Painted ship upon a painted ocean

These blogs are the driftwood of my mind, no chronological order.  This must have been early 70's, because I was a 2nd officer on an oil tanker heading across the Indian ocean.  Spotted a ship's liferaft, called Captain.  We tried to come alongside a couple of times but the wake of our big ship pushed the raft away.  Eventually I, foolishly, volunteered to swim out to the raft now some 200 yds away.  Over the side on pilot ladder, nice warm water.  About halfway to raft I remembered some chart corrections I had been doing earlier.  The depth of water under me was in miles rather than feet or fathoms.  The watchers on the ship told me later that I looked as if I was suddenly turbocharged.  The sudden fear of all that black water under me made me swim for the raft like an olympic champion.  I came up out of the water and dived inside the raft, quite oblivious whether it contained decomposing bodies or not.   Fortunately it was empty.  We got it back to the ship, any markings on it had been weathered off, but we assumed it had been washed off a vessel in a bad storm.