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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/gamalfrank on 2025-05-22 17:14:30+00:00.
I work on cargo ships, long hauls across the empty stretches of ocean. It’s usually monotonous – the endless blue, the thrum of the engines, the routine. But this last trip… this last trip was different.
It started about ten days out from port, somewhere in the Pacific. I was on a late watch, just me and the stars and the hiss of the bow cutting through the water. That’s when I first saw it. A disturbance in the dark water off the port side, too large to be dolphins, too deliberate for a random wave. Then, a plume of mist shot up, illuminated briefly by the deck lights. A whale. Not unheard of, but this one was big. Really big. And it was close.
The next morning, it was still there, keeping pace with us. A few of the other guys spotted it. Our bosun, a weathered old hand on the sea, squinted at it through his binoculars. “Humpback, by the looks of it,” he grunted. “Big fella. Lost his pod, maybe.”
But there was something off about it. It wasn’t just its size, though it was easily one of the largest I’d ever seen, rivaling the length of some of our smaller tenders. It was its back. It was a roadmap of scars. Not just the usual nicks and scrapes you see from barnacles or minor tussles. These were huge, gouged-out marks, some pale and old, others a more recent, angry pink. Long, tearing slashes, and circular, crater-like depressions. It looked like it had been through a war.
And it was alone. Whales, especially humpbacks, are often social. This one was a solitary giant, a scarred sentinel in the vast, empty ocean. And it was following us. Not just swimming in the same general direction, but actively shadowing our ship. If we adjusted course, it adjusted too, maintaining its position a few hundred yards off our port side. This went on for the rest of the day. Some of the crew found it a novelty, a bit of wildlife to break the tedium. I just found it… unsettling. There was an intelligence in the way it moved, in the occasional roll that brought a massive, dark eye to the surface, seemingly looking right at us.
The second day was the same. The whale was our constant companion. The novelty had worn off for most. Now, it was just… there. A silent, scarred presence. I spent a lot of my off-hours watching it. There was a weird sort of gravity to it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that its presence meant something, though I couldn’t imagine what. The scars on its back fascinated and repulsed me. What could do that to something so immense? A propeller from a massive ship? An orca attack, but on a scale I’d never heard of?
Then, late on the second day of its appearance, something else happened. Our ship started to lose speed. Not drastically at first, just a subtle change in the engine’s rhythm, a slight decrease in the vibration underfoot. The Chief Engineer, a perpetually stressed man, was down in the engine room for hours. Word came up that there was some kind of issue with one of the propeller shafts, or maybe a fuel line clog. Nothing critical, they said, but we’d be running at reduced speed for a while, at least until they could isolate the problem.
That’s when the whale’s behavior changed.
It was dusk. The ocean was turning that deep, bruised purple it gets before full night. I was leaning on the rail, watching it. The ship was noticeably slower now, the wake less pronounced. Suddenly, the whale surged forward, closing the distance between us with alarming speed. It dove, then resurfaced right beside the hull, maybe twenty yards out. And then it hit us.
The sound was like a muffled explosion, a deep, resonant THUMP that vibrated through the entire vessel. Metal groaned. I stumbled, grabbing the rail. On the bridge, I heard someone shout. The whale surfaced again, its scarred back glistening, and then, with a deliberate, powerful thrust of its tail, it slammed its massive body into our hull again. THUMP.
This time, alarms started blaring. “What in the hell?” someone yelled from the deck below. The Captain was on the wing of the bridge, her voice cutting through the sudden chaos. “All hands, report! What was that?”
The whale hit us a third time. This wasn’t a curious nudge. This was an attack. It was ramming us. The impacts were heavy enough to make you think it could actually breach the hull if it hit a weak spot. Panic started to set in. A creature that size, actively hostile… we were a steel ship, sure, but the ocean is a big place, and out here, you’re very much on your own.
A few of the guys, deckhands mostly, grabbed gaff hooks and whatever heavy tools they could find, rushing to the side, yelling, trying to scare it off. The bosun appeared with a flare gun, firing a bright red star over its head. The whale just ignored it, preparing for another run.
