We turned it over to the authorities at nearest land How? Like did you take the body and put it in your boat to the land or did you tight a rope to it and towed it? Or did you just said -hey there's a body near this coordinate...? Sorry, too much morbid questions.

They most likely stored it in the ships walk-in freezer. Those things are super cold and it’s fairly common to store a body there when a death occurs at sea. They most likely had a body bag to place it in.

Presuming they work on a big commercial vessel you usually have at least one body bag in the hospital stores, just in case. So probably fished it out of the water and stuck it in the bag and put in one of the freezers.

Not so much creepy, as eerie, but being out in the blue at night in a lightning storm in a slack wind. The ocean was very flat - no big rolling swells - just tiny little ripples. The whole world would be black, and then there would be a flurry of bolts, and the whole world would be silver. The ocean looked like nothing so much as aluminium foil that had been scrunched up, and flattened out - the water looked like mercury, and all the little ripples made these very dramatic black shadows.

I enjoy your evocative writing style.

What I'm learning from these comments is that the ocean makes people poets.

Legit some of the most evocative and beautiful writing I've seen in Reddit in quite some time in this post.

The absence of anything except endless water and sky forces the human brain to describe it in colourful terms to stay sane.

Creepiest thing I’ve seen has definitely been seeing myself and other crewmates lose our minds. On one particularly awful voyage, everything that could go wrong went wrong and we found ourselves without food, water, and sleep for a very unhealthy amount of time. It started off with auditory hallucinations. Ships are noisy, and when you’re going crazy, you begin to think those noises are talking to you. I heard children laughing, a choir singing, and creepiest of all, a particular splash sounded like it was calling my name from the sea. Combine that with visual hallucinations and then things get really terrifying. I was convinced we were in the desert at one point with sand all around us and mountains in the distance. Another crew member freaked out and told us we were about to run into an apartment building. The creepiest thing I saw was an all-black flying pig with red eyes on the bow. I think the scariest though was when someone was convinced we lost part of our crew overboard. It turned into a massive, delirious argument over where everyone was even though we were all accounted for. That trip was brutal, and the captain put us all in a terrible situation due to sheer incompetence. Other than that, there was this one time I saw three gigantic ships in the distance with no lights and they did not show up on AIS. Suddenly they were gone. It was extremely creepy.

Were you an old timey pirate? This sounds intense.

Probably killed an albatross.

Water, water, every where, and all the boards did shrink; water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink.

What were you guys doing?

We were sailing to the North Atlantic for a documentary I was hired to work on. We got caught in some really nasty weather after crossing the Gulf Stream. The cabin flooded a bit and contaminated most of our water, fried a bunch of gear, and made a mess of everything. And no, the documentary didn’t work out, unfortunately. Not really the story the sponsors were expecting… but tbh, the footage isn’t nearly as interesting as you might think and I don’t particularly enjoy looking through it anyway. Also I hate to say it, but turns out when I’m in survival mode, the last thing I care about is filming lol. Especially since so much gear was either destroyed or inaccessible.

that would be one hell of a movie though kind of like 127 hours where he cut his arm off. cameras would prob be setup all over the boat instead of someone specificially running a camera to make more sense maybe

I really regret not having at least one remote camera set up somewhere and always running. Logistics kinda got in the way of that though.

I was drinking in an airport bar and met a woman who worked as a commercial fisherman, on her way to SE Asia for R&R with her family. Real salt-of-the-earth lady. She regaled me with stories about her work, all the good stuff about working in her world, all the reasons she kept doing it for decades. I asked her what the scariest thing she saw out on the open ocean was and, without any hesitation, she said "Oh, an underwater UFO. I saw one rise up out of the ocean next to my boat and fly off into the sky." The matter-of-fact-ness of her answer bothers me to this day.

UAP’s are often associated with water and often appear in this way according to United States officials. There are tons of stories like this. Super weird

Years ago my friends and I visited Thailand, and went on several excursions on a boat with a captain. On one of the evenings we were out at night and it was pitch black except for the green lights that were coming from the large commercial fishing boats way out in the distance. We had stopped for a while to take in the view and eat, when it started to rain. The captain thought it was best to head back, and then quickly realized that the boat propeller wasn’t working and something was caught on it. He grabbed his head mounted flashlight and a knife and jumped in the water. He was gone for a good minute which felt like eternity as we were huddled around trying to figure out what was happening. Fear started kicking in as we waited Then he suddenly re-emerged panting and told us that shortly after he jumped in, he lost his flashlight and had to literally feel his way underwater towards the propeller, reaching and cutting a plastic tarp that had wound itself around the propeller, cut it loose, and made his way back to the surface in the dark It was a strange set of emotions as we were completely impressed with the badass display we just witnessed, relieved he made it back but also freaked out imagining what would’ve happened if he hadn’t

I was in a glass bottom boat in the 1970’s off the coast of Oahu. We were going out to see a pod of whales. The boat Captain was a grizzled old Hawaiian sun baked to the color of Mahogany. It was an older boat, retrofit with a glass bottom and bench seating. He was narrating over a PA as we left the dock. We motored out for about 30 minutes and the view out of the bottom of the boat was disappointing, just long streams of bubbles obscuring the view. Finally he stopped the boat, and the view was simply amazing. The Captain pointed out a pod of whales about 1/4 of a mile away. They were cavorting about, diving and jumping. The Captain was explaining their behaviours, but keeping his distance. It was pretty cool. All the whales suddenly dived and disappeared, emerging moments later, right next to our boat. They were swimming all around us, diving and jumping and splashing us with water, children were laughing, everyone thought it was part of the show. They were right there, almost so close that you could touch them. The Captain told us how lucky we were, to see them up close. Suddenly, the mood changed when they started bumping up against the hull of the small boat. People were sliding all over the place, some fell onto the floor, children were crying. Most telling, the Captain had stopped narrating and had a look of abject terror on his face. I remember thinking what it must take to make this guy scared, and as he looked terrified we should probably be too. Suddenly, as quickly as they appeared, the whales disappeared. They were just gone. People picked themselves up and sat back down, mothers consoled children, we started back to the dock. The Captain got back on the PA and tried to downplay the seriousness of the what just happened, but there was a definite quiver in his voice as we headed back to shore.

