Yahoo Lifestyle The Ocean Is F*cking Terrifying, And These 27 Stories From People Who Work At Sea Prove It
I'm just gonna outright say it: I do not fuck with the ocean. It is simply not for me, and I am absolutely alright with that. Don't get me wrong, I have a healthy dose of respect for it. Sure, beaches are fun! It's beautiful! Yay, fish! But still, I feel like 99% of the things I learn about the ocean are moderately to fully horrifying and are ten times more likely to send me into an existential crisis than any equally mindblowing fact about space would.
Hear me out! Over 70% of the Earth's surface is ocean. I'm no mathematician, but that's, like, a lot. And yet, it's estimated that humans have only explored about 5% of it overall. So, that means WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN 95% OF IT. Absolutely not. Nope. NOPE!
All that being said, I genuinely cannot image what otherworldly, unbelievable things people who frequent these massive, salty bodies of water have seen with their own two eyes. Lucky for us, we won't have to imagine it all! That's because Redditor u/Itsyourcamila asked, "For those who spend long periods of time at sea for work, what’s the eeriest thing you’ve ever encountered out on the water?" In full, spine-chilling detail, here are 27 stories people shared, as well as first-hand accounts from our BuzzFeed Community and this similar thread.
1."We responded to a sailboat that was taking on water. It became clear that the sailboat wasn't going to make it. We brought the crew of the sailboat onto our vessel, and then we sort of waited around and watched the sailboat sink. What struck me was how silent it was. No fuss. No drama. It wasn't like a dark and stormy night or anything — it was a picture-perfect day. A glassy ocean with not a cloud in the sky, and it didn't matter. It was the kind of day that most seafarers dream about, and yet these blokes had been in a fight for their lives trying to keep their boat afloat. After it sank, there were a few bubbles, and then that was it. You'd have never known there was ever a sailboat there. Just a beautiful day without a trace of struggle. Sailboat? What sailboat? Around here? I didn't see a sailboat."
2."I was on a night dive. It was a dive site I was familiar with, and as is common practice, the captain had fixed a steady strobe light at the anchor line of the boat so we could find our way back. As I was readying to complete my dive and ascend, I wondered why the strobe was no longer blinking and was now just a steady beam. Looking at my compass, I was doubly confused by how I had gotten my navigation so wrong. I felt foolish — had I been cocky and overexcited because I was comfortable with this site? How could I have miscalculated my direction so? It’s a dangerous mistake at any time for a diver, much more so at night. But as I was ascending, the brightness of the light really irked me. Why would the captain change the strobe on us? Was something wrong? Then it hit me."
"I wasn’t swimming toward the boat at all. I was swimming toward the moon. The water was so clear and calm, I had mistaken it for a light. Luckily, I hadn’t ascended fully and wasn’t too far off. I was able to redirect to my original navigation, eventually finding the strobe, the boat, and a renewed respect for the ocean’s ability to make you second-guess yourself."
3."We found a dead body floating in the water. The crew got it onto a stretcher, double-bagged it, kept it in the freezer, and turned it over to the local authorities at the next port visit. I had a role in that. It was in an advanced state of decomposition, but there was enough remaining to get an identification by dental records. Some family got closure."
4."We were under the polar ice cap. The ice sheets moan all the time. They sound like what you think a mermaid siren would sound like. And sometimes, you can hear it through the hull. We heard it for about 65 days straight, non-stop."
"The North Pole is absolutely the quietest place you can ever be. In November, it has this fog that's always there. You can't tell how far anything is away. It gets very unnerving after a while."
5."We were around some islands in the South Pacific. Saw a guy — one lone dude — floating in the middle of the water on some kind of inner tube/life ring. He hailed us and asked us to stop and bring him aboard because he’d been shipwrecked. Our captain, having not been born yesterday, offered to throw him a rope instead, saying we would happily tow him over to the open water and then welcome him aboard. The guy scowled and just said, 'Never mind, then.' Never stop around islands in pirated waters, folks. "
6."I was on a research vessel in the early '90s about 200 miles off of South Carolina. We could hold our position within a few dozen meters using a satellite system (predates GPS), so we stayed parked for days at a time. Sargasso seaweed would drift past us on its way to Europe. One time, the bridge called out that there was an oil slick. In actuality, it was a pod of killer whales that'd been hunting and were now drifting past, about to pass 1/2 mile (or so) off our port side. Before we reached the slick, two whales came over and patrolled our vessel stem-to-stern, maybe 30 feet off of the port rail, while the rest of the pod stayed with their kill."
"When the kill was about even with us, two more whales came and patrolled with the first two, taking two complete laps altogether. Then, the first two left to rejoin their 'lunch party' while the new squad stayed with us. After a while, those two left, and we never saw any of them again. At no time did they go to the starboard side, and they never went far beyond the ends of our ship. It was an organized guard patrol, and their message was very clear. No one aboard denied that we had been warned off.
We never did figure out what was on the menu for them that day, but it was large enough to form that huge oil slick."
