When the Sea Speaks: A Glimpse into Captain Goeran’s Wildest Sea Stories

Spend a few days sailing the San Blas Islands aboard Quest, and sooner or later someone asks: “What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen at sea?”

The truth is, Captain Goeran doesn’t go out of his way to tell stories, but every now and then, over a shared meal or beneath a quiet night sky, a memory surfaces.

Sunset over the Caribbean Sea

He’s been at sea since he was a teenager, starting out on a Swedish fishing trawler at sixteen in the ’70s. A year later, he found himself on the bridge of a commercial ship, steering past the Statue of Liberty. For a young deckhand from a small Swedish town, it was a surreal moment, one of many to come.

Over his 50 years at sea, his path has taken him across every ocean, from Arctic ice to the swells of the Southern Ocean. He’s worked on container ships and tankers, liveaboard dive vessels, mega yachts, tug boats, Caribbean cruise ships, offshore supply ships, heavylift ships, ferries, expedition cruise ships, and more. One of those journeys brought him face to face with a freak wave, a towering 30-meter wall of water that struck the bridge of the Caledonian Star while crossing between Antarctica and South America.

Picture from the Seychelles in the late 90ies - Goeran, chief officer at that time, from the right.

His stories span from the 1970s to today, and from every corner of the globe. Quiet tales of navigating tense situations with pirates near Lagos in the early ’90s, when piracy was becoming a growing threat, and off the coast of Brazil in the early 2010s - just two examples of the countless curveballs life at sea can throw. Long nights spent on watch in polar waters, surrounded by silence and sky. Rare natural phenomena, like the Antarctic heavens blazing crimson in the stillness of the midnight sun as if the sky itself had caught fire.

In the Caribbean, especially in the 1980s, life was just as lively ashore as at sea, filled with joy, mischief, and a few moments best shared in person over a rum and a laugh.

One of the more unusual chapters includes a pass by the remote and enigmatic North Sentinel Island, home to one of the last uncontacted peoples on Earth. Fiercely protective of their isolation, the Sentinelese have long resisted all contact with outsiders, and today it is illegal to come within five nautical miles of the island. Moments like that remind you just how vast, and how wildly diverse, the world remains.

But for all the stories, the spirit behind them is the same: a deep respect for the sea, for those who sail it, and for the quiet lessons it teaches over time. These aren’t tales for show, they’re simply pieces of a life lived on the water, one watch at a time.

Goeran smoking a cigar onboard one of the mega yachts he captained. Here, crossing the Atlantic from Greece to the Caribbean, 2005.