The take off is the easy bit? I'd disagree, on the way in you have instruments and a limited amount of visual clues to assist in the approach. You sit for a minute or so on the lit deck then take off. All of a sudden you are into the blackness, subject to any number of deceptive inner ear signals and no external visual clues, you can not tell where the water ends and the sky begins, so it requires a total reliance on instruments. You shouldn't think about looking outside until you are through 500'.