Many times at sea we were able to see many of the wonders of nature...  Most of the time when you are out of sight of any land, for days upon end..  If the weather was good we could see the stars and even the satellites in the heavens..  Since most of the time we ran darkened ship..  That meant that we only had the red nite lites on the bridge...  All outside doors were closed and the port holes were covered, and if there was navigation, the mast head and range lites were on, plus the Port / Starboard and Stearn lights...   So you can see there was not any light pollution as around large cities....  It is then that you can see the heavens and all stars...  It truly a wonder to behold, friend...

One of the other different sights was to see the flying fish...  The could be seen near dusk and dawn...  They would come up out of a wave and the pop open their wing struts, and flutter their tails which would be still trailing in the water..   Then once they became airborne they would glide for several hundred feet, before dropping back into the water...  They could get several feet into the air, one morning we found a flying fish, that had impaled itself; {It 's mouth was over the dog handle} on one of the forward door dogs....  This is about 20 Ft above the water line...  These fish were about eight to twelve inches long, maybe two inches in diameter....  With their wings out about ten inches wide...  Unique creatures...

Other times we would have schools of Bottle Nosed Dolphins run with the ship...  Their favorite thing to do was to cut in and out of the bow wake...  We could hear them on the Hydro Phones, and some times the sonar technicians would talk to them...  The seemed to like the sonar, sounds from the ship...  Beautiful animals...

At times we also heard the whales, they would stay aways off from the ship thought..  Our main concern was not wanting to run into the whales...  These are some of God's most wonderful creatures...  It was a privilege to see them...

Of course we would see the various sharks...  Some times when our speed was under ten knots, and the weather was fair, and sunny....  We would shark fish... Usually get some kind of sorry piece of meat from the Mess Cooks... Get a grappling hook, {hook the meat} and throw it over the stern, then get a couple of the small arms, usually the 30-06 rounds, and wait for the sharks to come up to get the meat trailing about a hundred feet  behind the ship....   Since the meat was moving along at around ten knots it would be skipping along near the surface..  Therefore the sharks would have to come up and usually turn belly up {BTW all shark and most fish have white under sides} so we got  a very good shot...  Usually if there were several sharks, when we shot one it would go off trailing blood, and the others would go after it...  A sad state of affairs, but I did not make up the rules, I just observed ... 

Other things would be to watch the rain squalls come and go since we could see unobstructed for more than ten miles in every direction, you could see things happening aways off...  Water spouts were neat to see also, these are were water born tronadoes... Some times we could see two or more swirling out on the ocean...  We would usually avoid them...  "Steer clear"  was the order...

I will discuss some more of these happening at sea later so stay tuned... 

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