Sailors Recall The Creepiest Thing They've Ever Witnessed While At Sea

The Unknown Sounds. 

I'm not a sailor but my family owns a boat and I frequently go out on fishing trips in the sea with my dad (it's usually more us talking about life with him doing most of the fishing).

Well, on one trip, we were out about I think ten miles from the beach. My dad was telling me about how he got into and won a bar fight and I was just silently listening when a weird whistling/howling sound sort of surrounded us.

I can't really describe it. It was like a cross between a wail and the sound of someone blowing air over an open bottle.

My dad looked pretty calm but I could tell he was freaked out too. It went on for about another minute, slowly becoming stronger, until it just abruptly ended with a screech from somewhere in the water.

We never talk about it and I still wonder what was making that sound. LockedPages

The Feeding Frenzy...

Not scary, just odd. but one time we were docked in Bermuda and somebody screwed up and dumped the galley waste into the harbor.

I have never seen so much marine life in one place. Every type of fish imaginable, turtles the whole whack, all on a feeding frenzy. It got so crazy that you couldn't really see water anymore for about 5m off the ship. Just a mass of crazy writhing fish. stuwoo

Tugging Along. 

I was pulling a small sail boat mast from the bottom of a lake during a storm - waves had turtled the boat. So I was about ten feet down and pulling the mast up and the weight of it pushed me down so I was basically standing at the bottom of the lake and could see the waves up top. It was an overall weird/frightening/stimulating experience. And then something big swam past me and brushed my leg - must've been at least 3 feet long. I eventually got the boat turned back over and the mast on board and we got towed in. As we hit land I laid down on the beach and decided I wasn't going to go in the water for a couple days. FBIFreezeDontMove

The Sunken....

The scariest is always finding unmarked half sunk boats. You have to check them to make sure there are no people or bodies and report them. Every time I pull up on one though the hair stands up on my body as I am hoping there are no bodies. So far so good but every time it unsettles me. whiskeyfordinner

This thing was a killer.​

2 years ago I was about 150 miles offshore from long island NY, in a 31 foot boat. We were trolling for yellowfin tuna. In the distance we saw 2 hug fins coming out of the water so we headed towards them thinking it was a couple of sharks. As we got closer, we realized it was one big shark... there it was just cruising slowly at the surface, not even the slightest bit disturbed by us approaching.

Once we got up next to it we realized that this shark was almost as big as the boat. It had to be at least 25 feet long and several thousand pounds. I was in absolute shock as we passed it. I'd never seen a shark even close to that big. I've seen plenty of whales, turtles, dolphins, sharks, all kinds of crazy things out at sea. But never a predator this large. It was definitely not a whale shark. This thing was a killer.

I want to say that it was a tiger shark but the internet says they don't even get close to that big so I really just don't know. I wish I could have gotten a picture of it, but I was just frozen, I couldn't even move. I will never forget that moment. The ocean is an incredible place. Bred_Stix

3 Years Later. 

I did a double-handed overnight race last summer and had a 45 minute conversation with my grandfather while on watch. I was the only one on deck and my grandfather had been dead for three years at that point. I'm fairly certain hypothermia, dehydration, low blood sugar, and exhaustion were all in play, but it was super weird. zwiiz2

Albatrossed.

One of my co-workers fled to the US from Vietnam in a small boat as a young child. (She was one of the Boat People.) We were complaining about little shit when she explained why she almost never got upset.

She was only 7 when this happened. She and her sister, father, mother and grandfather were in a small fishing boat in the middle of the ocean. They had been out of food for several days. She and her sister (5) managed to catch an albatross on the boat.

Her father said it was bad luck to kill one and released it. She said as she watched it fly away, she knew then that she and her family were going to starve to death. She hated her father at that point too.

The next day they were picked up by a trawler and taken to California. She still wears an albatross necklace for good luck. mel2mdl

The weirdest night of my life.....

Pacific ocean. Complete cloud cover and no waves, so the sky completely blended in with the sea. Four hours of lookout watch had me hearing my name called and struggling with some dissociation. The only way to get it to stop was think aloud and talk to myself, which freaked out the people inside the bridge.

The weirdest night of my life.

Edit: this was at night so everything was utterly black. The hairs on the back of my neck were perpetually up. Masterdarwin88

Law & Order: Maritime Edition....

When I was a kid I got really freaked out by this human hand that was floating in the harbor. It was just a rubber glove with trapped air. munkijunk

in my bones......

I was on the Enterprise (CVN65), and we sailed around South Africa toward Australia deep in the Southern Ocean. It was June and we went through a large winter storm that was rolling us all over and making the ship creak.

We had all the water-tights closed, including the hanger bay. The curtain doors for the elevators have smaller people sized doors in them. Snuck up to see the storm first hand. Go through the inner door (close it) and open the outer door in time to see a crazy big wave peaking as it is about to crash over the flight deck. Closed and dogged the door just as it hit. I could feel the impact in my bones. TimO4058

Off the Coast....

A mate of mine I was working on a Tuna boat with came across an airplane emergency life jacket floating in the water about 200miles out at sea, east coast of New Zealand. 1kz_akl1kz_akl

In the Sea of Cortez.....

My dad and I were sailing in the Sea of Cortez, it was early morning with some patchy surface fog. I was 14 or 15 at the time. We heard what sounded like applause in the distance, but becoming louder. We could soon see a patch of disturbed water getting closer and closer and hundreds of objects flying out of the water and splashing back down. A few of them flew out, hit the deck of the boat and bounced back into the water. Stingrays. A whole school of them, jumping out of the water for some reason. It was weird and awesome. Tyree_Callahan

a towering spike of death....

