Just got back from a cruise to Bermuda. On the way back, Mrs. Slug and I noticed something small and brown floating in the ocean. At first, we thought it was a clump of leaves. We weren’t too far off the coast of BDA and figured that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that some leaves floated into the ocean and survived.
However, later in the cruise, we saw even larger splotches, probably about 10-20 feet in diameter, floating by. And lots of them. So the leaf theory got tossed out the window. We just cannot imagine what this was. Some sort of pollution? Turds from a blue whale?
Bermuda, eh? That would put you in the western fringes of the Sargasso Sea and most likely you saw clumps of the famus Sargassum weed. MEBuckner’s mailbag article on the location…
Probably Sargassum as slaphead says, but colored spots in the ocean can also be caused by aggregations of animals or plankton (we tend to get orange and pink spots out here on the California coast), scat from whales (you’d very likely see the whale, though.) I assume that since you thought it was leaves you saw leaf-like structures?