Incredible sights at sea

In my 50 years working on tug boats on the Puget Sound and adjacent waters, I’ve seen some interesting things.

One late night coming out of Bellingham with one barge in tow, the water was glowing.

Every wavelet as far as I could see was glowing, as if it had a light bulb in it. The tow wire underwater all the way to the barge was glowing white. The barge looked like it was riding on a carpet of light. Any fish that was moving in the water was like a light bulb on the move.

In Saratoga Passage between Whidbey Island and Camano Island in the 1960’s, the tug would have a white halo around it at night, as huge schools of hake were moving away from the boat. Back then we thought it was phosphorus in the water, but we’ve learned since then that it’s billions of tiny organisms that produce a flash of light when disturbed.

Gary Campbell, one of the captains at Puget Sound Freight Lines, had told me he had seen several sea elephants over the years.

I had never seen one and was beginning to wonder if Gary knew what he was talking about. We were crewed together on the tug Anne Carlander and north bound in the area of Edmonds, Washington.

I was in the galley when Gary started yelling for me come to the wheelhouse. He handed me the binoculars and pointed at the black object about a quarter mile ahead. There it was, a large male sea elephant.

I would see two more of these spectacular animals in the next few years. I saw one at Turn Point at the north end of the San Juan Islands. As I approached him, he went from vertical to horizontal on the surface of the water. He was breathing hard, and you could see the steam coming from his mouth. He was loading up on oxygen, preparing to dive. They feed in very deep water and can stay down for a long time.

I passed within about 50 feet of him and got a good look. He was huge, maybe 12 to 15 feet long, with a foot-long floppy trunk-like nose.

I’ve seen the Northern Lights on several occasions while traveling the waters of the Puget Sound and Southern British Columbia. This far south they are usually displayed in white, but there has been a couple of times they were in Technicolor. One night in the Southern Georgia Straits, they put on a display in an array of vivid colors as they danced across the sky.

On a trip to Port Alberni on the tug Duwamish, we were near Port Townsend, and I was just going off shift at midnight, and Darrel McCormick was coming on watch. I had left the wheel house and entered my state room when Darrel yelled “come back to the wheelhouse quick.”

When I reached the wheelhouse, he pointed to an object streaking across the western sky. It was traveling from left to right and leaving a white smoke trail behind it. The object was up in the sky higher than an airplane would fly and following the contour of the earth.

Later we learned that a Russian Satellite had entered the atmosphere and burned up.

On another occasion I saw a large meteorite enter the atmosphere at night and explode into two pieces and burn up.