“Get the rifles!” someone shouted. I think it was the Second Mate. “We need to drive it off!”
I felt a cold knot in my stomach. Shooting it? A whale? It felt monstrously wrong, but it was also ramming a multi-ton steel vessel, and that was just insane. It could cripple us, or worse, damage itself fatally on our hull.
Before anyone could get a clear shot, as a group of crew members gathered with rifles on the deck, the whale suddenly dove. Deep. It vanished into the darkening water as if it had never been there. The immediate assumption was that the show of force, the men lining the rail, had scared it off. We waited, tense, for a long five minutes. Nothing. The ship continued its slow, laborious crawl through the water.
The Captain ordered damage assessments. Miraculously, apart from some scraped paint and a few dented plates above the waterline, our ship seemed okay. But the mood was grim. What if it came back? Why would a whale do that? Rabies? Some weird sickness?
“It’s the slowdown,” The veteran sailor said, his voice low, as he stood beside me later, staring out at the black water. “Animals can sense weakness. Ship’s wounded, moving slow. Maybe it thinks we’re easy prey, or dying.” “Prey?” I asked. “It’s a baleen whale, isn’t it? It eats krill.” The veteran sailor just shrugged, his weathered face unreadable in the dim deck lights. “Nature’s a strange thing, kid. Out here, anything’s possible.”
The engine problems persisted. We were making maybe half our usual speed. Every creak of the ship, every unusual slap of a wave against the hull, had us jumping. The whale didn’t reappear for the rest of the night, or so we thought.
My watch came around again in the dead of night, the hours between 2 and 4 a.m. The deck was mostly deserted. The sea was calm, black glass under a star-dusted sky. I was trying to stay alert, scanning the water, my nerves still frayed. And then, I saw it. A faint ripple, then the gleam of a wet back, much closer this time. It was the whale. It had returned, but only when the deck was quiet, when I was, for all intents and purposes, alone.
My heart hammered. I reached for my radio, ready to call it in. But then it did something that made me pause. It didn’t charge. It just swam parallel to us, very close, its massive body a dark shadow in the water. It let out a long, low moan, a sound that seemed to vibrate in my bones more than I heard it with my ears. It was an incredibly mournful, almost pained sound. Then, it slowly, deliberately, bumped against the hull. Not a slam, not an attack. A bump. Like a colossal cat rubbing against your leg. Thump. Then another. Thump.
It was the strangest thing. It was looking right at me, I swear it. One huge, dark eye, visible as it rolled slightly. It seemed… I don’t know… desperate? It kept bumping the ship, always on the port side where I stood, always these strange, almost gentle impacts.
I didn’t call it in. I just watched. This wasn’t the aggressive creature from before. This was something else. It continued this for nearly an hour. The moment I saw another crew member, a sleepy-looking engineer on his way to the galley, emerge onto the deck further aft, the whale sank silently beneath the waves and was gone. It was as if it only wanted me to see it, to witness this bizarre, pleading behavior.
The next day, the engineers were still wrestling with the engines. We were still slow. And the whale kept up its strange pattern. During the day, if a crowd was on deck, it stayed away, or if it did approach and men rushed to the rails with shouts or weapons, it would dive and disappear. But if I was alone on deck, or if it was just me and maybe one other person who wasn’t paying attention to the water, it would come close. It would start the bumping. Not hard, not damaging, but persistent. Thump… thump… thump… It was eerie. It felt like it was trying to communicate something.
The other crew were mostly convinced it was mad, or that the ship’s vibrations, altered by the engine trouble, were agitating it. The talk of shooting it became more serious. The Captain was hesitant, thankfully. International maritime laws about protected species, but also, I think, a sailor’s reluctance to harm such a creature unless absolutely necessary. Still, rifles were kept ready.
I started to feel a strange connection to it. Those scars… that mournful sound it made when it was just me… It didn’t feel like aggression. It felt like a warning. Or a plea. But for what? I’d stare at its scarred back and wonder again what could inflict such wounds. The gashes looked like they were made by something with immense claws, or teeth that weren’t like a shark’s. The circular marks were even weirder, almost like…
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