Hallucination?

At Sea
N 37 46 W 75.19

The cruising life has given me experience in acting swiftly and decisively when needed. However, making non-urgent decisions seems to be getting harder. On every important choice I hem and haw, and delay deciding and imagine complicating factors, and wish I had more perfect information. It sounds like I'm describing corporate executives who used to irritate me so much because of their reluctance to decide.

Last night was such as case. I was vacillating between the choice of putting in to Cape May, NJ for the night, or continuing on toward Norfolk, VA. We wanted to go to the southern Chesapeake rather than the northern end. However, the weather forecast wasn't great, and to make it worse, even the current weather did not have the favorable winds we expected. I favored one choice, then the other, then the first one again. The wind finally died entirely and we started motoring toward Cape May. Around
midnight, I said the decision was final. We would put in to Cape May for the night and then check the weather in the morning. I could feel my decision process being influenced by fatigue. I wanted a night's sleep. Within minutes of that decision, and nice NW breeze appeared out of nowhere. I flipped again.

So far, it turned out to be a good decision. I put up the spinnaker and we used it all night long and most of today. Now, 18 hours after flipping my choice we are 90 miles (out of 165) miles closer to the Chesapeake, and we're making 4.5-5 knots toward the goal. It has been a splendid day. By tomorrow noon we should be on the Chesapeake, well inside the bridge-tunnel. If we had put in to Cape May I would have been very unhappy with my choice and it would have been 2-3 weeks before we reached
the southern Chesapeake where we want to be.

Even Joshua Slocum had hallucinations on his voyage. Last night might have been our turn. We changed watch at 04:00. Libby took over and I went to sleep. I was very tired so soon I was very very deep in sleep. I was woken by a cry of help from Libby. I dashed up on deck without even my glasses on to see what the matter was. Libby said, "What is that, and how can I avoid it?" I looked out and saw some kind of large vessel close by, within a half mile of us. It was showing lots of bright
white lights but no red/green navigation lights were visible. Behind it was a string of red lights. Some of the red lights appeared to be stacked three lights high on vertical poles. Libby said the red lights were moving very fast. I looked and they all looked still, except that I caught a quick glimpse of a very fast moving red light. I heard no noise.

I thought, it must be a tug towing barges plus a chase boat. However, the red lights appeared to go on for miles. I couldn't read the GPS screen without my glasses so I couldn't orient myself. I couldn't tell which way we were pointing or where the strange vessel was pointing. To make things worse, I noticed the spinnaker wrapped around the forestay, and I could also feel my eyes drooping -- I was still half asleep.

I went below to put on my glasses and to put on a jacket. When I came back up less than 60 seconds later, the vessel appeared to be gone. "Where is it?" I asked Libby. "There," she pointed. I looked and the damn thing appeared to be 2-3 miles away already. Also, the only red lights visible anywhere were TV/radio towers on shore 10-15 miles away. What the hell?

So, what's the explanation? I'm really at a loss for a good one. The best I can offer is a weak speculation. I think the vessel was a hydrofoil traveling at 50 knots or better. I think the red lights I saw were the TV towers. I think the fast moving red lights that Libby and I saw were reflections of red lights off the waves. Perhaps the hydrofoil had a party with rotating red lights or even rotating lasers. That's pretty lame but it's the best I can do.

Despite the fact that we nearly died by being run over by this hallucination, I was back down below and back asleep within 5 minutes. I let Libby straighten out the spinnaker by herself. I was really zonked.

So what the heck was it? It didn't look like a flying saucer. Perhaps I should have entitled this blog Unidentified Floating Object.