Someone Asks Sailors Or People Who Work At Sea "What's The Most Creepy Or Most Amazing Sight You Witnessed?" And 30 Deliver

I once saw a rainbow by moonlight. Sadly this was before digital cameras, so I had no chance of getting a picture.

My dad was competing in a marlin fishing comp near Weepa (the pointy top bit of Australia). Battled a fish for 4 hours (they catch and release). As it neared the boat, crew readied to haul it onboard and a camera team went in for the tight shot, hanging right over the edge. The marlin breached the water and then a huge Great White shark breached under it. Full length above the water, inches from the crews faces. Shark took the whole marlin, plus a big bite out of the boat. All caught on camera. Everyone was pretty shaken for a while after. I’ll never forget the pics of the bite mark, exactly like people do to crackers, with individual tooth marks, but a metre+ wide.

Edit to add: sorry, footage was the property of the TV station who was filming. I have an old VHS tape of it somewhere, I should get it digitalised. I’m betting there are plenty of similar incidences on YouTube though. Those fishing boats carry rifles for a reason.

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.

Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.

You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how my many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.

At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.

Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

The most amazing thing I've seen is watching the mountains in the sunrise while pulling into port in Norway. That was the moment I realized I was actually living. I don't think I'll see anything as majestic until I go back to Norway. Just beautiful!

Not a sailor neither was my dad but my dad was fishing and had a baby whale come up to his boat and bumped it a few times, that video is probably the most insane thing I've seen.

Stationed on a Cruiser during Operation Desert Shield, we were working 12 on and 12 off shifts. Me and a shipmate would lay on the fantail in the morning with one of the deck hatches open, the red lights shining out. We had a stereo back there and would blast the Doors while hearing rush of water over the hull. It was really surreal as the sun would come up over the Persian Gulf, seeing the water like glass reflecting the sun as it rose. That will always stay with me.

Creepiest would be underway on 31st October / Halloween day off maybe 15miles off the coast of Florida near Miami. Lookout sights a white house boat looks like it’s just drifting. So we get closer on our Fast Response Cutter (154’) to make contact with them. Nothing, no one responded used radio, loud hailer and ships whistle. So Captain said lets launch our small boat and go investigate. During the small boat mission brief I reminded everyone that it’s Halloween day and this looks just like a horror movie storyline. So the boat launches and the crew gets onboard. The doors are closed, but lucky open so the crew can investigate. The boarding team slow conducts its safety sweep while looking any crew onboard. So here is a house boat floating on the ocean with no land in sight abandoned. So the boarding team marked the vessel with spray paint and left it. House Boat is probably in Europe if it didn’t succumb to the relentless sea.

Another time in the middle of the night between midnight and 3am we start tracking a target of interest. We clearly see someone and at least two others on a cabin cruiser. The vessel is unlit which is a red flag and steady speed. So we follow it and decide to launch the small boat for pursuit once they are close to U.S. territorial seas. We run our small boat with lights off as well and have night vision goggles to help us see them. I pull up with 15’-20’ of the vessel and flip the blue lights and spotlight on them. No one is on the boat. All we see is a boat no one standing up behind the helm or on deck. So I creep up closer than all of a sudden we see arm hanging over the gunnel. The boarding team starts yelling show us your hands and stand-up. No one moved they were laying on-top of each other. So we get the boarding team onboard and start checking boat for safety. We transferred all of the 26 migrants off the 35’ boat on the Fast Response Cutter (154’).

I saw a dead whale once. Out in the middle of the Pacific. Just bobbing along and getting slowly taken apart by sea life.
We thought it was a sperm whale, but it's hard to tell when it's half gone.
We got to see a lot more fish and a few whitetail sharks in the area. A dead whale seems to bring the sea to life!

Last deployment. Russian fighter jets flying right above us taking photos was pretty unsettling. Then on SIPR share drive we saw the photos of the Russians taking photos of us and it’s literally some dude in the back of the jet with a Casio.

Flying fish jumping through the netting between the hulls and cheese-grating themselves all over the trimaran OR racing catamarans in the Gulf of Mexico and the water turning purple as far as I could see from BILLIONS of jellyfish.