Giant spears plunging in and out of the sea lol.

In the gulf of Alaska, I have seen some crap. But one of the most terror inspiring things I've seen are what can happen with some of the loose logs from the logging trade.

Sometimes when a big log gets loose from a raft, it becomes partially waterlogged and floats small end up. So you have this 4 foot diameter telephone pole in the sea, sticking up 40 feet into the air. No biggie. Shows up on radar, and easy to spot.

Now, giv le that pole 20 years of floating around or so. It rots in such a way that it becomes filed to a point by wind and waves, and looks quite menacing.

Now, put it in a gale with 25 foot waves (50 feet trough to peak)

.... And it becomes a towering spike of death that shoots up from the sea every 15 to 20 minutes, out of nowhere, 60 feet into the air, only to plunge down into the dark depths waiting to skewer some unsuspecting boat in a few minutes when it thrusts out of the ocean again.

It is a genuine terrifying sight, rare, but not so rare that I haven't seen 2 in one season. It's like the spiked tip of neptune looking for an opportunity to mess your stuff up in a particularly terrifying way. bidet_enthusiast

GEORGE!!!!

I worked on tug boats for about 6 years. The back deck is considered a "wet deck" meaning it isn't unusual for it to be under water at times. We were making tow with an oil rig at sea with waves that were 14-16' and one hit us just right, taking my coworker George and pulling him out to sea. Now it's 3am and pitch black.

This is nearly always a death sentence. About 20 seconds later (which felt like an eternity) another wave brought George back on deck, plopping him safely on his butt right next to the winch. George laughed and got right back to work without missing a beat.

Edit: I'm mostly a lurker on here, didn't think this would take off the way it did.

Thanks for the silvers! Let me know if you wanted to hear some more sea stories. I've got some about drunk people getting on our boat, a small boat filled with half crocked pirates trying to get on our barge and a bonus story of one of the times I almost drowned in the rudder room. daniel1310

Fata Morgana.

A couple of years ago I was sailing as a cadet on a merchant vessel and I was scheduled on the evening watch. The rest of the crew was enjoying dinner and I was to call if anything went wrong. We were sailing over open ocean, no land within a day sailing around us and all of a sudden I notice a island coming up on my bow. It was still far away but it shouldn't be there. I looked at the maps, checked my position multiple times and then I noticed the island did not appear on my radars. I called down to the messroom to tell there was a weird island in front of us.

The chief mate came up and checked again the maps and positions. He also noticed that the radars did not see the island. We called the captain and when he came up he started laughing. He was a old sailor with over 40 years of experience under his belt. He explained us it was a fata Morgana. The real island was more than a day sailing away in the direction we were heading at that moment. After that incident he took over the watch and I went down. It wasn't really creepy but it was strange. chief970

Close Encounters. 

Not a sailor; however this was at sea... My dad went boating with some friends down near Rocky Point in Mexico in the mid-90s. They went out late at night to drink. It was incredibly dark apart from the boat lights when suddenly a helicopter flew above their boat and the local who took them out shut everything off immediately. The helicopter hovered over some water in the distance and dumped a few bodies into the water before flying off. When it was out of sight the local turned everything back on and shrugged it off saying, "they do that all the time, never seen it so close up before." Sleepyfalcon9

S.O.S

Not a sailor, but a marine on a ship. We were cruising through the pacific when we received an SOS from a boat (from what I heard he was trying to cross the ocean by himself). Took a few days to find him.

I remember watching off the side of the ship. The sails were imprinted with the Chinese flag. a small team was sent to board the small sail boat.

But when they arrived no one was one board. We searched for a body for the following days but found nothing. Still don't know what happened to him.

Edited to post a link. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/27/us-coast-guard-suspends-search-guo-chuan-chinese-sailor-lost-mid-pacificBigironjoe117

The Calm Before..... 

Worked the shrimp boats in the Gulf back in the '70s. 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana and the sea got dead calm. I mean dead calm, not a ripple or a swell. The sea was so calm that vibrations from the engine idling would make little ripples in the water. The surface of the sea looked like a huge never ending mirror extending out in all directions. The visual memory I have of seeing that perfectly flat sea in the moonlight is deeply etched in my memory and I can see it today in my mind just as real as if it was happening now.

I could talk about 25 foot seas in the middle of a hurricane, or a half dozen water spouts dancing around us during a summer squall, or sargassum seaweed as far as the eye could see so thick around the boat that you could walk on it, or flying fish all taking flight at the same time like a flock of birds skimming across the water. but none of that stuff had the impact on me like the dead calm of the sea 100 miles offshore. oops77542

Red Alert. 

On a navy ship, we were out on patrol and took a massive lightning bolt to the aft mast at the same time as the wind picked up significantly. We started listing quite heavily and the thunder made it sound like we hit something. Most of us got really fired up and immediately ran below the waterline to do damage assessment, one guy ran to the bridge to check out what had happened. Luckily it was only lightning and not something we'd hit, but it really felt like we had.

Apart from fire alarms I've never been so ready to do damage control in my life! Crossroots

The Bells....

When I was about 19, maybe 20, my mom's boyfriend at the time decided to take us out on his boat one afternoon so that we could lounge around and swim in the ocean far from the shore. We were super excited because the water was turquoise, completely see through and the perfect temperature that day. So we found what seemed to be the perfect location, dropped the anchor and had a snack.

Before long, we were completely surrounded by hundreds of giant milky white jellyfish. There were so many that we couldn't see clear water anywhere around us. Their bells were easily 5 feet in diameter, if not more. We did not swim that day. kinkyp3ach