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What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
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What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?Fishing or traveling. Just starting to run offshore on the jersey coast, so everthing will be interesting. What have you seen?
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Good topic. I, too, have been running offshore in New Jersey for some time. Most memorable are the various whales, of course, due to their size. There are several species of dolphin/porpoise, and I really like the saddleback variety in the canyons. Sea turtles that you can sneak up on while asleep for photos---those little birds that literally will land on your hand and steering wheel--massive ocean sunfish--basking hammerheads--flocks of migrating Monarch butterflies. Pick up a piece of Sargasso, there is life there. Floaters, buoys, always attract various tropicals in the summer. Keep an eye for military vessels....like subs!
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Boston Whaler 210 Ventura, 225 Verado
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
While fishing one day we saw something in the distance drifting in our direction. As it got closer we were able to confirm it was an inflatable doll bouncing in the waves. I guess she mad someone mad and he dumped her...
Not knowing where she came from we let her drift on by.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Humpback whales breaching off Oahu...about 50 feet from the boat. Another is this dinghy found offshore about 40 miles off Naples, looked like a homemade deal but very nicely done, very little damage...no passengers.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Saw a UFO once. well, it was a UFO untill we removed the 'U' part.
we were sitting in calm seas several miles out in the Gulf snapper fishing and from the horizon this white cloud appears and begins to move towards. it stayed right on the water, and as it moved closer, it was more like a 'spray cloud'. like when you see a water spout--the big spraying sputtering area at the base of the water spout. closer it came, and as it did we could see a dark object at the center. closer still, and we could see the object was very large and the spray cloud was enormous--maybe 100 feet tall. closer, closer. we were a little freaked. it was dead slick calm seas, not a cloud in the sky. the object came right at us and once in view we were speachless. it was a 100 foot long hovercraft--military. it passed maybe 1/4 mile away and was making a huge spray cloud. it was moving along, too. cant rememeber how fast we decided it was going, but it was moving.
may not sound sooo odd, but this was 15 years ago. we live in a navy town, 'cradle of naval aviation', and we had never seen anything like this! (remember, this is the days before the discovery channel!)
RE: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Boats on fire or sinking, all kinds of crap floating in the water, people making little people, turtles making little turtles, porpoise riding my bow, massive manta rays doing vertical donuts, a teenage moron trying to ride a surfboard across Beaufort Inlet, NC on a rough afternoon with a ton of traffic (we picked him up and chewed him a new arse since we almost hit him as he was hidden in the troughs). But the most interesting of all is the type of fish we are pulling out of the deep.....you often have a good idea but every once in a while you can be surprised.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Humback Whales breaching in the Mudhole.
Dolphins/porpoises as far as the eye could see in cobalt blue water in the Hudson Canyon.
Minke and pilot whales close to the boat.
A huge flock (hundreds if not thousands) of flying fish taking flight at once.
Big Bluefin feeding at the surface on balled up bait in the Hudson in Nov.
An entire large tree floating in the Hudson.
A sparrow landing within feet of me 50miles out that remained a resting passenger for a couple of hours.
Butterflies in the Hudson canyon.
Plankton/krill, huge schools of squid w/ darting Yellowfin under the lights chunking in the Hudson.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Saw a 500lb (EST) Blue Marlin wack a Mahi in half with its bill. Happened right next to the boat when we were trolling about 84miles offshore. Wish I had time for pictures...
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Oh, I forgot about the time we were in purple water, with flying fish sometimes zooming over the cockpit! That day we found vast schools of small yellowfin tuna just finning along the surface. As we trolled through them, they would part, but ignore our lures. We found they would hit metal cast from spinning rods from a drifting boat. Not another boat to be seen, BTW, by the Texas Tower. Yellowfin tuna on spinning tackle is interesting, to say the least.
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Boston Whaler 210 Ventura, 225 Verado
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Humpback whales breaching
Dolphins
Sharks
A low flying cargo plane circling around over head in the distance - then three large "packages" come falling out, followed by a commercial dragger steaming in that general direction. Really hoped they would not come in our direction, as we were not out running anything in a 40' sailboat.
__________________ Move along, nothing to see here.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
I was on the water but it wasn’t. It was in the sky. A couple of years ago DoD was testing one of those intercept missiles, launched from somewhere on the backside of California or Nevada, destined for somewhere over the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was exactly like in the movies, a bright glow from the rocket and a vapor trail that stretched from horizon to horizon. Don’t know how high up it was but that thing was way the hell up there, couldn’t see it, just a big bright glow leaving a vapor trail. And it was fast! Just a few minutes to go from horizon to horizon. At the time we didn’t know what the hell it was. Next day heard on the news it was a successful test of the missile system being developed to intercept nukes inbound from China. Somewhere in Asia a dummy missile was launched toward the US, the thing we saw took out the dummy missile somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
The first time I saw the Navy’s top secret stealth boat in San Francisco Bay. Well, I guess it wasn’t top secret anymore because it was tooling around during the day. They hang a bunch of radar reflectors on a line stretch down the middle of the boat so it will show up radar. it looks like the stealth aircraft without the wings, black.
Most famous person I met while on the water was Bill Kertzman, the drummer for the Grateful Dead while diving from a friends boat in Monterey Bay. When asked about Jerry Garcia, also a scuba diver, all Kertzman said he wouldn’t go in the water with him anymore, Garcia had “returned to his old ways.” A few months later Garcia died from drugs.
RE: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Submarine on the surface about 25 miles outside of Port Everglades while returning from bimini.
Most intimidating was leaving Hillsboro Inlet and going to Chub Cay. About 20 miles off we were hailed by a "US Warship" and asked to bring the boat to a stop and provide Documentation numbers etc. It was the same weekend as the Ft Lauderdale Air and Sea show, so they were being "overly cautious". No problem, but believe me when you hear that call and see that vessel on the horizon - you stop.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
A blue marlin grabbing a dolphin that we had reeled in- about 30 ft. behind the boat. He let go of it, then came back up from under the boat and took it for good. Of course the line broke immediately- it was awesome.
RE: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Some years ago they were filming The Hunt for Red October in our local waters here in So. Ca. Apparrently as the nuclear sub being used came on the scene it snagged a cable from a tug boat and pulled it under with the loss of crew on the tug. I did not see the accident but I did see the nuclear sub sitting on the surface for about a week or so while the investigation was conducted. A very strange sight because these subs are generally on mission under water or sitting mostly unscene in their base.
Re: What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore?
Not on my boat, but I was on a liveaboard dive boat returning from the Channel Islands (Calif), and we were asked to stop and drift between Santa Cruz and Anacapa. A USN vessel was doing to comms.
A little later, a cruise missile goes by about 50 feet off the water, disappears northward. 5 minutes later, it comes back heading southward, climbs to maybe 500 feet, stalls, pops a chute, and drifts towards the water. The Navy boat goes to pick it up.
We continued to be held for about a half hour, when another cruise missile went by. This one never came back, and we were cleared to continue back to Santa Barbara.
Pretty cool stuff, if you didn't mind the waiting.
Strangest thing I've seen in the water was on a night dive in teh Caribbean: a complete uprooted tree, about fifty feet tall, inverted in the water column. Came across the branches. Thought it was some kind of new huge basket star or something, until I saw the trunk. Took a few seconds to figure out what I was looking at. The root cluster (ball wouldn't quite be the right word) was just buoyant enough to float, and it was in water just deep enough that the tips of the branches were sweeping the sand. Weird.
What is the most interesting thing you have seen while offshore? 