7."Submariner here. I was a sonar technician, and we were out on a mission and had the towed sonar arrays out. We were deep, and it picked up on a couple of 'bios,' like shrimp and whales. It was quiet for about 20 minutes after we passed them. All of a sudden, we heard a screeching noise that sounded like metal on metal. We thought we had run into another submarine. The whole boat went into battle stations (aka each crew member went where they were assigned to be in the case of an emergency), and we woke up our SME (Subject Matter Expert) riders to determine what the fuck that sound was. It went on for about five minutes, just in and out. It sounded like a song if you started to replay it."
"The whole thing was recorded, but the acting SME couldn’t determine what it was, nor could the sonar chief. A message was sent out when we went to periscope depth, and the recording was sent to our squadron and the Office of Naval Intelligence once we pulled in. I do not know what happened afterward, but apparently, the Navy collects these types of recordings regularly.
From what we can tell, whatever caused that sound was close and almost as big as the boat. I couldn’t tell if it was bio (like an animal) or another boat. There were no screw noises, we didn't take on any water, and we surely didn't hit anything.
To this day, I still don't know what it was. Everyone was sure it was a bio. Most likely, it was an animal we never discovered. At the time of this occurrence, only military submarines were capable of going that deep, so individually, we ruled it out as anything mechanical."
8."I saw something that appeared very serpentine and very huge undulating in the waves of our wake on a very dark, cloudy night en route from Florida to NYC. It was glowing faintly green just underneath the surface and appeared to be some sort of huge, fat snake swimming alongside us with a roughly 1.5-foot diameter body. It was mesmerizing, trying to rationalize what I was looking at."
"Later, I realized it was just a dolphin playing in our trail, whose undulating body and wake were lit up by bioluminescent plankton."
"It’s stories like these that make you understand where a lot of legends passed down by oral traditions come from."
9."I've seen a lot of strange things at sea. A school of thousands of hammerhead sharks all swimming in the same direction. A half-eaten whale swimming along as though nothing was wrong. I've experienced the optical phenomenon where another ship looked so close I felt like I could reach out and touch it when, in reality, it was miles away. Being in storms where seas were tall and thinking back on wooden ships in the past traversing through such storms always weirded me out a bit."
10."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."
This sounds like an ocean fire, which — according to American Oceans — is "a rare phenomenon that occur when flammable gases seep out of the seafloor and ignite upon contact with oxygen in the water." In turn, the oceans surface is, in fact, on fire. Other causes include oil spills, lightning, and volcanic activity.
11."I was standing bridge, watching the Mediterranean Sea. It was 1996, and we were probably 50 miles north of Tunisia. At 2:00 a.m., something came down from the sky in a streak and exploded. It was absolute daylight for a few seconds. Bright enough that we were seriously concerned that a nuclear explosion had happened. It was probably just a big meteorite or something exploding, but it was surely something to see."
12."I sailed a 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. A creepy moment that is burned into my memory involved a near catastrophe halfway between New Zealand 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, we run a red light to preserve night vision, so there's basically just an eerie red glow emanating from below deck.
At about 2 in the morning, I was at the helm when a monster wave broke directly over the back of us without a second's 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."
13."The weirdest thing by far was coming out of a fog bank and seeing thousands of giant red Humboldt squid with their tentacles waving in the air. It was surreal and something I will never forget. They were like a bunch of little aliens."
14."I was running dark on a ship in the middle of the ocean. You could look in any direction (besides down) and see stars. It was so dark I couldn't see my hand an inch away from my face, but I could see stars that looked as though they were just above the water on the horizon, like a dome. It made me feel very small and insignificant."
15."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. 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 2m seas, he went to bed and left me to watch the wheel myself. 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 was drinking some nasty coffee and sucking down a Marlboro red when I saw 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 shoot directly up into the sky from the water. This thing had to be 60ft tall and was about 30ft off the bow, dead center. I damn near shit myself. I pushed to port and rubbed the 'tree' with the right side of the ship. We were at a good 14knot clip, which is fast as hell for an almost fully loaded trawler. Then it shot down 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 two 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, as 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 could come out of fucking nowhere tops my list."
You can see a video of deadheads for yourself below:
16."Former navy here. Somewhere off the coast of Italy, we saw a very, very small boat, not much bigger than a rowboat, about 9 or 10 miles offshore. This was sometime around midnight. There was no light from land, and no other ships around. The boat 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 offshore in the middle of a pitch black night, waiting to see what finds you."
17."I was working on a pearl boat for around 18 months on the Arafura Sea a few years ago. One of my roles was 'keeping watch' in the wheelhouse. Essentially, it was my job to make sure the boat was following the pre-set path on the navigation and to manually turn it if it strayed off course. My watch was 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. At about 7, I noticed a white cube, perhaps 200m port side (hard to say with no point of reference), but it didn’t show up on the nav/radar system we had that let you plot/recognize nearby boats. It was also not bobbing up and down with the waves. It was just sat there on the waterline in the distance."
