The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii. Ross MacDonald, The Drowning Pool
She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well. George R R Martin, A Storm of Swords
The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it. J G Ballard, Millennium People
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more. Lord Byron
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Eric Cantona
There is something out at sea terrorising the world’s shipping. It can strike out of the blue with devastating consequences. This is the story of a wave that is sinking ships around the world. A killer that defies all scientific understanding. And that no ship is designed to withstand. Horizon: Freak Wave, BBC 2002
The freak or rogue wave is one of the great myths of the sea. Mariners talk of a single breaking wave the size of a tower block that can rear up out of nowhere. It’s not a tsunami or tidal wave. It’s not caused by earthquakes or giant landslides. No-one knows where it comes from or why it happens. ibid.
On New Year’s Day 1995 a storm was brewing in the North Sea. The Draupner oil rig was a hundred miles out in the harshest of weather. Suddenly out of the blue came a wave so high and so steep scientists had thought it was impossible. ibid.
When the waves had to fight the current they grew massive; the current pushed against them driving them so high and steep a monster would rear up. ibid.
The Caledonian Star was lucky. Her engines were still working. The crew boarded up the windows, and eventually the ship crawled back to port ... The Caledonian Star and the Breman were fortunate to survive. But their experiences challenged everything known about freak waves. ibid.
If Osborne is right, here is the reason why rogue waves occur in the deep ocean. It isn’t to do with strange local conditions. It’s because waves start to behave in a bizarre non-linear fashion. For some reason they become unstable and start sucking up energy from waves around them. ibid.
In the mid-90s the Baltic Sea bore witness to the largest maritime disaster in Europe’s peace-time history: MS Estonia. 90s Greatest: Tragedies, National Geographic 2014
A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast
And fills the white and rustling sail
And bends the gallant mast. Allan Cunningham, A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea, 1825
The shipwreck: the sailor’s ultimate nightmare … It’s always been lodged deep in our psychological makeup … Shipwrecks changed the course of our history. Sam Willis, Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History I: Home Waters to High Seas, BBC 2016
In November 1703 a massive storm tore across the south coast destroying everything in its wake in a maelstrom of chaos. Which spawned wind speeds of over a hundred and forty miles an hour. The only bona-fide hurricane ever to hit our shores. ibid.
The Mary Rose returned to the surface after over four hundred years. ibid.
Over 20,000 Spanish soldiers and sailors had lost their lives. ibid.
One in five ships never returned. ibid.
The anxieties that built up in Georgian Britain about wreckings at sea. Sam Willis, Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History II: A World Turning Upside Down
The Scilly Islands were inaccurate charted and notoriously treacherous. ibid.
Longitude … a problem facing all British ships at the time. ibid.
These slave ships would carry up to five hundred men, women and children shackled and manacled in the hole … This was a gruesome trade. ibid.
Dozens of slave ships were wrecked in this period. ibid.
Summer means many different things to different people … but for us – the sport of Surfing! The thrill and the fun of the sport of surfing. The Endless Summer, 1966
Some surfers prefer the hairy thrill of a big wave. ibid.
Henry’s a seal – nature’s greatest body surfer. ibid.
Mike & Robert: You think they’re coming out with their forks to have you for dinner! ibid. guys in Ghana
Here in Cape Town they like to go all together … Durban: the sun is already up and it’s 4.30 a.m. … 80 degrees out, water temperature about the same … Sharks are a tremendous problem here. ibid.
In the curl for 45 seconds. ibid.
Lots of girls surf in Hawaii and many of them are very good. ibid.
Hawaii is truly a land of an endless summer. ibid.
You should have been here yesterday! ibid. dudes in Australia
It all started with a hijacking in November 1972. I was flying home to Mexico City from an anthropological conference on the history of violence when suddenly a group of terrorists took over the flight. It was too good to be true. Storyville: The Raft, BBC 2019
All my life I had wanted to know why people fight … I realised that if I could create a similar situation it would be the perfect laboratory to study human behaviour, but where can you isolate a group of people and expose them to danger? Then I had the idea … ibid.
May 1973, Las Palmas, Spain: Tonight the ten volunteers arrive in the Canary Islands. It was the first time they met. Ten brave strangers who are about to spend the next three months together isolated on the raft. ibid.
Captain Maria is the only professional sailor on board. ibid.
43 years later there’s only 7 of us still alive. ibid. survivor
The roaring noise of the ocean took over. Finally we are at sea. ibid.
Is violence something that is built into our genes or is it something we learn? ibid.
Instead, we witness a clear example of crowd frenzy, people no longer act as individuals but as part of a dangerous collective. ibid.
The most important question of our time: can we do without war? ibid.
He was a master manipulator. ibid. survivor
I feel completely misunderstood. ibid.
I realised that the only one who has actually showed any kind of violence or aggression on the raft is me. ibid.
Stepping ashore was a very strange feeling. It was 101 days that we had been at sea. ibid. survivor
We started out them and us and became us. ibid.
Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in our skies have been reported for decades. But chilling new evidence suggests a new phenomenon is emerging – from beneath the seas. Strange craft captured on film from the USS Trepang, and the Swedish Channel incident. Shocking encounters with unidentified submersible objects known as Ghost Rockets. And humanoid entities in Russia Lake Baikal. UFOs: The Lost Evidence s1e2: Deep Sea Encounters, Discovery 2017
Why are they here? And why are they underwater? ibid.
Most of these reports remain stubbornly classified. ibid.
Researchers believe the Baltic Sea anomaly is indeed an alien underwater spacecraft. ibid.
There Leviathan
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land, and at his gills
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out a sea. John Milton, Paradise Lost 7:412
A most terrible creature, resembling nothing they saw before. The monster lifted its head so high that it seemed to be higher than the crow’s nest on the mainmast. The head was small and the body short and wrinkled. The unknown creature was using giant fins which propelled it through the water. Later the sailors saw its tail as well. The monster was longer than our whole ship. Hans Egede, Dano-Norwegian sighting off Greenland 1734
Over the centuries there have been reports of the so-called Great Sea Serpent. Scores of captains have recorded such sightings in their ship’s logs. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, ITV 1980
Precise drawings were made of the Stronsay Beast at the time, and its dimensions were carefully measured. More than fifty witnesses swore to what they had seen. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, Rothiesholm Head, Stronsay, 1808