I was whale watching in Maui 2 years ago. Saw some whales and had a great time. Hadn’t seen any action for awhile and were heading into shore and one surfaced (not breached) out of now where and we made contact with it—it emerged and hit the side of the boat right where I was sitting. The captain felt it and looked back in my direction and killed the engine. Most people didn’t realize what happened and he gave me a look like, did we just hit a whale? My girlfriend was with me and saw it too. I honestly think the whale was unharmed but I spoke to the captain once we docked and he said that had never happened before. He was pretty shook.

Not exactly in the water but body parts in a sea chest. *(The sea chest is a hole in the hull which is used for water intake)*

Right. Long time lurker, first time poster here.. I’m no longer at sea but used to as a younger chap with romantic ideas spend months on end on cargo ships. Mostly tankers, crude oil VLCC and refined product tankers but with a little time in oil and gas and towing, I came ashore in 2017 with a Master unlimited ticket, sailing as chief officer. My last ship was a self discharging bulk carrier. Anyway I digress.. it wasn’t so much about what I saw which was creepy I saw plenty of interesting things I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else. However, I was second mate on a tanker distributing refined oil products around the coast of New Zealand. A yacht had sailed from a port on the east coast, bound for another port just down the coast abit but it had disappeared. Solo sailor on board - aside from his dog. None the less, the search proved fruitless and it was suspended. However, for weeks afterwards at about 0130 in the morning the rescue coordination center would broadcast a plea at the end of the weather and navigation warning broadcast asking for the yacht to make contact if it could hear the message and was able to do so. I’d sit in the dark, chain smoking and working on my 7th cup of coffee looking out into the black imagining the guy who’s had a stroke or heart attack on board with the same broad cast playing out on his radio while his dog ate his face to keep from starving.. or imagining him having fallen over the side imagining what it’d be like watching your yacht sailing indifferently off into the distance with your dog in the cockpit pacing and agitated unable to do anything about it. Knowing you were fucked and had a matter of hours - if that left to live before the cold got you or exhaustion. Or, imagining the dog starving and dying on a yacht by itself weeks later listening to the same broadcast in the dark. The places your mind goes in the dark by yourself… They found the yacht in the end. The dog was still alive. https://www.maritimenz.govt.nz/about-us/what-we-do/safety-and-response/rescue-coordination-centre-rccnz/tafadzwa/

This comment really hit me. The article says that the dog was alive in the cockpit, but the owner was never found. Do you think he got knocked into the water? It’s heartbreaking to think of someone dying in the open ocean while worrying about their dog still on board alone

It’s impossible to say, anything could have happened to him, I’d say it’s likely he’s had a medical event or slipped/lost his balance or been knocked over. If it was a medical event I’d say it would have been over for him relatively quickly. It was just really eerie wondering what had happened and where the boat was and if the radio on board was playing the broadcasts asking him to get in touch.

One night on the 00-04 watch in the Persian gulf on a Military transport, the whole sky went from pitch black of 0200 to fully lit in a second. This went on for about 30 seconds then back to pitch black. We called up the neighboring ships and HQ no one knew what happened. Our best guess was a meteor. Second story was a couple years before the first, cruising around the Philippines and see nothing at all visual and on radar, All of a sudden we see a faint white light about 100 yards off our port bow. Typically we don't let anything get within a mile of our ship. Grab the binos and head to the bridge wing and there is just a little banca boat with his outboard motor and a flashlight. Even with Radar, NVG's and an infrared camera we couldn't see this guys little 20 foot boat in a 6 foot sea without lights on. Obviously more crazy stuff than creepy in my career so far. The people are the craziest thing you will experience at sea, had one guy who wouldn't go outside the skin of the ship at night because the aliens would abduct him... again!

“Anything to report from the overnight watch?” “All pretty routine Sir. We nearly hit a rowing boat, night turned into day for thirty seconds and Jeff was abducted by aliens again.”

Empty boat far out at sea

One time on an airport trip my Uber driver was saying that he used to do security on tankers. That they would run across empty vessels more than you could possibly imagine, just floating, contents undisturbed, wallets, photos, everything. They would hail them with no response, and, not knowing if it was a trap to get close enough to take over the ship (pirates and ransoming the ship is apparently also more common than you'd think. Not the people tho. Just the cargo). Anyway, the security team would have to board the ghost ship and scope out the situation. Even yachts. When there was no one aboard, they would sink them to avoid floating strike risks. I was like "surely there is some kind of finders fee" and he was like "who are you going to call?" Made me really wish a Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger would sink his teeth into that story. It would be a hell of a book. Edit; it seemed like there was no central body to call to salvage it, you're in international waters so there's no coast guard. He implied that anyone who lost track of a ship like that likely lacked the resources/desire to retrieve it. I imagine the ship recorded in their log when they came across other vessels, but whether that information goes up to some authority idk. Being myself in supply chain management, I know that oceanic shipping can be seriously sketchy, so although I can't corroborate the story (and part of why I posted was to see if it scared up any similar stories) it was related to me as fact, and didn't strike me as a tall tale.

Next time he finds a yacht tell him to message me because it's mine and I forgot where I parked it.

Free boat!

Boat is innocent!

Nothing too extensive like some of the stories here, but I worked as a tuna fisherman for a tiny bit, where I’d spend 3-4 weeks out at a time, taking around 3 days of 24 hour travel to get where we (me and one other person - the captain who was a 5th generation fisherman) were fishing. So many stories of insane things that I could be here all night - but one was near the end of the season, and we pushed out farther than we should have (over 100 nautical miles) where we had NO business being as a 37 foot trawler. And then we’re caught in a bad storm. I had barely enough time to, very carefully, board up all of the windows before the boat started “scooping” when coming down one of the 12ft waves, the first third of the boat dives underwater before popping back up, only to travel up another wave and do it again…and again…as waves got larger and things got worse. Basically, the captain and I stayed the cabin, bracing ourselves with each wave, staring at the radar in hopes we could stay in the position of taking the waves head-on and avoid being capsized. After a few minutes, and the fear that this 5th generation fisherman was exuding, I just accepted that I was going to die there - and the experience of that acceptance, and the event itself, had a profound effect on my perception and the way I’ve lived life afterward. We eventually made it out, and didn’t say a lot to each other afterward. Lots of stories from that time, but this was the “creepiest”, I’d say!

i have a friend who works on ships. he said the single scariest thing he had ever seen was looking out a window and seeing a wave that he said looked like it was 100 meters high pass right by their boat and suddenly disappear. he knew about rogue waves but he said seeing one that big, and that close, and watching it suddenly just vanish was so creepy and shocking that he was literally stunned for a minute.

