The sea. It holds all the power of nature and has no mercy. If you don’t treat it with the utmost caution, it will chew you up and devour you.

You cannot begin to talk about the sea and its power without considering safety. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) have stations housing their rescue boats all around the country and are staffed by a special breed of men and women. I have never really understood why in the U.K. the people most involved in sea rescue are largely volunteers but the organisation and the individuals who crew the various lifeboats do a fantastic job.

Recently I have been spending a lot of time over at the coast looking out on the North Sea. I use a ship finder app on my phone to identify any vessels I see. Research suggests there is a magnetic anomaly over an area of the North Sea off the East Yorkshire coast. Apparently when vessels pass through this area, manual ship’s compass units behave erratically. On a marine chart I have there is also a submarine training ground marked nearby. I wonder if the two could be linked? Has the Ministry of Defence placed some equipment on the sea-bed to mess with submarine navigation equipment as part of their training of commanders? Or is the explanation something a little more other-worldly? Perhaps we will never know, but strange lights have been spotted on multiple occasions. We have yet to establish an explanation of what causes them and exactly what they are. I wonder if any of the crews who work the sea have seen them and could provide an explanation?

The North Sea is quite a busy waterway. Trawlers, cargo ships, passenger ships and assorted pleasure craft all use it. So you could be forgiven for wondering why more people have not reported seeing these lights. Often when they appear, they are only visible for seconds so if you’re not looking in the right direction, you will miss them. It has been suggested to me that what I’m actually seeing are navigation lights on vessels and they disappear when the vessel dips into a trough in a wave system. The main problem with this explanation is the colour of the lights being seen are not the standard navigation light colour. So in my mind it can’t be that.

Have you seen strange lights? Have you seen anything on or entering the sea you can’t explain? If you have, please do let me know.