Tales From The Travels

We did a cruise in the Caribbean, including a trip to Guantanamo Bay for training, in the February and March 1981 and finished up with a port call in Martinique, one of the West Indies islands, before returning to Norfolk. The significance of this is that this caused our return trip to go through the Sargasso Sea, a very strange area in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Sargasso Sea is a large area in the west-central North Atlantic in an area sometimes called the doldrums. The ocean and air currents circle around this area, making it very still. One of the main features of the Sargasso Sea, and the source of its name, is the seaweed that floats on the surface, sargassum. The water is a couple miles deep here, so the seaweed grows by forming these air sacs and floats on the surface. Usually, it just forms in big mats, but can be much more extensive at times, leading to wild claims of ships being trapped in it. While the seaweed can be thick, it is not thick enough to trap a ship. The real danger to old sailing ships was the lack of wind, which might becalm them for extended periods. There is no ‘graveyard of ships’ there. The doldrums (or horse latitudes), the seaweed, and the fact that it’s in the Bermuda Triangle has led to all sorts of stories about it, almost all of which are false.

I have been through the Sargasso Sea several times and all that I observed was a very calm ocean and large mats of seaweed. But, during this trip in March 1981 the ocean was covered with this thick blanket of seaweed for as far as you could see, and you can see a long way from the bridge of a ship at sea. From horizon to horizon was nothing but a flat coat of floating seaweed. It was quite smelly, which is something different for the open ocean. Normally, ‘sea’ smells are something you get on a beach and are due to rotting plant and animal material. The open ocean has essentially no smell and is very fresh.

The heat and humidity was very oppressive, both characteristics of the sea. The same combination of currents that causes the doldrums also leads to it being warmer. This increased heat leads to higher humidity and very little rain. On this trip, just stepping outside was enough to make your uniform stick to your skin.

We were also concerned with this thick mat fouling the screws. The mat isn’t thick, but the turbulence caused by the ship might have sucked some of the seaweed down close enough to get tangled. Would it have tangled the big screws? Probably not, but we didn’t want to take a chance and slowed down. I appreciated this since I would probably have been one of the guys that would have to go down and clean it out. A more realistic concern was that the seaweed could be sucked up through the various intakes and into the machinery, so all of the intakes were closed off.

Certainly, everyone was aware we were smack-dab in the Bermuda triangle, an area of the ocean off the east coast of North America where ships and planes are reputed to disappear without a trace or explanation, which just added to the eeriness of the situation.

So, you can imagine that the tension was pretty high when our magnetic compass went crazy. It would start spinning in one direction, slow down and stop, then start spinning in the other direction. It did this for several hours until we were leaving the Sargasso Sea. It was interesting to watch it and try to figure out why it was doing that. As far as I know, no one ever figured it out. It might have been some kind of glitch in the system that just coincidentally happened at this particular time, but no one ever told me about such a problem.

There were a lot of guys that were convinced we barely escaped disappearing. I have to confess, who’s to say they weren’t right? It really was pretty spooky. We went through the Bermuda triangle routinely, but that’s my only story of anything weird ever happening.

So, do ships disappear in the Bermuda Triangle? Probably not. But, there is one thing that could lead to the sudden sinking of a ship, and I mean real sudden. Beneath the ocean floor on the continental shelf are large deposits of methane hydrates, essential methane ice. This stuff can melt and give off gases and small eruptions of gases have been observed. If a large eruption were to occur and send a bunch of bubbles up, you could have a large area where the water is mixed with methane bubbles and this would have the effect of dropping the water density. If a ship were to be in the area of such an eruption it would sink so quickly that there wouldn’t be time to send an emergency message. In fact, the density could be so low that even the debris would sink. The ship and everyone on it would disappear without a trace.

Has this ever happened? There is no evidence that any such thing has ever occurred. But, of course, the whole problem with that statement is that it wouldn’t leave any evidence. The biggest piece of evidence we have against such an event has to do with modern ships and the electronic equipment they carry, keeping them in constant contact with other ships and shore facilities. If a ship were to suddenly sink, we would know right where and when it happened by the breaking of the signal. The Bermuda Triangle is one of the busiest areas in the world for sea traffic and no event like this has ever been recorded. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, just that if it does, it’s very, very infrequent. If it happened more often, we would have seen it by now.

So, despite my personally witnessing the spinning compass, I have to remain a skeptic of the Bermuda Triangle. I just don’t see any credible evidence to make me believe it’s different than any other part of the world’s oceans.