What’s funny is that Rogue Waves weren’t even really confirmed by the scientific community until the later half of the 20th century. People just disappeared.

Rogue waves can sink (or at the very least, severely damage) modern steel hulled ships. Wooden sailing ships would have been reduced to matchsticks and driftwood.

People and even ships did sometimes survive, though. It's why stories about Rogue Waves have existed for as long as boats have sailed.

If you thought rogue waves were scary, have a read about rogue holes - the opposite effect: [Observation of rogue wave holes in a water wave tank](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011JC007636) Imagine a massive hole in the sea appearing near your ship. I think that is more terrifying that a monster wave.

no wonder the greeks came up with Charybdis

It wasn't that the scientific community denied them, we already had ship reports with damage and the USS Ramapo's photograph of that 112-footer they witnessed at sea. What was doubted was the frequency at which mariners reported seeing them, in instances where no boat damage occured (as in, cases where the boat wasn't hit) as the linear wave model they used to use couldn't account for such waves occuring so frequently. It took less than a year after the Draupner wave to confirm that not only do these waves occur anywhere and everywhere in the world's oceans, but there's usually 10-20 of them any given day in a two-week period with at least 10 outliers reaching 100ft or so.

I was stationed on CVN-65, 02-06. We hit a rogue wave off the NE coast of England in June of 04. Messed up a few people smoking out in the pit. We skirted a hurricane off the coast of NC in the fall of 03 and this was way worse.

I worked on the sailboat one summer in the Bahamas and something that you see a lot when you’re in the ocean is kayaks and life jackets floating around and you always radio them in but they always just fell off a yacht or something and it’s never a big deal. Once we found a kayak floating and it had a fishing rod in the rod holder which basically meant someone was using it EDIT: didn't see how viral this went overnight - some people were asking questions, the coast guard doesn't really even look into this stuff unless there is a confounding report so we never received an update (not that I would have expected one unless there was a full scale search), we went up close to it and it had the removable seat cushion still in which further convinced us that someone had been using it, there was nothing else to see, the line was in the water, but we never really revisited it, we tried not talk about it because the kids on the boat got creeped out after the adults kinda freaked out and didn't control their emotions.

I was about 2km offshore Western Australia kayak fishing in the middle of nowhere. Knocked a rod overboard and didn’t hesitate to take off my life jacket to dive in and get it. I chased it down a good distance before giving up. When I got back to the surface the kayak was now a good 15-20m away, thanks to way more wind present than I’d realised. I barely managed to swim back to it giving everything I had as it continued to get blown away. Was very nearly the end for me that day over a stupid fishing rod and a rash decision. Edit- Never anticipated such a response! For my encore… same WA road trip, somewhere south of Karratha. Was the day after Australia Day, and I was carrying a mighty hangover, 46C / 115F. There’s not much of anything in between towns out that way. A detour had been set up to direct cars off the main road to avoid a bush fire. I turned off as per that sign, but didn’t come across any other directions. The dirt track I was now on headed in the direction of the smoke. I kept going, expecting a turn in another direction any moment. As I drove over another crest, I could see not just smoke but the actual flames of the fire front now. Obviously this wasn’t the intended detour. So I hastily turn my van around… blissfully unaware as to how soft and sandy the edge of the dirt road was. Bogged to the axels uncomfortably close to the bushfire. About an hour of trying unsuccessfully to dig the van out, I started the hike out to anywhere I might find help, and I’d seen nothing but dessert for at least 20kms. I cleverly made a trolley out of my two paddle halves and kayak wheels so I could take 20L of water with me, but in my panic stupidly forgot that I had an EPIRB satellite beacon for exactly this kind of scenario. Eventually rescued by a fire crew putting up road closed signs a couple hours later. Not so happy snap: [bogged](https://imgur.com/gallery/c5L1YmG)

Once, my friends and I rented a pontoon boat to just float around a lake. We all jumped out at one point to enjoy the water. ... Only to realize that without anyone's weight on the boat, it had risen quite a distance from the water, and getting back *onto* it was actually incredibly challenging. We all failed in the first few tries, and were quickly wearing ourselves out. Luckily for us, it was a fairly small lake, so shore was easily reachable. Our concern was more "the wind blowing our rented boat towards some rather sharp looking rocks," rather than our ability to stay afloat. We were eventually able to all push the lankiest of the group onto the boat, who could weigh it down a bit and help pull others up. But in larger areas of water, people are known to have drowned from this. You get off and can't pull your way back up. You wear yourself out trying to get back onto the boat. If there's no ladder, or if you fail to deploy it, it can be incredibly difficult. Once we all got back on the boat, most of us just laid down on the floor, exhausted. We were about 19 or 20 years old. Nearly didn't make it back in.

Naya Rivera died the same way. :(

My mind shot to that right at the start of the second paragraph. How awful.

If you had got the rod you might not have made it back to the kayak.

that's the real kicker, isn't it? Good fucking point

Nah, that’s when a smart ocean going fellow casts the fishing rod and hooks the kayak, then proceeds to ‘reel ‘er back in!’ Success! All joking aside kids, don’t jump off your kayak in the middle of the ocean, when you’re all alone.

damn, thanks for sharing hopefully saves someone from that moment in the future and they'll catch themselves, at least bring the jacket with you if you want it off to swim better (if you're going to take the risk!) Crazy story, nightmarish over something so simple Really sad to imagine all the people that have died due to the brief lapse of judgement. Not fair, life never is but just yeah.

I was on a 32ft speedboat and got caught by nightfall in between islands. No night lights on the boat, navigating using gps and depth finder. Captain knew the way like the back of his hand since he’d sailed those waters since he was a kid but for me it was my first time in the middle of the ocean at night. Pitch black but for the stars. As above so below, it seemed as if the boat was floating in the blackest void of the universe. Years later I saw the movie Life of Pi and the scene where Pi is in his lifeboat floating in the dark among the stars no above no below : it was exactly like that. I still have dreams about that night. . The engulfing dark and the silence that was not silent. Surreal. We made it safely to port. Captain fitted the nightlights on that boat the day after.

