20 Deep-Sea Fishers In This Online Group Share The Most Strange And Creepy Things They've Ever Encountered

Humans are trying to explore the universe when there's so much left on the Earth to explore. Have you ever thought about how much we know about the ocean that covers about 70% of the Earth's surface? It might surprise you that we've been living on Earth for ages but more than 80% of the ocean is still unobserved or unexplored. Since oceans are so mysterious, people tend to find strange things in or around them. When a Redditor icefalls asked, “Dear Deep Sea Fishers of Reddit, What's the strangest thing you've seen/heard on the open ocean?”, many people shared their stories and experiences of encountering weird and creepy things in open oceans. Scroll below to read them. More info: Reddit

#1

Image source: PM_Me_Rude_Haiku "I was sitting in a little boat off Gran Canaria once, when I heard a strange whirring noise, like when kids stick playing cards through the spokes on their bike. I heard it a few times and wondered what it was. And then it hit me! It was a flying fish. It literally hit me, and then floundered around the boat for a few seconds before I picked it up and hurled it back. Those things are goddamned weird. It's wings were gross."

#2

Image source: Asunder_ "My dad and I were fishing off the florida keys, we had our anchor out and been fishing for about an hour. 15 minutes later the boat gets bumped and we rock a little bit, my dad jokes saying "looks like jaws is after us better stay away from the edges.". 10 seconds after him saying that the boat begins moving backwards, we are being towed, by our anchor line that's in the water. Whatever has it is now dragging the boat backwards slowly getting faster and our boat get pulled under too. next thing I hear is "no f*****g way" as my dad drops his pole runs from the front to the back grabs a knife and cuts the anchor line, after that we decided that fishing was not in the cards that day."

#3

Image source: [deleted] "I had a friend who would go deep sea fishing and stay out at sea for days at a time. He told me that at times he would hear some of the most bizarre, unearthly noises ever out there at night and assured me that there must be things out there we have no idea of. Considering we apparently know more about what's on the moon than we know about what's in our own oceans, I'm inclined to agree with him."

#4

Image source: howtocookawolf "I do quite a bit of saltwater fishing, and any time I'm on a chartered boat, I ALWAYS ask this question to the captain. On a blackfin tuna trip out of Key West three years ago, I asked the question, and without thinking...or blinking really, the captain said "A dead elephant in the middle of the ocean." I'll never forget that. Same captain also told me that while tied behind a shrimp boat not far offshore, his client pulled up a large grouper with a human knee joint (and muscle/flesh) inside its mouth. They went back to shore, and contacted the appropriate authorities to let them know a shrimper had possibly dismembered someone and tossed them into the ocean. Weird stuff."

#5

Image source: ShelSilverstain "A friend's cousin is a tuna fisherman. They found a deer swimming over 100 miles off the coast of New Zealand a few years ago."

#6

Image source: nlderek "While on a sailing cruise returning to Miami from the Bahamas I was permitted to pilot the boat while the crew sat down for dinner. I was told to simply follow a certain heading on the compass. As we were going along I noticed the position of the sun was rather rapidly changing as I was chasing the heading on the compass. I returned to what I thought was the correct heading and watched in amazement as the compass began to spin in circles. We had been scuba diving so several of us had compasses and they were all exhibiting the same behavior. The heading on the GPS was unaffected.. After maybe 10-20 seconds the spin slowed to a stop back on the correct heading. The crew logged the coordinates of the anomaly. The best guess we had was that we'd crossed over an old shipwreck, perhaps something hauling a large amount of some magnetic metal over to the Bahamas."

#7

Image source: ZincII "Out off Bermuda back in the 80s or early 90s we saw a huge piece of rocket fuselage or aeroplane floating vertically 5-6 feet out of the water. It was out in the Gulf Stream and was moving quite quickly. This was before Internet so we never knew what it was part of."

#8

Image source: LostTheGame42 "I was fishing off the coast of malaysia in the middle of the night. Suddenly, the night sky brightened and I saw a bright glowing orb appear to the bow. The orb moved slowly across the sky, leaving a bright yellow trail and seemed to have sparks coming off it for about 20 seconds before disappearing into the night. After getting back to shore, I learned that it was a retired japanese satellite re entering the atmosphere."

#9

Image source: Random-Miser "We were out at night once, with our lights off because we were admiring a field of bioluminecent stuff that was just stretching for miles around us. Really freaky looking but neat... right up until a shadow twice the size of our boat started coming right towards us...."

#10

Image source: 3rd_in_line "I have been out in the open ocean (no land or other boats around) and the sea was perfectly calm on a clear day. Our boat was only small and it was not moving at all - it was perfectly still, there was no wind, the water surface looked like glass. It was eerie and slightly disturbing. Only comfort was I was not alone and we were not a sailboat."

