The ocean is a sea of mess.
Feed Me
hungry feed me GIFGiphy"The largest biomass migration takes place every night when deep sea animals come up to feed."
Supraman83
Pitch Black
"I remember watching a YouTube interview with a military diver. He described how when you’re doing a covert op you spend a lot of time just underwater doing nothing with no lights on until it’s time to move. He specifically mentioned how he had to get used to having large things bump into him in the pitch black."
Freaked_The_Eff_Out
Sonar
"The sonar we use for deep sea mapping really screws up a number of species especially whales, dolphins and porpoises. Imagine walking around and a tornado alarm decibel-level noise triggers right next to you. We do that every time we use that high-powered sonar and it basically f's up their own sonar abilities causing them to be unable to communicate and navigate."
Reyltjj
Scattered
"Once did a night dive where we covered our lights while resting on the floor at about 50'. You cover your light and wave your hand and you can see bioluminescent bacteria in the water. Well I was looking up when we uncovered our lights, there were hundreds of barracuda between us and the boat. They scattered from the light though."
bwtaha
Gone
Looking I See You GIF by Shark WeekGiphy"Lost sailors in the sea who cling to wreckage basically have their skin dissolved by salt water after soaking for more than 3 days."
SnooOranges4231
At this point I feel like a shower may even be dangerous. Water issues...
Hot Bubbles
hot tub jacuzzi GIFGiphy"'Hot tub of despair' is a lake under the ocean, in the gulf of Mexico. It is highly concentrated with salt and has dissolved methane. Any creature that enters dies."
Abathur11235
the bottom...
"There are perfectly-preserved shipwrecks from ancient Greece preserved at the bottom of the Black Sea. The water is so deep that it becomes anoxic (oxygen free), which preserves organic materials like wood. Shipwrecks are cool, but I find the phenomenon a little disturbing, since there is probably no life down there."
"Here's an article from a few years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/23/oldest-intact-shipwreck-thought-to-be-ancient-greek-discovered-at-bottom-of-black-sea"
colorforge
When you bleed...
"The ocean is blue because all the other pigments are absorbed. So after a certain distance down everything thing becomes a monotone blue color, unless you have some other light source. The freaky part is if a diver gets cut underwater the blood looks black, like ink. All the red has long since been absorbed so there’s no wavelengths left to show you a red color when you bleed."
Lord_of_the_Canals
Not a Care
"I tell new scuba divers this: The ocean doesn’t care about you. It’s not actively trying to kill you. But it will do a lot of things on its own that will absolutely kill you if you’re not prepared and paying attention. I realize this could apply to any natural environment but it feels much more apt when talking about the ocean. One wave that you weren’t prepared for can make your day pretty bad. For the ocean it’s just business as usual."
bg-j38
Poison
Marine Life Sea GIF by BBCGiphy"Just one millilitre of coastal water taken from the ocean's surface can contain up to 10 million viruses. The number of viruses decreases further offshore and deeper into the water."
SuvenPan
No Air
"There are parts of the ocean which are dead no oxygen in the water which means nothing can survive, no fish no plankton nothing at all. They are spreading exponentially. Whilst they are tiny now and have been. At the rate of growth. They’ll cause serious problems before the end of the century."
Emergency-Tiger4339
The Fisher Items
"Most of the plastic pollution in the ocean is not from straws, shopping bags, or consumer items as most of us were led to believe. It’s from fishing nets and fishing gear."
TheSheekGeek
Heartless Lover
"It doesn't hate you. It doesn't love you. It doesn't even know you exist. When it destroys/capsizes your boat your boat didn't even cause a change in its movements. I am a sailor and I am in love with a cold heartless *itch who couldn't care less whether I live or die."
Intelligent-Lie-7407
Swimming Dead
twd GIF by The Walking DeadGiphy"When sea creatures die in the ocean and their bones sink to the deep ocean floor, zombie worms eat the bones. The skin secretes an acid dissolving the bones, digesting the remaining fat and protein left behind."
creeeeaaach
Remains
"Well Crippin should have dumped his wife's remains in the ocean because not an ounce of food goes to waste including the bones. If you need to get rid of a mass grave don't bury dump at sea and the entire body will be eaten which will actually be beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole. We shouldn't be burying people but dumping them at sea."
TwistedDecayingFlesh
Dipped
"When you dip your toe in the water you are no longer at the top of the food chain."
Kermitsfinger
"Isn’t that true on land as well? If you go hiking, grizzly bears and mountain lions could still mess you up. Same thing if you go to the savannah. There are plenty of animals there that are higher than you on the food chain."
outofdate70shouse
Giant Squids
"We don't really know whats it in I can say that for thousands of years we drew sea monsters believing they lived in it. Surprising a lot of stuff we found in those pictures were in the ocean. (Giant Squid recently ). Just makes you think what else is actually down there that we don't know about."
ghigoli
the 1%
Mr Bean Beach GIF by Working TitleGiphy"Only 1% of its floor has been explored. It’s pretty common knowledge by now, but most people don’t understand how absolutely insane it really is. We know more about the surface of mars than we do our oceans floor."
LandscapeLost992
Underwater
"I’m a scuba diver and one thing that really scared me when I first started off diving, you hear SO MUCH more underwater then you ever will above on the surface, I’m not even talking about like the shifting or just the water itself moving, your hear things like fish clicking and other things like that, cuz underwater sounds move and travel a lot more so you hear a lot more and much quicker, was pretty out of nowhere when I first went under."
Cogburn____CG
This is why I hate the beach. I'm staying on dry land forever.
The rules of "normal" kind of go out the window. It's not an environment humans are accustomed to, and so even the most mundane things can seem entirely surreal.
