Sea Tales [Part 2]
My last post got some good feedback, so I figured I’d make a new entry for any of those who were interested. Here we go with a few more short stories.
· Seagulls. I don’t know if many of you have ever heard all the lore surrounding them, but there is tons and it’s honestly not without reason. One of the more well known legends out there says that they are, or they carry, the souls of those drowned at sea. I’m not really sure if there’s any truth to that sort of thing or not, but what I can say is that I’ve legitimately seen gulls flying around in places where you wouldn’t think it’d be possible for them to be. Mostly they’ll pop up way out in open ocean, seemingly out of nowhere too. One moment you’ll look up at the clouds and the next someone points out a single gull flying through the air. The craziest place I’ve ever seen one was Point Nemo. 1670 miles of nothing but ocean in ever direction, and not big land masses either, tiny islands which you could easily miss (the big land masses like New Zealand or Chile are farther) and I looked up to see a single gull flying through the air perpendicular to our boat. I mentioned it to all my boatmates and we just watched it fly on westward until we lost it on the horizon. How it got there, what it had been doing, how it seemed to not need rest, why it was even there… I have no idea or answers for any of that, but seeing them like that is not as uncommon as you might think.
· I’ve been debating whether or not I should tell this one because even mentioning it is seen as extremely bad luck. It’s something that happens on still nights when you’re far out at sea. Maybe you’ve heard the saying “Red at morning, Sailor’s warning; Red at night, sailor’s delight.” It’s a classic one that pretty much means that a red sky in the morning signals an incoming storm and has been around forever. Of course modern tech makes it so storms are actually predictable, so the saying’s kind of been lost over the years a little bit. What modern tech isn’t able to predict is the other thing that sometimes happens when there is a particularly red morning. Like I said, red morning means storm, but sometimes those storms don’t come, and instead you’re treated to a very, very, very, still, very, very, quiet night. One of those nights where the water’s surface basically looks like a giant mirror and you can’t tell where the sky and stars stop and the water starts. Most sailors will rejoice when they have a night like that, they think it’s awesome that the storm that was coming missed them. That’s when they’ll notice the extra crewmember. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you both can and can’t remember the people that were in it? That’s exactly what this is like. I’ve seen him twice and I know what he looks like, but I also can’t remember enough to describe him to you. I both do and don’t know what he wears. What I can say is that when he appears the only thing you should do is ignore him. Sometimes he will help you haul a line in. Sometimes he will ask you questions or offer you a drink. Other times he will be in a tough situation and will beg for help. Maybe he'll look starved and ask for food and water, or will be seriously wounded and bleeding everywhere. Those of us who have seen him and have survived know to ignore him no matter what. He will eventually leave as the sun comes up. I won’t give more details for now, though. The thought of him terrifies me.
· This one is a little more specific, and is something that happened a few years back. I was crew for a tuna boat and we’d been out in the middle of the North Atlantic following some Bluefin when we suddenly came upon a 40ft or so sail boat. When we tried radioing it we got no answer so we decided to go check things out. It was a windy day so it took us a moment to catch up, but when we finally did, we realized there was no one on it. This was an extremely nice boat, extremely sleek and modern, basically new, but there was no sign of anyone on board. No captain, no crew, no passengers, nothing. We searched for a couple of hours to see if we could find any evidence of what might have happened, but there was literally nothing anywhere. My captain figured maybe it’d been a solo sailor who might have accidentally fallen overboard. We spent about a day or so searching the waters for anyone floating around but never found anything. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened, or if it was something a little more sinister, but either way, the thought of falling in the water and seeing your own boat float away without you and there being absolutely nothing you can do about it chills me to the bone. If that is what happened, I cannot imagine a harder fate than eventually drowning from pure exhaustion because you just can’t keep yourself above the water anymore.
· We once got a mayday call over the radio from a ship that was about 50 miles away. We could tell from radar that we were the closest ones to them so we had to turn course and head over for a rescue. The ship we were going to help had run into a dead head in the middle of the Atlantic. If you don’t know what a dead head is, it’s basically a tree or a log that’s washed out to sea. Trees and logs usually float horizontally, so you can spot them pretty easily. But not dead heads. They’re debris that has been out at sea long enough to start to sink, but not enough that they’ll end up submerging fully. What happens is usually one side will lose buoyancy while the other will stay close to the surface, so you end up with a giant battering ram that lies just underneath the surface waiting for a boat to hit it. They’re almost impossible to see because of that, and not only that, but they tend to bob up and down with the waves, meaning they can ram your ship really hard. When we reached the ship that had called the mayday, it was almost completely underwater. The dead head it had crashed into had been picked up by a wave and had run clean through the hull, killing two men in the process. There was blood all over the water and the sound of the crash had called in a few curious sharks that we found circling the crew. Thankfully we made it in time before any of the sharks managed to bite anyone, but those men were lucky. They were all so completely shaken up they could barely talk once we rescued them.
· There’s this kind of uncanny thing that happens with the sea and messages in bottles. We’ve all heard of them, of course. A person ends up stranded on an island, out of desperation they write down a message and throw it in the water, hoping that someone somewhere will find it and will come save them. The probability of anyone finding the message and actually getting to you in time is pretty slim, and actually I’ve never heard of it even working. I suppose it’s just a desperation thing. What’s weird and kind of hard to explain is what happens to a huge number of people who do throw those messages out there and then end up getting rescued. Sometimes it'll take years, like I’m talking decades or centuries, but the bottles always, always, always, end up washing up somewhere near where the person who was rescued died. Remember in my last post when I mentioned the sea was alive? A lot of us swear up and down that it has something to do with that, like the sea somehow sending a message to those it didn’t end up taking. I don’t really have an explanation, and I don’t find it to be a particularly scary thing, it’s just a strange fact that this happens as often as it does.