I, personally, will be staying on land for the foreseeable future now, thanks!
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.
Henry Wang / Viayoutube.com
Don’t get me wrong, I have a healthy dose of respect for it.
Sure, beaches are fun!
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 about5%of it overall.
So, that means WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN 95% OF IT.
Lucky for us, we won’t have to imagine it all!
“We responded to a sailboat that was taking on water.
It became clear that the sailboat wasn’t going to make it.
What struck me was how silent it was.
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.
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?
I didn’t see a sailboat.”
WatchTheBoom
2.
“I was on a night dive.
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?
Its 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?
Then it hit me.”
“I wasnt swimming toward the boat at all.
I was swimming towardthe moon.
The water was so clear and calm, I had mistaken it for a light.
Luckily, I hadnt ascended fully and wasnt too far off.
NJshore_77
3.
“We found a dead body floating in the water.
I had a role in that.
Some family got closure.”
doublestitch
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 might hear it through the hull.
We heard it for about 65 days straight, non-stop.”
“The North Pole is absolutely the quietest place it’s possible for you to ever be.
In November, it has this fog that’s always there.
you’ve got the option to’t tell how far anything is away.
It gets very unnerving after a while.”
monkeywelder
5.
“We were around some islands in the South Pacific.
He hailed us and asked us to stop and bring him aboard because hed been shipwrecked.
The guy scowled and just said, ‘Never mind, then.’
Never stop around islands in pirated waters, folks. "
Ok_Yard_9815
6.
“I was on a research vessel in the early ’90s about 200 miles off of South Carolina.
Sargasso seaweed would drift past us on its way to Europe.
One time, the bridge called out that there was an oil slick.
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.
It was an organized guard patrol, and their message was very clear.
No one aboard denied that we had been warned off.
somewhereAtC
7.
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.
It went on for about five minutes, just in and out.
It sounded like a song if you started to replay it.”
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 couldnt tell if it was bio (like an animal) or another boat.
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.
Due-Exercise2751
8.
It was mesmerizing, trying to rationalize what I was looking at.”
ImogenUponAvon
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.
GeromeDB
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.”
In turn, the oceans surface is, in fact, on fire.
Other causes include oil spills, lightning, and volcanic activity.
“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.”
capty26
12.
“I sailed a 70ft yacht around the world a few years back.
We ended up hitting really bad weather and absolutely huge seas 50ft swells with massive troughs in between.
The most terrifying thing is the sound of an invisible wave breaking behind you.
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.”
u/Le_Rat_Mort
13.
It was surreal and something I will never forget.
They were like a bunch of little aliens.”
woolybuggered
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 made me feel very small and insignificant.”
“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.
It was clearing up with a medium haze and flat, calm waters.
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.
“Former navy here.
This was sometime around midnight.
There was no light from land, and no other ships around.
The boat had a light.
One of my roles was ‘keeping watch’ in the wheelhouse.
It was also not bobbing up and down with the waves.
It was just sat there on the waterline in the distance.”
It sounds a bit like what I saw that morning, too.”
brutusblack
18.
“I have a friend who works on ships.
“This was 1971 in the North Atlantic.
He nodded and continued reading his paperback novel.
Except for one.”
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.
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 figured 52 years was long enough.
It’s probably lost or erased.”
Anonymous
20.
It was really weird, but I thought nothing of it at the time and kept going.
Even bigger than the biggest great white videos.
Then, ANOTHER huge shark came up and started fighting with the first shark.
Then, the new shark bit the other one and swam away.
After that, I was afraid to go fishing for days.”
“In the mid-90s 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.
It had been adrift for who knows how long.”
“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 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.”
“Creepiest thing Ive seen has definitely been myself and other crew mates lose our minds.
It started off with auditory hallucinations.
Ships are noisy, and, you begin to think those noises are talking to you.
Combine that with visual hallucinations and then things get really terrifying.”
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.
u/MAGNAPlNNA
24.
“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 feltwrong.”
“I wish I had a more interesting conclusion than that.
u/IcelandLady
26.
“I worked on cruise ships and lived on the 11th deck.
They had a spotlight on a tiny boat floating in the middle of the dark ocean.
HUGE hammerhead sharks were swimming around the boat.
Another few minutes and they would have been dead.
Seeing those sharks and those people so close to being gone…creepiest thing Ive seen.”
Theres 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.
u/Herb4372
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