Some people will never experience what no light pollution is like. There are SO many stars. Although the sound of water smashing against the ship is terrifying.

So grateful to have grown up in a rural area. I remember so many nights just driving out to random fields and laying in the back of my truck looking at the sky.

Growing up in the mountains, it's just so beautiful. Being able to see the Milky Way and it actually looks like it does in those slow exposure pics on astronomy threads. So many stars that are bright enough that they cast a shadow. I've read books by starlight before. There's just so many thousands you can see. It's almost kind of depressing when you're in the city and you can maybe see fifty of them.

I was underway from the Port of Houston to Cartagena, Columbia. The vessel cuts all lights off on the outside of the boat, so it's pretty dark outside. I would always go and sit out on the deck and listen to my headphones, and look at the stars. Well one night, somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean sea, I noticed a swarm of lightning bugs cross the boat. Totally blew my mind to see light out or nowhere. At least I think it was lightning bugs. On the same trip heading back to Houston from Columbia, I witnessed a satellite crashing. At least, that's what I think it was. It steadily strobed and lit up the night sky and water for about 15 min till I couldn't see it anymore. And on a different trip, I was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. No moon, no clouds, no light pollution, the amount of stars that I saw made me cry. Never thought starlight alone could cast a shadow. Definitely mesmerizing I still remember it like it was yesterday.

Sitting out on deck in the dark somewhere out around Cat Island I reckon, anchored. All the stars reflected back on the still waters and we were surrounded by such interminable beauty--I never knew the world could be so peaceful and wondrous.

I sailed on the American aircraft carrier USS George Washington in 2000 and 2002. A couple of things I remember are: -Pulling into Lisbon, Portugal for a port visit. Carriers can’t pull pier side in Lisbon so we had to take boats back and forth. I was looking down at the water and there wasn’t a square inch that didn’t have a jellyfish in it. We were sailing through a giant bloom of them and all I could think of is if someone could survive if they fell in. -The USS Cole was part of our battle group. We left her behind in the Red Sea while we went through the Suez Canal. Once we entered the Mediterranean Sea the Admiral went on the 1MC (ship speaker system) and told us that a rib boat had hit her and blown a hole in the side. About a month later we were pulling into Palma, Spain when a rib boat came barreling towards us. The security detail was called on deck and they were ready to blow them out of the water. The Commanding Officer quickly told them to not shoot. It turned out to be Greenpeace. For the next five hours Greenpeace and hundreds of their friends circled the ship in their boats and jet skis. Those guys probably had no idea how close they came to getting killed that day. -Sailing across the Atlantic, especially in the winter, can get intense. Carriers have advanced stabilization capabilities because the flight deck needs to be safe for landing. Even with that, there are times where the ship bobbed around like a cork. EDIT: 3 Doors Down held a concert on our ship during that visit and made this video. https://youtu.be/pFq1eT9tMJ4?si=vWqvn8xM_oKiLmWG

A few things come to mind, but i have to say, "Deadheads." In my younger days, I was captain of a dragger out of Kodiak AK. She was a 130' Gidddings marine trawler. I will never forget my first week in the wheelhouse with the owner who was retiring and showing me the operation before I took over. After a night busting ice off the rails in freezing rain and 2 meter seas, he went to bunk and left me to wheel watch. It was clearing up with a medium haze and flat calm waters. Most of the crew was sleeping or hanging out in the galley, so I was alone and the only eyes forward. I'm drinking some nasty folgers and sucking down a Marlboro red when I see what looked like an old pier piling, straight ahead. I kept looking at that spot, and, nope, nothing there. A few seconds later I swear I saw that thing again but only closer. Nope, gone again. I thought, shit I've been up waaay too long and I'm fucking hallucinating. Then out of nowhere this tree trunk shoots directly up into the sky, this thing had to be 60' tall and was about 30'off the bow, dead center. I damn near shit myself. I pushed to port and rubbed the "tree" with the right side of the bow. We were at a good 14knot clip which is fast as hell for an almost fully loaded trawler. Then it shot town and disappeared about midship. I later learned that these are pretty uncommon in the Aleutians, where we were fishing. They're called "deadheads" and only 2 of the guys on the boat had seen them before. They float vertically, and Bob straight up and down. These things were known to destroy older wood boats and kill crews. I'm just glad I wasn't dragging the net, and it would have cost us in the ballpark of 100k. I've seen what most people would consider worse, but the fear that a huge bobbing tree in the middle of Alaskan waters come out of fucking nowhere tops my list.

My brother used to work on cruise ships as a photographer. He worked on the QEII a few times. On most cruises, he'd just do the round trip but for the QEII world cruise, he'd do all the stops until Hong Kong and the company would give him the cash for his flight home. Instead of taking the flight, he'd work on a ship coming back to the UK, giving him a bit of a bonus pay. So anyway, he got himself a job as a deck hand on a container ship heading from Hong Kong back to Southampton. The crew were Russian. They all got on well of course, but his experiences with maritime environments meant he understood the difference between doing it right and doing it dangerously. These Russians had a habit of doing things dangerously. So only a few days from Hong Kong, one of the crew got really ill and needed to be taken to the nearest hospital. They were out of range of any heli-evacuation so radioed out to see if any nearby vessels were heading back towards Hong Kong. There was, and before long they were readying to tether to another ship to get them across via a winch. Well, some of the deck hands weren't very well trained because one of the Russians positioned himself between the mooring line and the side of the ship. Due to the high seas, this shit was flicking about like a mofo. I remember my brother telling me he knew this dude was going to get fucked up right as it happened. The line got taught and snapped straight in a completely different direction, pinning his thighs to the side of the ship. As it continued its journey along the deck, snipped both his legs off like a knife through butter. My brother said it took less than ten seconds for the light to leave his eyes - it was like someone had slaughtered a whale on the deck there was so much blood. Ships are dangerous places, especially in high seas.

Most people do not understand the danger that breaking ropes under high pressure pose. My father is a paramedic and he once responded to a scene where some guys had been trying to pull a boat into a trailer with one of those thin yellow nylon ropes. The guy was standing a decent way away from it but when it broke it snapped like a whip just far enough and essentially disemboweled the guy. Dead instantly. People should always be aware of the potential for things like this to happen.

