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If it had been daylight instead of pitch black at night, it would have looked like this….
(Photo by Defence images, UK Ministry of Defence) |
Normally the night watches are calm, peaceful, serene times for reflecting upon the larger issues of life: ‘Who are we?’, ‘Why are we here?‘, ‘How big is this galaxy really?‘, ‘How can I eat both my sardines and the Can Opener’s at tomorrow’s breakfast without him noticing?‘
But this night was different…
It’s amazing how your depth perception fades to useless at night. It becomes difficult to tell the size of objects, to judge their speed, even difficult to judge what angle and direction they are travelling at.
You can’t believe how challenging this is till you (don’t) see it.
Until last night we had been blessed with next to no traffic – the Med’s not too busy this time of year. Just a few commercial vessels’ lights passing on the horizon, nowhere near us.
Every 15 minutes as usual, both the Can Opener and I would scan the horizon… and this time we noticed some lights were NOT moving across our bow. Rather they stayed lined up with our course.
This is a bad thing and can make even the best of us super antsy!
But they weren’t any kind of lights we’d seen before in life or in a textbook.
There were about a hundred little white lights lined up horizontally above the water, and masses of lights – all white – by their bridge. And no sign of any port or starboard lights to tell us what direction this monster was moving in.
The lights came closer and closer and then a hulking giant something loomed out of what was near pitch blackness. No moon this night.
Suddenly a searchlight swept around and their horn blasted five times… and we saw it was an aircraft carrier. Holy great Bastet! I nearly had to make an unplanned trip to my sandbox.
The horizontal little white lights were lighting up an aircraft carrier’s runway. The bridge flicked on their nav lights and we could finally see it was port-side to us… and realised it was parked… in the middle of the Med!
Quickly I ordered the Can Opener to steer decisively around it.
To our left, a giant aircraft carrier, and to our right now, another unknown ship (that we had previously noted but that was not on a collision course with us) was pulling up not too far off.
We seemed to be passing through some kind of NATO military configuration or exercises on the high seas. Gulp.
The Can Opener was strangely unmoved, but I had to go below for a restorative sardine.
–Captain Cat
(transcribed by the Can Opener)
The Cruising Kitty 