It's night, I've got the 12 to 4 watches (or 10 to 2?) as an engineer, making sure the boat doesn't stop or sink. The pilot (I can't remember his name) calls me up to the bridge and points out a blip on the radar, but we can't see the boat. We're nearing the Eastern end of the Florida Straits traffic zone and it's just not cool for a boat, a moving boat, to not run their lights at night. We're thinking pirates, maybe? He's calling them on multiple bands on the radio and they are not responding. We're a bit nervous, so the pilot wakes the entire boat and John gets onto the bridge with our other pilot. Too crowded for me, I step out. There's talk about where we have guns to get ready to defend ourselves and John is calling out to the unidentified and unlit vessel. Thangs are getting tense, when our searchlight is finally close enough to reveal the Cuban Maritime Guard running some interdiction. Now John gives them a piece of his mind. He's mad, and hell, we're all mad. There is just no effing reason for this as we could see them on radar! All they did was to needlessly scare us.
Now, I wasn't on the bridge to hear this part, but at some point a comparison was made between them and our maritime service. Then a voice came over the radio telling us that "we have your back". Apparently, there's been a stealth Coastie ship behind us all night running black and we DIDN'T pick them up on radar. We had no idea when they pulled behind us and we couldn't see them until it got light out. That's crazy stealth. I never saw them, as I was asleep by dawn.