One reddit user asked:
Mariners of Reddit, what's the strangest thing you've seen out on the open ocean?
and ok ... maybe surreal was an understatement. Some of these sound outright unnerving. Except the last one. We're pretty sure that last story is about interrupting God's fishing trip and God just trying to play it cool after getting busted.
Edgy
I have only spent about 2 months on the water, with about 2 weeks on the Great Lakes. But even just a couple miles off shore in the Atlantic when it's a foggy and calm night I totally get what sailors talk about when they say "sailing off the edge" sometimes it looks like the water just stops and there's nothing after it.
Who?
An Owl. 300 miles offshore. I hoped it would stay with us or get close enough to catch, but it flew off into open water. Lots of land birds get stuck at sea, sometimes they accidentally fall asleep on a ship and wake up in the middle of the ocean and try to find land again. Some get blown out from storms. They eventually drink too much salt water and die. The smaller ones get eaten by seagulls. It's sad.
Praying
GiphyWe were at least 5 days away from land and our ship was covered bow to stern in praying mantis. Not truly the weirdest thing ever, but after not seeing much life for a few weeks it was an experience for sure.
Lightning Strikes Twice
One time on the coast I saw a massive storm stretching as far as you could see, which is of course very far when you have nothing obstructing your view.
There was lightning everywhere I cant put it into words, every city was probably getting a lightning strike per minute, but from my point of view with this massive panoramic view, there must have been 10 bolts of lightning per second, sustained over at least an hour, absolutely mesmerizing
Like any good mariner, I grabbed my cigarettes, and did the ol' one foot on the railing and watched.
Ballet In The Bay
Whales doing ballet in the bay. Hilarious to watch such a massive and heavy beast come flying out of the water over and over again like it's just playing, meanwhile it's big enough to just crush me instantly.
Every Other Human In History
GiphyFather used to sail yachts for rich bastards across the Atlantic so they could have it in their Mediterranean and Florida houses depending on the time of year. His first time he got to truly see an open, starry night, and says he was appalled that it was so unusual to him, and because we're all living in cities everyone's missing out on that kind of natural beauty that almost every other human in history would've had access to.
Baldius Manius
In Slovenia, whilst on our research vessel, we saw a pale and bald thing almost emerge from the sea, it looked incredibly humanoid (as in its head was poking above sea level, with a thin layer of water over its head).
It was there for a split second, and we assumed it was a diver trying to scare us. Lo and behold, we carried out a biodiversity assessment in that very area and found nothing apart from some smaller fish. But no man. There was nobody there.
To this day, me and my marine biology professors have no idea what it was, or how it got there (I was majoring in marine biology at the time).
Our first assumption was a juvenile whale. However we were in relatively shallow waters, where these species tend not to congregate. Furthermore, if it was a calf, there should have been a much larger mother (which none of us ever saw).
We named this species as baldusmanius.
An Orange Flower
I was on the helms of a ship in the South China sea in late 2018. It was just before dark when one of the stars expanded from a dot to a flower shaped orange thing that rotated very slowly. That thing was there for the whole night.
Everybody the on the bridge was wondering what the heck it was. It was not larger than the size of my thumbnail with my arm stretched out, but it was so distinct and eye catching.
Probably an astronomical or meteorological phenomenon.
The Void
Solo night watch on a sailboat delivery. New moon (when the moon can't be seen) with overcast skies that covered the stars.
The strangeness wasn't what I could see but rather what I couldn't.
Total silence on a broad reach, surfing down long unbroken swells. No light in the sky, almost no perceived movement, just 4 hours of nothingness. Occasionally a wavelet would crest and reflect the light of the navigation light and cast a pale green flash that was the only reminder that I was on the ocean and not cast into an endless void. It was the most unsettling experience I've ever had.
A Man With No Boat
Was motoring through hurricane Irene (captaining a 32' charter catamaran) between Anegada and Jost Van Dyke in open water many miles from any coast/harbor....and stumbled upon a local man with NO BOAT doing "deep sea spear fishing."
Dude had a 4x1.5 foot Rubbermaid container attached to 2 bouys filled to the brim with ice and fish. Probably at least 300 lbs of deep sea catches (before gutting). And all he had was a rudimentary, blacksmithed, iron spear rigged with silicone tubing on a stick for the propulsion.
We were probably 13-15 nautical miles off any shore/harbor...winds were insane, at least 45-50 mph...waves were between 15'-17' in the open sea, prob 20'-25' on shore...dude didn't seem to have any sort of boat/canoe.....looked to us like he swam out with a few bouys and nets and just got to fishin and didn't notice the hurricane lol.
He had obviously been spear fishing these waters his whole life, I mean the amount of fish this guy had speared was unimaginable... literally a massive pile of fish. It was impressive.
Why the F are you spear fishing in the open ocean during a hurricane, and how the F did you spear all those you wizard?!?!?!
We scooped him up, gave him a ride, and then enjoyed an enormous bounty of fresh deep sea fish with the fellow. He must have given us 20-25 lbs of his catch when we scooped him and gave him a ride to Jost Van Dyke.
He looked pretty normal for a BVI native besides his mohawk hairstyle. Kinda skinny, in his 20s, super fit, of west African complexion, and spoke the local language as well as English with a thick islander accent. He was a very respectful and cool dude, helped us a lot.
Saw the dude later on, getting off his dingy at Pusser's bar with plenty of fresh catches for the tourists. He loaded us up with fish and drank with us that night...let us in on a few "secret local diving/fishing spots." Dude was chill, poured us some of his homebrew rum and open fire grilled us some local chicken.
Asked us to cover his bar tab at the bar as "payment" and went on his way.
We ended up scoring some good footage and fish on his recommendations. Ended up giving a lot of our catch away or trading for other goods cuz there was just too much for our freezer.
Was a great trip all in all. Never did learn his name.
- Jsmoke91