night light

It's been an unusual night tonight. After so many days of not seeing any boats other than an occasional ship crossing my path very quickly, I am slowly overtaking another sailboat on a similar course. That means for night watch I need to be diligent to not run it down as it has the right of way, known in boating parlance as being the stand-on vessel. My boat being the give-way vessel.
At 0200 I had the boat, Numawan, one mile off my starboard bow. One mile is pretty close; much closer and I might start making that captain, or whoever's on watch, nervous. All I can see is his white stern light as is acceptable per regulations. I can tell I'm seeing a white stern light at deck level as it is blinking irregularly likely due to waves frequently obscuring it. Most sailboats nowadays also have a tricolor light at the top of the mast to make them more visible from a distance but this boat obviously doesn't (or it's not working or someone forgot to turn it on). She should only see my green bow light and a similar green from the top of my masthead (my boat has a tri-color). To those that haven't boated at night, you might be incredulous that something a mile off would be considered "close", but when you can only see a single point of light there is no way to accurately judge distance. So you can quickly get surprised when what your brain thinks it's figured out sp
atially turns out to be inaccurate. Also, to change course isn't just turning the wheel. There are multiple sheets and other things to coordinate. So time, and therefore distance, is your friend.
As a personal illustration point, I had an experience in the Caribbean a few months back when I was on watch in the middle of the night in 20+ knots of wind and big waves where I had a large vessel angling toward me (very fast) looking as if it was going to cross from port to starboard but I could see the red bow light and red masthead tricolor light. This boat was not sending AIS signals so I couldn't "cheat" and see it on my chart plotter. This is extremely unusual for big boats these days. Did I mention it was coming very fast? I was on a starboard tack so I should have been the stand-on vessel unless I was overtaking it (which I wasn't) or the upwind boat (which I was), but every captain is required to take evasive action to avoid a collision regardless of right of way. I chose to gybe hard to port and probably came within a couple hundred meters of a huge (repeat huge) sailboat. My immediate reaction was that I should have made the opposite decision and come about hard t
o starboard. I say this as an example of a first-hand situation where clearly my understanding of the spatial situation was not what it appeared to be. To this day I don't understand how I could have been seeing red lights based on its relative motion to me.
Back to tonight,.. Then a squall swept through. Suddenly the wind picked up my boat speed jumped from 5.5 knots to 9 knots. At the same time there was a wind shift (they almost always come as a pair). So I adjusted course to stay hard on the wind and try to keep the boat speed around 7-8 knots. The next time I looked up I saw a red light off my port bow. Just a minute ago he was off to my starboard showing a white light. WTF!?
I checked to starboard. Yup, she was right there where I left her; still showing her white light. So where'd this other thing come from???
The light looked a little more orange than red. Maybe a freighter? It's not on AIS as all commercial ships are required to broadcast now. It looks very tall and almost dead ahead, I would guess at least a couple miles off. As I continued to watch it, it looked more and more orange and less and less as a point source of light. I'm 500 miles from land so it can't be that. Then it became brighter and more readily apparent that what I'm looking at is the tip of the smile of a new moon rising at the horizon (hence the red/orange color) but mostly obscured by a dense cloud.
I'd like to say this kind of thing is an extremely rare occurrence but it's not. Also, you're not always your sharpest self at nighttime. I recall distinctly thinking one time that I was overtaking a very close boat that turned out to be Venus rising.
So now I am passing Numawan and she's showing her red port bow light and occasionally her white stern light as she swings in the waves and sometimes neither when a tall wave passes between us and obscures her entirely. All is well.
...and that sneaky new moon is nowhere to be seen due to the heavy cloud cover.