#11

Image source: adkiene "My dad, who is as rational of a scientist as you can possibly be, has experienced very vivid hallucinations that he truly believed were real at the time. His friend's family had sold a sailboat to a buyer up the eastern seaboard. So my dad and his friend, young amateur sailors, decided to sail the boat up the coast and deliver it. This was in the late '70s or early '80s, so I guess they didn't have the 24/7 crack news team of the Weather Channel telling them what was coming. Apparently, a tropical storm was coming and they had no idea. It caught them when they were some ways from shore, with no exact idea of where they were. They had to just ride it out because going inshore in a storm like that was too risky when you didn't know the waters. They didn't sleep for several days while they had to fight tooth and nail to keep the boat above water. During that time, my dad says he saw all kinds of s**t in the ocean. Mermaids, the souls of the damned, you name it. Really shows you where all those old sailors' tales come from."

#12

Image source: rusty_L_shackleford "I was about 40 miles off the coast of the carolinas, and see a watermelon bobbing along in the water next to the boat. So random."

#13

Image source: nukethor "Not a deep sea fisherman, but I was in the Navy. We were a few hours off the coast of Thailand, I was in the hangar bay of the carrier for morning muster and there were trees floating in the ocean. like they had been cut down and thrown in, bobbing right side up with their bare branches sticking out of the water. It was really weird to me."

#14

Image source: thewaybaseballgo "I do a lot of night fishing off of SC and FL. I get a lot of fish that are bitten in half by sharks. Some of them had to have been very, very large. When you reel in a large sportfish's head like some kind of sequel to the old man and the sea and realize the shark is close to half the size of your boat miles and miles offshore, essentially in the middle of nowhere, you get more than a little freaked out."

#15

Image source: SpaghettiMafia "I'm a diver. We were doing a night dive on the Great Barrier Reef when we came up to a cave like structure (really just a rock formation) which is known for turtles. We shine our flashlights inside and see these huge f*****g flippers. In there was a 100 year old turtle about the size of a small car (in diameter). This isn't anything like the supernatural stories that you were probably after but I found it very strange. EDIT: We knew the age because we were told beforehand that there was a large 100 year old turtle in the area. We weren't expecting anything as big as we saw, however."

#16

Image source: Aiku "I had a friend who was stranded in a rowboat for a couple of days. He got pretty dehydrated, and later told us of these wild hallucinations of beautiful female water spirits encouraging him to join them in the water. It was strange because he was one of those no-nonsense guys who didn't believe in the supernatural, but he said these things were so real to him."

#17

Image source: heri0n "I'm a marine biologist, while at uni I went out to the deep ocean on a scientific cruise. We were trawling about 800 m. Pulled up the catch. I found a hermit crab. What was cool about this was it wasnt in a mollusc shell but was in a hard anemone. The anemone had a bottom part that was hard and hollow perfectly fitted for the crab. On top was two clusters of stingers. It was an awesome little symbiotic relationship in which the anemone gave the hermit crab shelter and protection and the crab presumably moved the anemone to food. Anyway, I tagged and bagged it for another scientist to look at. I never followed what happened with it. I tried to search if it had been discovered. I couldn't find anything. It could have been a unique discovery."

#18

Image source: Smellzlikefish "I dive in the open ocean at night a lot while leading something called a blackwater dive. I have seen all sorts of strange life, but certainly one of the creepier encounters (cookie cutter sharks, larval fish, strange squids, schools of mola) was when I watched a spotted dolphin hit a squid and take off. Drifting down from the site of attack was this bright shiny thing. As I looked closer, I realized it was the squid's eyeball that popped out in the attack, starting on a journey sinking 6000 feet below us."

#19

Image source: bg-j38 "I was on a dive boat off the coast of the Big Island in Hawaii last week. It was after dark and a pod of dolphins was spending a lot of time playing around off our stern. They were pretty interested in us it seemed since every once in a while you could see a head pop up and just sort of look at us for a few seconds. Pretty much everyone was hanging out on the dive platform on the stern when suddenly this huge manta ray comes right up to the surface about five feet away from the boat. It was easily 10 ft. wide. It did a quick flip and was gone in a few seconds. It wasn't too freaky as we'd been night diving with them a few nights before that. But I could see how someone who wasn't aware of them would get really freaked out. The ocean has a lot of weird stuff in it."

#20

Image source: skull145 "I do a lot of fishing at night, the weirdest things I've seen / caught are the greater hammerhead sharks. They look downright creepy in person at night."