June 21, 2012
We’re still underway from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus and it’s been a long, strange and kind of hard trip so far and last night took the prize for strange. We saw phantom boats on our instruments, I saw phantom lights ahead of us, and there were strange flashes both in the water and on the horizon.
The strange flashes in the water are about the only part of that we can explain. There are creatures living in the water that emit light when disturbed (bioluminescense). Our boat passing disturbs them. But these are not like the tiny bioluminescent plankton we’re used to – these are huge flashes. The individual flashes seem to range from about a six inch disk to an eighteen inch disk. It seems sometimes there may be many together making a flash that is several feet in diameter. Sometimes these greenish flashes are so bright we wonder if they don’t have there little fishy flash cameras out to take our picture as we pass – it’s like a strobe going off.
Maybe this bioluminescense explains some of the other strange things we saw last night but I don’t think so. For now, we’re going with UFO. -Rich