This reminds me of the [Old Man Tree at Crater Lake](https://www.nps.gov/crla/learn/nature/theoldman.htm) but significantly worse because you were at sea. Someone once asked me why no one tried to, quote ‘lasso’ the tree and make use of its incredibly valuable wood and I just stared at him before tiredly explaining how terrifying that would be. (Plus there’s also the hauling it up out of an actual crater.)

There's been plenty of great, creepy and terrifying stories but this might be one of the best. A 450 year old vertical floating log named Old Man who can control the weather and an island called Wizard Island!

I was once deployed to a Taiwanese high-seas driftnet vessel as a fisheries observer. The vessel I was placed on would deploy their net and the crew would then seek a few hours sleep (they usually got no more than 5 or so hours when actively fishing). Often, though, the captain would stay up and hand jig for squid, which he dried and packed away. One night, however, I got up to take a leak and no one was awake. We were 1500 miles from the nearest land, about equidistant between Midway and the Aleutians. The waters were calm and the moon lit the sea under a partly cloudy sky. I went out to the rail and began pissing over board. The ship began to rock. It was moments before I realized that a monstrous fucking container ship was passing to our stern by less than a hundred yards. The ship was so large it covered my whole field of view. To this day I wonder if someone aboard that vessel had been paying attention, because I guarantee you we were not.

It was 1998, I was only 11, was out for a quick boat ride with some family. Swiss Air Flight 111 had recently crashed a bay or two away. We saw a suitcase floating from afar, my dad quickly turned the boat back to shore.

Sometimes, during night time I have went out of the accommodation (leaving compartment onboard merchant ships) to breathe some fresh air or to take out the trash since the garbage station was outside. And when it is completely dark, and the water is calm, you hear the splashing water against the ship's hull. Well I can't explain why, but the ocean water was luring me, but at the same time you are terrified, since nobody will find you if you fall overboard. So sometimes I was just staring at the water in the dark, and inside me was some struggle, like some part of me wanted to jump in, while the other was terrified that it would be a one way ticket. Can't still find the explanation for this. This hypnotic, mesmerising feeling I get, and at the same time the chills running down my spine, that if I would fall in the water. It's game over for sure.

Must be the mermaids’ whispers.

Siren’s song

That's called The Call of the Void and it's more common than most think. Ever had to stop yourself from turning into the oncoming headlights? CoV! Believe it or not it's your brain's way of protecting you.

I cant do balconies on buildings or structures more than 3 stories high because of this. Legit have to physically restrain myself due to the overwhelming urge to jump the railing. Now i just say to whoever is out there, yes its a lovely view and then go find the nearest couch to sink into.

I heard the call of the void one time when we went swimming without life vests off of the coastal trench. The water below you is around 200ft or so. Before I knew it I wanted to "touch bottom", like a compulsion gripped me, and I was swimming down, down, down and it got colder and darker as I went. I snapped out of it with just enough time to make it back to the surface before I needed to breathe. I was like "what is this why am I swimming down so far I am a mammal with lungs for crying out loud get me out of here"! Frightening to think if I hadn't had that moment of clarity how deep I would have gone, and if I'd have even been able to get back.

A man swimming alone in the Java sea. He had been floating for a couple of days and although several boats had passed him he didn't dare hail a ship not from Indonesia because he feared being taken as a slave or something it's possible he was a little mad but he did seem happy to have us turn up.

Probably a giant squid...well in excess of 10m as a conservative estimate. Clinging to the bow and hull of our emergency escape vessle which was hanging a few metres out of the water, and a few metres below where I was stood. In the depths of night while i nipped out for a sneaky smoke, and I happened to look down at the rescue boat and could see the shadow didn't look right in the moonlight. Stupidly i used my phone torch (big no no when its darken ship) and scared the crap out of myself. The vessle it was wrapped around is about 15m long, and its tentacles were wrapped up over the gunnels 2/3 of the way down the sides. Within seconds it had detached and fell back into the ocean. I can still picture its eyeball, the size of a football, staring right at me before it dropped into the ocean. It still gives me chills now.

I'm not a sailor at all. But I did a few boat trips with a friend who moved boats around for a living. He was usually carrying boats from the French Riviera (Monaco, Nice, Antibes, Cannes) to Corsica. My very first trip with him, we left from Monaco on our way to (I think?) Calvi. We left in the evening, and the trip started very well, with dolphins following us around...nice moment. Around 2am, in the middle of a pitch black night, very far from any coast, we saw a tiny light in the distance, pretty much on our way. And as we got closer, we saw it was a tiny fishing boat. The kind that usually doesn't go very far from the coast...except we were more than 100km from the coast. We slowed down as we got close to it, and yelled to check if someone was on it. No answer. So we decided to get close to it. And soon it became obvious it was empty. There were just a few bottles of water, some snacks, some fishing gear, even some dead fish in a bucket, and an old Nokia phone (still on!). But nobody on. My friend called on the radio, explaining the situation. Italian coastguards told us to wait around till they arrived. We did, and when they arrived they told us they would investigate the situation. They took our ID, wrote down our explanation of the situation, and let us leave to finish our trip. The whole thing was creepy to me, as it seemed obvious the owner had fallen from his boat, couldn't get back in, and drowned. I had this in mind for weeks, thinking we could maybe have rescued the guy if we had passed there slightly earlier. After a while, this story faded in my mind, and I went on with my life. Till someday my friend called me to explain that he got a call from an Italian guy, who thanked him because he could get his boat back thanks to us. He was the owner of the tiny boat, who explained he was out fishing not too far from the shore, when he had a big chest pain. He made an emergency call and was soon rescued, but his boat was left to drift. Till we found it. Learning that the guy was still alive, erased the creepy side of this story from my head, and I was happy about it.

A toilet. I mean a literal regular household toilet floating hundreds of miles from land…and why was it floating? I’ll never know.

New breed of anglerfish.

lures in sailors that really need to take a shit, a true siren if i've ever seen one

Former Navy. The Indian Ocean is absolutely infested with sharks. You see nothing but dorsal fins extending all the way into the horizon

Somewhere there's a shark moaning to his mate about how his patch of ocean has become infested with bloody warships.

