First off thank you for the kind and detialled comment, this is very kind :)
We had a few ideas in mind, but I really like not taking the most obvious route when being given a theme.
We also though about making the game into a corridor so that the ships would need to go from one side of the screen to the other, but having ships come from everywhere at once seems more and chaotic :D
So yeah, sending the ships back to where they came from is a valid strategy, even though that means a lot of very confused sailors for sure
Anyway, thank you for playing and for the kind words :)