Mike wakes early and comes up to take over. There has been a big white cloud behind the boat, growing bigger for about half an hour but it suddenly becomes visible on the radar and glancing at it I can see that it is now quite dark.
While I finish writing the blog Mike wanders out to the cockpit and announces that the big black cloud now has a ‘thing’ dangling from it. Indeed it does. A bloody great waterspout – a tornado of sorts over the water – and it’s only a few miles behind us.
Photo: You can see the cloud with the waterspout just forming
Given that there is no wind to speak of which means that it’s travelling almost as slowly as we are, we are in no imminent danger but Mike takes decisive action by rapidly changing course to make certain we are out of harm’s way.
We watch the spectacle for about 15 minutes. You can clearly see the disturbance on the water and that on the right hand side of the cloud it is raining hard.
Eventually the spout twists which seems to make it lose power and the disturbance on the surface of the water stops. Within minutes, the cloud starts to turn a lighter grey and then back to white as it has now dumped all its water content into the sea. Mike puts us back on course and we continue towards Bermuda rather than Europe.
Photo: Impressive and a bit worrying when it comes up behind you!
Eventually the spout twists which seems to make it lose power and the disturbance on the surface of the water stops. Within minutes, the cloud starts to turn a lighter grey and then back to white as it has now dumped all its water content into the sea. Mike puts us back on course and we continue towards Bermuda rather than Europe.
All the excitement wakes me up just at the point when I should be going back to bed so unsurprisingly I cannot sleep. The pathetic breaths of wind are coming from behind and there is no cooling breeze coming in through the hatches. It is stifling everywhere on the boat. After about an hour’s fitful sleep, I give up and come back up again.
There’s no further excitement until late in the afternoon when a freighter that I can clearly see does not show on AIS until it is very close. Unable to work out for myself exactly how close he will come I wake Mike up so that’s two of us with not enough sleep under our belts today and irritatingly (from the perspective of waking Mike unnecessarily) the freighter passes almost two miles in front of us. It looks a lot bloody closer.
With virtually no wind and a current of 0.5 knots against us, we make pathetic headway. Gone are our thoughts of arriving on Friday morning. We will now be lucky if we make it before Customs and Immigration close on Friday afternoon. We take the main sail down – it’s doing no good anyway – and Mike ties the genoa out to the side to try to capture any wind that may come from the SW.
By the evening, the sea state is lumpy, but only little lumps. It makes for a bit of a jerky ride but not one to induce sickness.
Nearly there!
Our position is: 31degs, 10 mins N, 64 degs 34 mins W
Distance so far: 769 miles
Fantastic photos!
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