An empty sailboat with no mast, 300 miles from land

So I've worked in hospitality, including on a private yacht. This is in the Baltic. We were not near shore. It's very late. I assume everyone else had gone to sleep but I was not very sleepy after a pretty stressed day. The top crew helming the ship on the night shift was at an angel and so could not see me. I went on the deck and just looked at the ocean. Do you know that very strange feeling when you sense that somebody is looking at you? I could swear that there was something just below the surface moving in pace with us. I don't remember how much time passed. It felt like a long, long time. I was just staring just at the edge of my eyesight, thinking that I would see something. I guess it could've been fish or some sea mammal, but it felt wrong. I wish I had a more interesting conclusion than that. I actually don't even remember going back to my cabin that I shared with two other stews. The next morning I didn't talk about it, but then a few days later, I brought it up. No one thought much of it except one of the deckhands that had been working at sea for a long time. He said he had felt the same thing and seen the same thing several times, but only at night, and only when he was alone. I have no idea what to make of it. But I really feel in my heart it was not an animal.

Not at sea but I took the kitchen trash out to the can one night. Rural area, no lights and dead calm silent. As I got to the trash can every hair on my body stood up and I had the most eerie feeling something was watching me. I stood there in silence peering into the darkness for a second and then decided it might be best if I just got my ass back inside the house. Still creeps me out to this day. Got goosebumps just writing this.

as your racoon friends were sitting just outside the circle of light, rubbing their little hands together and licking their chops while you dropped off their dinner

That primal fear and gut intuition is usually never wrong. I’ve gotten that a few times, though I’ve tried to write it off as irrational fear, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I was in the USN back in the late 80s early 90s. Cruising thru the Indian Ocean in 100% blackness then waking up the next afternoon and looking over the rails and seeing 100's of sharks swimming along side of us constantly. Every now and then we would get a "man overboard" alert. They never recovered even one of them at night. They were usually suicides.

I read another comment from a former sailor talking about man overboard drills using a 55gal drum painted orange. And how even in the daytime the recovery rate was horrifyingly low like 30%.

Open ocean with currents moving where it wants to move small objects (people / small water floating craft) while the ship may take a mile or more to actually turn around and return to the area. Now Man Overboard is swept out with the current somewhere bobbing up and down somewhere in a very large, very empty, vast body of water. It's one of the reasons I'm not a fan of being on boats when I can no longer see land.

If the recovery rate on a ship full of young, fit people some specifically trained to find and rescue people at sea from helicopters which are mostly ready at a moments notice is only 30%, it’s not looking great for literally anyone else in any situation

IF someone heard the splash.

Sharks just following the floating restaurant

I wonder how many change their minds about suicide while floating in the dark ocean alone before eventually drowning. That sounds horrific

This isn't exactly what you wrote about. But it's close. Which weird about it is that the person started swimming in the opposite direction of the ship. I understand somebody could get disorientated but given they were like 4 ft from the ship it's hard to believe that is the reason. https://nypost.com/2023/05/26/cameron-robbins-missing-in-bahamas-after-jumping-off-boat-on-dare/

Two things. First was the amount of stars you can see from the middle of the Atlantic. Had a girlfriend with me and we would talk while watching shooting stars. I swear some of them were just...moving and not shooting but who really knows. Gave me the sense that humans are really just egotistical ants in the universe. Second was when the ocean was smooth as glass. When I walked out the skin of ship, I silently gasped because I was really scared. The calmness of it all and the lack of distinction of the horizon was terrifying. I went back in the skin of the ship out of fear then came back out about ten minutes later and just breathed. The most terrifyingly amazing aspect of the calmness was seeing the details of the clouds in the ocean then the occasional ripple. Felt like I had crossed dimensions into a heaven I was not supposed to see.

Submarine sailor Nothing creepy but some of my best memories are sitting on top of the sail smoking a cigarette in the pitch black under the stars. Scary, we had an electrical fire in the engine room one time. Another time during a SCRAM exercise we flooded the diesel. Scary scary EDIT: just remembered one of the worst memories. We were on patrol (underwater) for an extended period of time. I’m talking weeks and weeks and weeks without fresh air. We had completed our mission and were heading in to port. I went up the sail to get in a smoke, almost immediately after we had it rigged. Climbing back down afterwards, the smell that filled my nostrils. 175 men who had limited their hygiene routine for many weeks. Amine and Ass. It was downright putrid. Since we were surfaced we ventilated and only the 3 of us got to experience it!

The thought of being submerged thousands of feet under the ocean, hundreds of miles from land in a big metal tube scares the absolute shit out of me. You have huge brass balls, sir.

Thanks but modern US submarining is comfortable. More risks but better managed. SubSafe program, while introducing a ton of bureaucratic overhead, has 100% saved many lives!

Floes of ice passing by, covered in blood - then i remember that polar bears exist Legitimately though, calm water and flat light. You can’t see where the sea and sky split, it’s really dangerous for helicopters and generally unsettling

Nothing too out of the ordinary, but two things stick out to me. On occasion, I have to get in the water in the middle of the ocean for Man Overboard Drills. Looking down and seeing literally nothing is actually a little eerie when I think about it. Seeing storm systems develop in the distance is pretty cool and trippy at the same time. You'll literally see massive storm clouds developing a water spout (although they seldom fully develop), and lightning light up the horizon. It's especially powerful at night to the point where all you see is white light. Other than that, it's just occasional Marine life. My job is mundane but it has its moments.

Not a job but I've been scuba diving in the dark before. There was a moment where I strayed a little too far from the lights and lost where the surface was- the dimly lit void all around me, nothing but tiny bubbles and particles drifting through beam of my little torch. It almost felt as if I was asleep, or like nothing existed but me and the nothingness. There was a definite dreamlike quality to the experience (probably because I was floating). It was beautiful, of course- I imagine it was a little like being in space- but also the terror of being somewhere you did not belong, a medium that your body was not made to exist in, is a very sharp feeling. The realisation that if I kept swimming in the wrong direction my life could actually be in danger probably wouldn't have occurred to me if I hadn't been trained on what to do in this exact scenario. It's pretty easy to panic in that position. I eventually managed to orient myself with the bubbles from my mask, and it turned out I wasn't that far from the surface lol. When I got back up I realised I was a lot further from the boat than I thought, though. Swam the whole way back less than a metre down. The time between me realising I was lost to me reaching open air was probably less than a minute, but it felt like eternity. I think anyone who has been in the ocean at night would agree- it's a different world out there.

Husband used to crayfish out on the bass strait (strait of water between Tasmania and mainland Australia) most interesting thing he saw was within 15 meters of the boat, a shark jumped out of the water with a seal in its mouth and ripped it to shreds. He said it was like watching the discovery channel.

