Basically answering "Old Dodes"...although I agree with much of what he says, I invariably found that I only got a bit scared AFTER the event. While things were bucketing around and getting wet and so on everything seemed to happen either in slow motion or very much speeded up. As an aside, I generally found smaller ships were better at handling the very large lumpy stuff than big ships.
But looking at the photos makes me wonder if we were all mad for going to sea as a career....or did (do) we all have some sort of "death wish"!
One of the photos appears to be of a USN (?) ship preparing for a heavy weather RAS...she being the receiving ship. The wearing of semi-inflated lifejackets is normal procedure even in calm waters. None of the deck crew here seem at all peturbed by the apparent volume of water that plainly isn't going to land on them...although they'll still get wet. Wearing "lifelines" in this sort of situation would seem to the unitiated to be advisable....but the end result of that would be akin to taking 20 dogs for a walk on 20 different leads. BY.
I can equate with your comment about being scared after the event in extreme weather, I, almost, always found it rather exhilarating, at the time, and worried about it afterwards. The only time I was really frightened, on big ships, was on passage in 1959 from Halifax to Newport News in ballast on a 12,000 tonner, when in a hurricane we did over 30 miles backwards in 36 hours!!! Lots of structural damage was done and the dress of the days was brown corduroy trousers.
I agree with your comment about smaller ships. I found that the 4,500 GRT ships I occasionally sailed on rode heavy weather much better that bigger ships. The smaller tonnage rode the seas like corks, whereas the bigger ships were like half tide rocks.
In all my years as a professional seaman, I have only ever worn lifejackets at lifeboat drill and have never been on a merchant ship which had inflatable lifejackets available on board. I swallowed the anchor in 1989 so I guess things must have changed. Elf and Safety rules ok.
As far as being frightened on small boats, I will let you have my observations at a later date regatding the occasion when I and three others were caught in freak 84 mph winds in an open fishing coble off the NE Coast of the UK and were sunk by the RNLI LIfeboat sent to escort us into harbour when a wave picked her up and dropped her on top of us, smashing our bow off a mile or so from safety.
Cheers
John