Sea Stories and Tall Tales of the Seas by Forum Members

Discussion in 'All Things Boats & Boating' started by hoytedow, Dec 6, 2011.

  1. philSweet
    Joined: May 2008
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    Location: Beaufort, SC and H'ville, NC

    philSweet Senior Member

    Yep, seamonsters. I have 22 encounters with critters "bigger than me and the boat I rode in on". 18 identified, one probable, three totally clueless as to what it/they were.
    can anyone explain to me how a ray with a seven foot wingspan can fly ten feet out of the water and do a perfect wing-over and dive straight back down when the water is only two feet deep? What creature swims 16-18 knots in three feet of water without breaking the surface and looks exactly like a Harley dresser would if it was being towed just below the surface. I collided with it in the Florida bay. I was planing at twelve knots and I stopped like I had hit a dock. It was pissed. It swam away and then attacked. A sawfish of 14' or more might do it, but I haven't found anyone who's had a similar sawfish experience. It was definitely in the 1000# plus class.

    If you're ever out in the middle of the Florida Bay and it's just like a glass table top and you're wondering what that disturbance on the surface is about a mile away- don't paddle over to it. It was a 17' croc. 1500# or so. Nobody believed me 'till it swam into the basin at Flamingo and hung out for a couple of days. They closed the whole marina off. You get pretty accustomed to gators when you work at Flamingo and there was always somebody riding their bike along the flooded track back to the staff area drunk at night in the rain and crashing into a gator and ending up sprawled in the mud with the gator between them and their bike. But I tell you everyone was REAL aware of where the big guy was while he was around.

    "authorized personnel only". We didn't get too many visitors wandering around the staff housing area. A lot of the staff got good at walking along the bridge railing to avoid gators on the bridge. It was over two miles around the other way. I had a golf cart and gators don't like golf carts.
     

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  2. thudpucker
    Joined: Jul 2007
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    thudpucker Senior Member

    I think an incident like that would work in well, as part of a journey around the southern tip of Australia.
    It's short. No real solid ending to it. So it's an Imagination feeder.
    A kid might read that whole book hoping to find the end of that story.
     
  3. hoytedow
    Joined: Sep 2009
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    Up on the Oklawaha River on a hot day I thought I'd take a swim. I jumped off the bow of my boat and immediately heard another splash about 60 yards away. It turned out to be a 9' gator who thought I was serving lunch. That was a very short swim of less than 30 seconds.
     
  4. Dirteater
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    Dirteater Senior Member

    the first fish I ever caught out on the "salt-chuck" with my Dad
    was a flounder! I remember how ugly I thought it was and that I sure as heck wasn't going to eat it! It wasn't very big iehter. (about a foot or so).

    my dad was pretty amused by the catch though. *L*

    I of course was expecting something more like a Rock Cod or a salmon of some kind, not that ugly thing!
     
  5. WestVanHan
    Joined: Aug 2009
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    WestVanHan Not a Senior Member

    Easy- you over-estimated the size of an ocean Sunfish aka mola mola.

    Can be a couple tons+ and a 15' by 11' swimming disc.

    Saw a very large one...very unique experience.
     
  6. Mr Efficiency
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    Mr Efficiency Senior Member

    I'll wager it wasn't a minimum 30 feet wide. This was no sunfish, I can only say from the way it moved, first tilting slighly then shooting off rapidly, it was a solid object. My fishing buddy maintains it had to be, ahem, an alien spacecraft, me, I couldn't say. I've never heard a plausible explanation, but it sure brings a sceptical response from people who think it is a cooked-up tale. I know differently.
     
  7. Eric Sponberg
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    Eric Sponberg Senior Member

    I remember when I was about 16 or 17, at our camp on the shore of Lake Superior in Marquette, MI, my friend Bobby down the beach wanted to take their family's Lyman with twin 35 HP Johnson outboards on a cruise up the lake shore toward Granite Loma, a huge mansion owned by a banker in town. There would be the two of us plus a third friend from the other end of the beach. We'd make a weekend of it, camping out on the shore for a night before heading back. My mother, however, nixed the idea as far as I was concerned. She said, "You don't know what kind of trouble you could get into out in that big, cold lake. You might hit a rock and wreck the boat, and get stranded. You could get into real trouble."