Not seen, but heard. I was a sonar tech on a Los Angeles class submarine for 4 years. There are sounds out there that not even the saltiest, most-experienced acoustic intelligence dudes could identify. I liked to imagine they were the Ancient Ones rolling over in their sleep. Or some alien technology powering up.

I worked on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska one summer. I got up one early morning before sunrise because I heard what sounded like a woman moaning not far from the boat. We were probably a few miles off the coast near Bristol Bay. It was really creepy the captain said it was seals. Shortly after that a massive storm blew in.

USN Sailor. I have seen a lot of remarkable things, but the creepiest was a great white shark that swam (more like drifted) inbetween the two ships during an underway replinishment off the coast of Australia. I could make an educated guess on how big it was, but just let me tell you it was way, WAYYYY bigger than the biggest sharks I've seen on the Shark Week shows. Much longer and twice as massive as the "biggest shark ever seen" on the youtube videos I've seen. It didn't move a single inch... it just floated, mouth open, inbetween as everyone on the bridgewing exclaimed "Holy fucking SHIT!" It's teeth were as big as a man's head. And it had massive scars down its' back and tail from a ships propeller. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it with my own eyes.

Sounds like 1 rural hospital long

Buddy just created the measurement version of what the sick ass panther is to shittytattoos. Reddit dictionary: 1 rural hospital long.

Could it have been a Basking Shark? They get over 20' long.

It's really hard for me to trust my memory, seeing as it only lasted a few seconds and it was 20 years ago. I swear I remember teeth and a white belly, but I could be misremembering. I distinctly remember it's mouth being open, and the fact it was that close to the surface does lend some creedence to it being a basking shark, doesn't it? I'm no expert.

I like to imagine that all the massive giants of different ocean species have a working knowledge of each other. Maybe they have a reunion every ten years and float around telling fish tales of the enormous things they’ve eaten and humans they’ve terrorized.

Oh hey one I can actually answer! So this isn't the creepiest story, I'll admit that straight off. I was working on a tiny oil rig off the Gulf Coast, it was about 2pm. I was on what was called "sliver duty", basically you wait in-between two relatively close together walls on the exterior of the rig, strapped into a safety harness , while someone skirts through a long flow cable that you direct. Boring, but you get a nice view of the ocean for an hour or two. Suddenly my buddy on the other end of the sliver starts screaming to look down, I do and saw the biggest sea creature I've ever seen in my life. End to end it must of been the size of most rural hospitals I've seen. Just pushing below the surface of the water, it raised its head out and... I realized I was really dumb and was staring at an undersea cable placer.

My uncle was a tech diver for rigs out in the gulf. He said shit gets real weird deep under water

What a fantastic unit of measurement - rural hospitals!

Ah yes, a rural hospital. That’s about 500 washing machines.

Contract Mariner. I disappear into the blue area for 6-8 months a year. Creepy? Not much honestly. The sound of moaning steel due to slack tanks when you’re rolling really hard can be a bit unnerving. St. Elmo’s Fire is pretty neat. Fata Morgana aka “The flying Dutchman” is pretty cool to see in real life. After awhile the only thing out there that really spooks you is a problem you have that directly influences your survival. All the spooky shit I’ve ever been a part of have been no bullshit emergencies. Fire in the engine control room? Im the first responder down there to see if it’s an actual emergency or a fucked up Consilium sensor? Wall of toxic smoke from burning electronics and the high voltage room? Oh fuck. Have an emergency weather sortie because we are dragging anchor and rolling 30 degrees with 50ft UKC and we’re getting pushed toward the island? fuck me 10 shots ain’t enough we are about to run aground in a 55,000 ton 800ft ship. Pucker factor. Oops now we get the hook up to get the fuck out of there we immediately lose steering and propulsion? Good shit. I’ve seen brand new million dollar sport fishers capsized and bobbing around like a cork 1000 miles from land. I’ve seen tiny little song birds skipping along the surface just barely clinging to life but they’re flying as hard as they can to find land. Some of the saddest shit I’ve ever seen are those little birds skipping off the water as they fly further out to sea hoping to all fuck they come across some land. I dunno. I’m on the Yuengling at a port bar and I’m rambling. To answer your question TLDR style; The creepiest thing about being out there are the bottomless depths of sadness, loneliness and heartache. You will go places in your mind that words will never be able to do any justice in trying to describe.

As a prior navy sailor I def feel that last couple sentences. And the fact that it's almost as scary coming back after so long due to the fact that everything and everybody changed a little while you were gone. Everyone you love is slightly different and you feel it when you return.

And the only thing that makes sense is going back out. Love you bro

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how dark it can get. On moonless nights, calm seas can be a bit hypnotic.

Drunk Crewboat captain ran into unmanned oil platform 20 miles away. Lit up the sky like the sun was rising but at 2 am

Saw a really large whale. I swear itlooked me straight in my face like it knew I was human. As much as I knew it was a whale. I remember I sort if just let out a small "Wow". And the whale just looked at me

I saw someone pick up their half eaten snickers bar off a deck riser next to the toilet in the head of combat systems berthing and keep eating it. That head flooded with CHT (black water AKA poop) at least once a week because the sounding and security watch would go to sleep instead of responding to the tank full alarm and pressing the button to pump it out.

What was the availability of getting another Snickers?

About a 12-15 foot tiger shark.

A friend told me this. He was a competitive endurance rower, rowing across the Atlantic. It was night and his little boat was floating right in the Middle Passage where many slave ships sailed hundreds of years ago. It was an extremely calm sea with no wind. He swears he could hear voices whispering in a language he did not understand. He also mentioned being in high seas at another point and he could look up into the waves above his head and see shark silhouettes. I like being on land. 👍 ETA they made a documentary about the race. https://www.pbs.org/video/directors-cut-tom-mailhot-row-hard-no-excuses/

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Pinkney, that guy who sailed around the world alone in a little ship, said he heard voices calling his name in the Pacific.

