Deckhand Was Filming the Sunset on Day 40 at Sea When Something Grabbed the Container Ship
A deckhand filmed a Pacific sunset on day forty at sea, joking about whales, when giant tentacles crashed onto the container stacks and an eye rose by the hull.
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Marcus Bell, 34, had worked on cargo ships for nine years. He had seen typhoons off Taiwan, rogue swells in the North Atlantic, and more sunsets than he could count. On his current voyage, a 300-meter container ship hauling electronics and furniture from Busan to Long Beach, he had a running joke with his sister back in Oakland. Every evening he sent her a sunset clip with the same line: “Day whatever, still no whales.”
On day forty, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, he finally got something bigger than a whale.
Golden Hour
The video opens like every other one he sent. Marcus is standing on the starboard deck in his orange hi-vis vest, white hard hat, and navy hoodie. The sun is low and gold, the swell is light, and the steel container stacks behind him are glowing orange. He grins into his phone. “Day forty,” he says. “Still no whales.”
Then something hits the ship.
It comes over the side from his left, a gray, barnacle-crusted tentacle as thick as a city bus. It slams down across the top of a container stack forty feet away. The sound in the video is a deep, wet boom followed by the shriek of steel crumpling. Sparks spray where the container corners grind together.
The Stacks Fall
Marcus stumbles backward, and the camera whips around wildly. When it steadies, there are two more of them. They are wrapped around the stacks, flexing, the barnacles scraping paint off the steel. Then the stacks start to go. Three containers, each as heavy as a loaded truck, tip outward and fall over the side one after another. The splashes throw spray so high it spatters the lens.
Somewhere above him, the ship’s alarm horn starts to blare. It does not stop for the rest of the clip.
“Get Inside!”
Marcus runs. The footage bounces as he sprints along the rail toward the superstructure and the bridge. You can hear his breathing, ragged and terrified, and under it a groaning sound from the hull itself. Then the deck tilts. The ship lists toward the side where the tentacles are holding on, and loose lashing chains start sliding across the steel toward the water, clanking and skittering.
A crewman leaning out of a hatchway ahead of him is screaming, “Get inside! Get inside!”
Marcus does not get inside. For reasons he still cannot fully explain, he stops at the rail and turns his camera toward the water.
The Eye
The last seconds of the video are what made it famous. Rising out of the sea right beside the hull, close enough to touch, is an eye. It is yellow, with a horizontal black pupil, and it is the size of a car. It does not blink. It looks straight into the phone. For one long second, there is no sound but the horn and the water.
Then the screen tilts violently as the deck drops beneath him, and the video cuts to black.
What the Crew Says Happened
Marcus survived. He was thrown against the rail and broke two ribs. According to the account he gave his sister, and that crew members later repeated, the ship rolled hard to starboard and then snapped back upright as whatever had hold of it let go. The engines were never damaged. Eleven containers were lost overboard. The captain logged the event as “impact with a large unidentified marine animal.”
The next morning, when the sea was calm, the crew lowered a camera over the side to inspect the hull. They found round scars in the paint, some nearly three feet across, arranged in rows. Ring-shaped marks like that are known from sperm whales that fight giant squid, but those marks are usually the size of a coin or a dinner plate. Nobody on the ship had ever heard of marks like these.
The Debate
Marine biologists who have watched the clip are split. Some point out that the largest giant squid ever recorded were around forty feet long, nowhere near large enough to topple containers. Others note that the deep Pacific is the least explored environment on Earth, and that the colossal squid was not photographed alive until 2007. “We find new species at depth every single year,” one researcher said. “We just don’t usually find them this way.”
The shipping company has declined to comment beyond confirming the lost cargo. Marcus has been home in Oakland since the ship docked. He says he is not sure whether he will go back to sea.
“People keep asking if I was scared,” he said. “Of course I was scared. But what I can’t stop thinking about is how it looked at me. It wasn’t attacking. It was curious. Like we were the strange thing in its ocean.”
He still sends his sister sunset videos, from the beach now. He does not make the whale joke anymore.
More Stories Like This
If this one gave you goosebumps, read our stories about the cruise passengers who filmed something enormous moving under the ship at night, the fishermen who pulled up a net they could not explain, and the offshore rig crew who heard knocking on the hull at 300 feet. The ocean still keeps its secrets.
