Ask yacht crew what they’ve seen, and they’ll say that the truth is stranger than sci-fi.
Other Worldly?
Captain and consultant Herbert Magney remembers when he was cruising between the Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. “All was as happy as can be, then all of a sudden, the boat shudders and starts slowing down. Then the engines quit. We’re drifting, not going anywhere. We're like, ‘what is going on here?’ We start to investigate, and we see all these small lights waving and moving underwater around the back of the boat. It was really freaky. Then, we figured it out. We had run over a drift net with lights in it that somebody had lost, and it had got tangled up in the propellers. There’s an occurrence that hasn’t happened again and I don’t want it to happen again, but that was the night that we were attacked and stopped by aliens.”
Whale Tale
When Mark Lacey, captain of the 60-meter M/Y Formosa, was leaving Minorca and heading toward Sardinia, he saw a whale and went back to take a closer look. “It turned out to be seven sperm whales, side by side almost rubbing against each other, watching the sunset go down. A person I knew who researched whales told me that it’s a known phenomenon and no one knows why.”
Big, Green, and Scary
When delivery captain Guy O’Connor was coming across from the Mediterranean to Florida, the whole north side of his boat suddenly lit up. “It was a bright, bright green light. We didn't know what it was and the crew were freaking out. We worried that when it hit the ocean, we’d get hit by a 100-foot wave. We got in touch with NASA and they told us it was a meteor made out of a metal that made it green. They said, ‘It was hundreds of miles from you guys and it’s tiny, the size of a golf ball. It's nothing. Don't worry about a thing.’”
A Matter of Luck
Scott De Mello, captain of a 55-meter expedition yacht, happened upon a 30-foot boat with two men aboard adrift about 200 miles off The Azores. “It was like an open boat that they use for whale watching. They had lost power. We towed them back a couple of miles off the island, and another small boat came out and finished bringing them in. That was the first time I've come across a manned vessel that was in distress like that.”
(Almost) in Hot Water
Veteran captain Winston Clarke had a surprising experience on a dive off Barren Island in The Andaman Sea, an area known for its volcanic activity. “The water literally started to boil around us. A good thing we hadn’t actually got in the water. I mean, we’re talking about two feet of steaming water below us. The Barren volcano was erupting at the time, but we’d gone there intentionally to dive because there are extraordinary underwater corals to see at that end of the world, not necessarily to go look for volcanoes underwater. We happened to be on top of a fissure when it let go, which was really cool. I obviously went to look for another dive site.”
Seeing Green
John DeCaro, owner of All Ocean Yachts, said that the proverbial “green flash” is not a common occurrence, but is a repeating occurrence. “It is simply a refraction of light as the sun goes down on a flat, flat sea that splits the light into its primary colors. And the primary color you see at sea level is green. I knew about it. I’ve been told about it, but I was still shocked when it occurred. I was like, huh, that really did happen.”
Nature or Not?
Lou Clark, a retail charter and sales professional, recalls this sight from her years as captain: “Bringing the boat back along the coast of France toward Monaco, I suddenly saw a massive waterspout that just kind of shot up. Then I saw military vessels. They apparently exploded a mine that they had located under the water. That was a thing that made me stop and go, ‘that's weird.’”
Cloudy Vision
Tracy “Trey” Williams, deckhand on the 101-foot M/Y Sea-Renity, saw colors where he wasn’t expecting them, “a complete rainbow cloud in The Bahamas around the Exuma chain. It was kind of weird, but the charter guests loved it.”
