Ambiance
When a picture of the sea comes to mind most people have one of blue or green water with waves. Movies and magazine photos usually show the crystal blues and greens of the tropics or the darker blue/gray of the higher latitudes. Then there is the storm's ominous colors and action. There is black night, maybe with a big moon or bright stars. All these may come to mind. When some real time is spent over a wide enough area of this planetary sea there is time and space to realize some really strange effects exist. Some of those can have a strange effect on people.
The background to this page is from the Mediterranean just off Libya--close enough for some concern about the fast missile boats they were threatening to use at the time. It might just be a strangely purple sunset, but the sunrises and days were strange too. Even the nights were "off." The effect is sometimes seen as far north as the European shores. Very fine North African dust blows north causing these effects. Odd "fog" at night, smoky reddish days, and often a lost horizon that is almost like a white out in the polar regions.
In some northern waters the effect of a glassy sea and light fog can erase all features. There is no horizon. Gray water blends into gray fog at a distance. It is very different from the closed effect of a heavy fog. That has limits, like a room. This has distance and no markers. Perspective is completely lost without visual clues to size and distance . Unknown objects may take on strange properties when floating in this blankness. Is the log small and near or large and far? The closest I've come to this effect anywhere else is flying transpacific on the southern routes via Hawaii where blue of sky and sea can match and it appears to be nothing but blue space out there.
A few days in these unusual worlds can begin having an effect on the people aboard. Ashore, a long period of being really snowed in is perhaps closest in mental effect. I think what makes it different at sea is that people, even mariners, have natural orientation to features; trees, hills, rivers, buildings and such. The sea is already very different and lacking these fixed references. When it goes strange colors or just blank and even the sparse, but familiar visual markers, such as waves, begin fading there can be a mental effect.
I once spent over two weeks in the far north Atlantic where the sea was flat calm and a gray to exactly match the gray of the light fog. There was no visible horizon. No reference at all. Once the disturbance of the ship's passage became ripples there was nothing.
We were a gray ship on a gray sea in a gray globe and the only effect of our existence seemed to be those ripples fading into the unknown distance. It was a shock to come on deck one day and see an object and wake out there beyond our own disturbance--a fin. It was a shark. Was it large and far or small and close? It took a while. Only when I got a reference from remembered angles off that deck and a sense of how our wake flowed did it become clear it was large and far. From the size I'd guess it was a Greenland shark. Except for occasional birds, birds that would appear and disappear into that gray globe, that was the only object outside the world formed by us and our wake.
There were magical nights. My favorite ones were in the Philippine Sea where the stars were brilliant and the seas matched. As we slid along the lights in the sea ranged from star like sparkles, long glowing blue green tubes of the wake and great flashes, the size of basketballs, that lit the kingposts. Those were matched by the magical nights when the spooks were out.
Those were the nights when we were wrapped in fog so tightly that even the ship's navigation lights were not clear and the only sense of our presence was the groan of the ships fog signal and what was inside the hull. Even spookier were nights after days like the background where there was a moon or some stars, reddish and enough to make a ghost story real.
This purple evening period was spooky. I can't quantify it, but my feeling was that the most of the ship's people turned even more inward and became quieter. A few became much more social. What was evident was that that change outside, not a storm, no unusual danger or a "rough ride," was having a distinct effect inside. The gray globe, not that unusual for those familiar with northern seas, or cheerful blue globe is one thing. Odd colors and seas are another. During this period in which the days were reddish, evenings purple and nights of spooky red sparks in the sky, I remember being somewhat fascinated and wanting normality to return.
This page was intended to be a link from one long "in development" titled "Seatime" about ship life of not too long ago when we almost vanished from the world of land and humanity. Now it seems to belong to the age of the Clippers carrying tea from china.
That was a time when there was no "phoning home" using satellite communications. At best there was static filled, fading in and out, short wave radio. Three days straight out from land meant isolation. A thousand miles out meant those big short wave sets were the only source of news of a world outside the hull. Right in the middle of important news the signal might just fade into whistles. The mysterious "Russian Woodpecker" was part of the noise out there.
There was no GPS navigation. The best navigation in the world could drift out of accuracy over a matter of weeks. Second best, top quality LORAN-C, could get repeatability within the survey of tens of yards using survey techniques. It could be a mile or more off in absolute terms. Then entire nights were wasted because the sunset, sunrise and "night monster" got the signal and the ship appeared to jump somewhere at two hundred knots or go backward. We had to analyze the top quality Navy Navigational Satellite (doppler) passes to come up with a shift of the entire survey line net to a better position in relation to the real world.
Copyright © 2005 by Ramon Jackson