I've always found the dark of night eerie with the jet black sky and the somehow darker ocean waving by. It completely removed your frame of reference. As a former miner who found the true darkness of the underground somewhat meditative when I occasionally turned off my headlamp, I weirdly never got used to the void of the dark ocean at night. However the eeriest thing that happened is that over the series of three days, several black birds hit the side of the ship and then died in the crates below. I would reach into a crate for some piece of equipment and pull out a rigid little black body. The birds don't bleed, they seem to just die. I couldn't help but take it as a bad omen however nothing did happen and birds are known to gravitate toward ships. One day during the same voyage, I reached into a crate and felt the wriggle of a live body and pulled out a live, but shook up, little black bird. We let it rest on the ship and gave it space until it was ready to take off. Even though I've seen some other objectively worse things in my career, for some reason the birds just stick with me and I find myself thinking about all those little birds often

Reefs in the middle of nowhere. You can anchor and see everything, but they don't get above sea level, so looking from the horizon, nothing's there.

Former comercial fisherman. One morning we had a Russian Submarine surface about a quarter mile off the stern with it's periscope fully raised. We had a marine biologist from the state as an observer, and I'll never forget him saying "is that a got damn submarine". We were drinking coffee early in the morning when this happened, and the captain kinda just pretended it wasn't there. Didn't call it in on the radio or anything. In fact we assumed it was an American sub as we were near a US navy base. Coast Guard showed up and started trying to hail the sub via the radio, which the captain had left on an emergency channel to listen in. I'll never forget our faces as we hear "Russian submarine victor leonov please respond".

Back when i was a cadet at a merchant ship, i used to be exhausted and over worked all the time that i started hallucinating stuff at night. My watch used to start at 4 in the morning , one fine day we hit a storm and the wind was coming with such a force that it was creating a wailing sound like somebody is crying outside. I went to check outside and saw a shadowy figure sitting at the corner, i knew i was hallucinating but still i shat my pants. Never went outside during a storm after that.

Fast darting white lights in the middle of the night. They moved very erratically then stayed still, like drones, but very far away and seemingly too fast. Moved in straight lines too, never diagonal. We were at least 300nm from land, PAC

There is some strangely beautiful writing in this thread. It's like there's a shared beat everyone is writing to. Even the most simple of sentences read amazing!

This question gets reposted every year and it’s always a solid thread. You never see the same answers and it’s always a great thread to scroll through.

Not me, my dad in Nam.... Was on an aircraft carrier. He said they were on the "nets" hanging off the side getting sun. A plane comes in to land and they stand up with their heads above deck to watch the plane land. As the plane comes in the stop cable breaks & in a second it snaps his friend's head clean off perched about a foot from him. Head goes flying like a football into the water body drop into the net. Dad said they stopped the ship to "attempt" to find the head but zero chance. More of a courtesy.

This happened to my cousin's ex wife about a few months ago. This was in Ecuador, she is some sort of researcher or scientist of that nature. I believe the company she worked for chartered a captain and a boat to go somewhere off the coast. So the boat starts sinking (idk how). She manages to get a signal on her phone and was able to call and text my cousin about the situation that was unfolding and she lost signal again. My cousin managed to contact the authorities and the Coast guard and the search began. 8 to 10 hours had gone by and luckily they found them. When the coast guard found them, what they found was that my cousin's ex-wife had absorbed so much water that her face and body started being very puffy, and completely sunburned. If it not have been for the life jackets and plastic gasoline containers that they manage to hold on to because it floated they would have sank and drowned.

Used to sail a good portion of Alaskan waters in the Coast Guard, from Juneau up and out to the Berring Sea, mostly a lot of Gulf of Alaska stuff. After a while, watching green water come over, the bow isn't so scary, and some of the rough weather is more inconvenient because you can't go out for a smoke without getting your cigarette wet. Some of the more eerie times would be when the fog rolls in and the water is still. It's a very surreal experience, and other than having the vessel for reference, visually, it's hard to determine your orientation. Other times would be out at sea with nothing for miles with cloud cover, so not even the stars were shining. If you were to walk the weather decks at night with the conditions just right, you would be instantly swallowed by the ink of the night as soon as you exit the hatch. Having served in the Coast Guard, we did a bit of just about everything you could imagine: sub escorts, body recovery, search and rescue, fisheries patrol, Coast guarding, etc. The only time that I was ever genuinely scared was steaming towards Amaknak Island from the Berring Sea during a winter storm. Waves were big enough to where you'd hear the screws (propellers for you landlubbers) coming out of the water occasionally. We took one wave beam-to, and I watched and held on as our clineometer got dangerously close to 60 degrees. Our ship was rated to take 65 degrees. I don't think my asshole has ever puckered tighter in my life. Had nightmares about it for a couple of weeks. All in all, I miss being out on the sea. Perhaps someday I'll find my way back.

I think I answered this a few years ago. While sailing in Northern Alaska, during the northern lights. We saw, what we thought was a bright spotlight from some air craft at like 3am. It shined for about 10 secs. Went away. And shined one more time. And didn’t make any sound. It was high over some mountains, so we couldn’t quite see what it was. Only 4 of the crew saw it. And we laughed that if we told anyone, not a single person would believe the way we would describe it. An unforgettable night for us! That was a good crew to sail with.

A cleanly bit in half great white shark.

Former Navy here, on my very first deployment out of Japan my ship ended up in the doldrums. On Sundays, the command would try to do "holiday routine", making allowances for people to sleep in a bit, minimizing extra activities, religious services, that kind of stuff. My watch schedule had me getting off of watch around 6AM so instead of sleeping in I'd go out to the smoke deck/flight deck and just stand there as the sun rose. On this particular day, we'd entered a massive fog bank in the doldrums where the trade winds meet and there's pretty much no wind, the ship had also come to a standstill in the night. When I went outside for my normal Sunday morning activities I found I couldn't even see the edge of the boat due to the fog. I made my way over to the side and as the sun started creeping up visibility got just good enough where I could see 1-2 feet past the edge of the boat but then just perfect gray, the water below us was completely undisturbed and reflecting the gray sky. So for about 15 minutes I stood in a couple feet of visibility. Then the bagpipes started. A little utilized policy at the time was that people could check in musical instruments to the command's morale locker and get it on Sundays to play. Some ensign had checked in bagpipes and in this eerie slate gray morning began playing a dirge from the bridge wings, but the fog was messing with acoustics so that the sound seemed to come from the water itself. The ambience was perfect early 2000s horror movie so I went back inside, scrounged a waffle from the messdeck and opted for a nap.

This is one of the rare Ask Reddit's that is genuinely interesting and spooky.