"I got a better look at it with the binoculars and it was so strange seeing this white cube just sat still there on the sea in the distance. It wasn’t really hovering above it, but as the waves moved with the ocean every now and again, I could see the bottom of the light, which is how I knew it was a cube. Again, it’s hard to say without a point of reference at sea, but I’m guessing it was roughly the size of a van. The person who was following my shift came to drop me a coffee, and he saw it, too, so I knew it wasn’t just me being tired and hallucinating.
A few years later, I saw when the tic-tac videos came out from the Pentagon, and some of the fighter pilots said they had seen five-shaped objects floating in the sky. It sounds a bit like what I saw that morning, too."
18."I have a friend who works on ships. He said the single scariest thing was when he looked out a window and saw a wave that 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 — then watching it suddenly just vanish — was so creepy and shocking that he was literally stunned for a minute."
19."This was 1971 in the North Atlantic. We were conducting ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) operations in the North Atlantic, tracking Soviet submarine activities in our Hunter Killer task force. I pulled a Dog Watch (aka a shift) in the CIC (Combat Information Center) with little to no movement on our carrier. All was quiet, and only the normal returns from our surface radar reflecting our task force shone brightly on my face. I was alone with the watch commander and asked to switch to air watch systems since boredom was heavy in the room. He nodded and continued reading his paperback novel. With the flick of a toggle, I was in air mode and began identifying air contacts, which were mostly airliners flying to and from Europe and flashing normal IFF identifying signatures. Except for one."
"I locked on to the bogey as I attempted to get more information on its heading, altitude, and speed. With the next passing sweep, the bogey suddenly moved to the far side of my screen. I thought that was a bit odd, but I locked on once again. The information I gathered put it at a speed of Mach 26 (19,949 mph) at a shift in altitude from 40 thousand feet to 5 thousand feet in a matter of 3 seconds. I had my hands full trying to keep up with this thing for some time as it bounced around for the next few minutes at speeds between 25 and 30K and heights between 50K to almost surface level.
I informed my watch super, who looked over my shoulder at this incredible scene unfolding on my scope. We called a tech to check all of our systems, which resulted in no abnormalities. The gear was working just fine. I was ordered to run a tape of this strange encounter as a visual and keep the matter to myself. I figured 52 years was long enough. The tape? It's probably lost or erased."
—Anonymous
20."I was just fishing one night off the coast of the Pacific and saw a bunch of fish swimming in the opposite direction. It was really weird, but I thought nothing of it at the time and kept going. Only about 25-30 seconds later, I saw a huge great white heading towards the fish, and I mean HUGE. Even bigger than the ‘biggest great white’ videos. It luckily kept going for the fish, but its fin got caught in our propeller, and it got a scar. Then, ANOTHER huge shark came up and started fighting with the first shark. The two of them were blocking my path back to the pier and thus to shore, so I had to sit tight. Then, the new shark bit the other one and swam away. A few seconds later, the water around us was fully red, and I saw the first shark bobbing in the water. After that, I was afraid to go fishing for days."
—Anonymous
21."In the mid-90’s I was a deckhand sailing a schooner in the Caribbean. About a day west of Grenada, we saw a small inflatable board adrift. Per the captain's orders, another deckhand and myself motored over to it. As we approached, a couple of gulls flew out of it. When we got alongside it, we discovered it was empty save for a pair of large shoes and a pair of socks. It had been adrift for who knows how long."
—Anonymous
22."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 aluminum 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. It was eerie."
23."Creepiest thing I’ve seen has definitely been myself and other crew mates 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, 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."
24."The eeriest thing I've seen out at sea is the churning chaos of sealife you can attract just by shining a light in the water at night."
25."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 stressful day. I went on the deck and just looked at the ocean. Do you know that very strange feeling when you feel like somebody is looking at you? I could swear that there was something just below the surface. I don't remember how much time passed. It felt like a long, long time. I was just staring...thinking that I would see something. I mean 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 others in the stew crew. 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."
26."I worked on cruise ships and lived on the 11th deck. We slowed down and stopped late one night, which is unusual, so I went out on deck to see what was going on. They had a spotlight on a tiny boat floating in the middle of the dark ocean. It was taking on water, and the passengers — who'd been packed in like sardines — were frantically trying to dump it out over the side with small buckets. HUGE hammerhead sharks were swimming around the boat. They were almost as big as the boat, and — trust me — if I can see them from that far away, they’re huge. The captain had a small speedboat, and an officer went and was able to rescue them, thank God. Another few minutes and they would have been dead. Seeing those sharks and those people so close to being gone…creepiest thing I’ve seen."
—Anonymous
27.And finally, "In 20 years, the weirdest shit I’ve seen is other people who work out here. There’s about 40% of the sailors who 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 six 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."
Have you ever worked at sea and had an experience like these? If so, we'd be absolutely delighted to hear them. Tell us your story in the comments below or via this 100% anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
