The lights I'm referring to aren't navigation lights. They're arrays, usually on arms that stick out from the side of the vessel, for attracting squid. They com

The lights I'm referring to aren't navigation lights. They're arrays, usually on arms that stick out from the side of the vessel, for attracting squid. They completely overwhelm the navigation lights in the photos I linked to. Since the author of the post is an airline pilot and an experienced photographer, I have to image he'd seen ships' navigation lights from the water before and these were significantly brighter. You can also see in the blog post photos that the shape of the lights is in keeping with being arrays, rather than a few point sources on each ship. They're rectangular or square, and remember that the photos were shot from about 34,000 feet (about 10km). I'd expect navigation lights to be a pinpoint at that distance. Anyway, I was able to answer my own question: red lights are used by fishing fleets for attracting saury, as discussed in this article about a separate "surreal collection of red lights observed from an aircraft" incident: https://observers.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20220805-debunked-mysterious-red-lights-pacific-fishing-boats https://observers.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20220805-debu... The author of the blog post even used the term "saury" in their explanation, but I didn't realize at the time that that was a type of fish.