    Since it was the end of summer, I had to get back down state to school anyway, so I reluctantly gave up the trip and drove back to Ypsilanti where we lived.

    I later found out that my other two friends did indeed go on the trip. And they did hit a rock, demolished the boat, and they did have to swim to shore where they were stranded until help arrived.

    I don't know what to make of the story, if I learned anything or not. I guess the irony of the Lake Superior trip has always stuck with me. My wife and I later went on an 11,000 mile cruise on our sailboat, crossing the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, and my mother did not have anything to say about it.

    Eric
     
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  8. Leo Lazauskas
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    Leo Lazauskas Senior Member

    It's not what they say: it's how they sigh. :)
     
  9. Dirteater
    Joined: Oct 2010
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    Dirteater Senior Member

    Eric Sponberg story reminded me of another.

    My father warned us never to play on a constrution site, duh?
    anyway, there was a house being built just down the street and a couple of my buds asked me if I wanted to come play in the house. I headed my fathers advice and declined. (they called me a wimp of course)

    anyway the story goes one of my buddies took a run from the second floor and was going to jump on a big mound of dirt in the front yard. Guess he didn't see the plateglass window. I visited him in the hospital the next day.
    about 147 stitches. We remained good friends after that. *L*
     
  10. Dirteater
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    Dirteater Senior Member

    log boom

    Ok, same bud as above.

    I was invited with my bud's family to go to a lake for the day.
    We noticed on the other side of the lake was a log boom. About 4 us trudge through mud that would sink your foot down about a foot with every step.
    we eventially made it to the log boom (dead tired) where with great effort we managed to free up a log to ride back accross the lake. It was a heck of a lot of work to paddle this log all the way back across. By the time we made it back, I let go of the log about 20' off shore. I was so tired I almost didn't make it! 3 more strokes and I probably wouldn't have!

    bad enough the log boom was quite dangerous, let alone the efforts to get there and back. It was there I learned about getting to know my own limitations.
     
  11. Doug Lord
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    Doug Lord Flight Ready

    Close Call??

    For a number of years my brother ,parents and I lived on a 47' powerboat at Pensacola Bahia Mar. My brother and I were conscripted to work on the boat every weekend that dad was ,essentially, rebuilding from scratch.
    One beautiful Saturday, we were all invited to go for a sail in the gulf on an 80' schooner by a guy my dad had met around the marina. The boat was magnificent and the biggest boat of any kind I remembered being aboard. I don't have much of a memory of the day except how much room there was below and how great the boat felt in the gulf. I was about 12 and the whole thing made a really big impression on me.
    I don't remember the name of the boat---perhaps because of the way the story unfolded a few months later. I don't remember hardly any details except
    that "Mr." Harvey-owner and skipper who had seemed so cool to me-took the boat to Ft. Lauderdale and took some passengers out. The way I remember it,
    he shot all the passengers except one little girl from Wisconsin(who survived)
    and sunk the boat. It was a stunning story that shook us all up.
    ---------------------
    Thanks to Hoyt in the next post! My brother and I have looked for some corroboration of this story and Hoyt found it. I was 11, not 12... The boat was a ketch and 60 ' and heres the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebelle_(ship))
     
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  12. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    [​IMG]The boat was named Bluebelle.

    http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/36985...mpage-left-girl-orphaned-adrift/#.TuN3JLLNlGU

    "Her story remains as extraordinary today as it was when it happened in 1961. Arthur Duperrault was a well-to-do optometrist from Green Bay, Wis., who took his family on a cruise on a 60-foot ketch, Bluebelle, captained by a genuine war hero, ex-Air Force pilot Julian Harvey. The 44-year-old captain’s new wife, Mary Dene, 34, was also on the trip."
     
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  13. philSweet
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    Location: Beaufort, SC and H'ville, NC

    philSweet Senior Member

    My mom paints. Sometimes she does birthday cards. This is one I got after cruising the Bahamas for three months. I've had nightmares about this card. Happy Birthday? I think mom may still have issues regarding my occasional adventures.
     

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  14. Dirteater
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    Dirteater Senior Member

    Nightmares? *L*

    a beautiful water color I'd say.
     

  15. WestVanHan
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    WestVanHan Not a Senior Member

    Nothing to do with colour: his boat is going straight on to the rocks....
     
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