Not exactly on topic, but in the same alley:
When I was young (pre-school) I often got to travel with my father on his ship. He was a captain of a container ship.
One day I was with him on the bridge, probably standing on my stool with my entire head buried into the radar funnel as usual. I loved the radar - even when there was nothing to see (I was about 6, so this must have been in 1975-76). And I liked the smell of the rubber funnel as well... :rotfl: This was probably in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere, but I can't really remember now.
Anyway, suddenly he called me over and gave me his binoculars. There was a periscope sticking out of the water some distance in front of us. This was the first time I realised that periscopes don't look like they do in Donald Duck comics, which was quite disappointing. I had complete confidence in Disney!
He said that we would catch up with it soon, so I got excited as to what would happen. Would it turn away, disappear or surface? After a while my father must have realised that the scope was actually gaining distance from us, because he said that we would not catch up with it after all.
I remember very clearly that something in the way he said it made me look at him (I remember some of the bridge crew did as well), and the look on his face made me uneasy.
The periscope continued gaining distance until we couldn't see it anymore.
Only several years later he told me that he had been torpedoed by submarines twice during the war. So I guess this realisation of how fast the new submarines had become underwater was the reason he became uneasy, combined with the memories of his past encounters with subs.
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