Position: 31 degrees, 22 minutes south 177 degrees, 26 minutes east
I’ve never heard of one before, but last night I saw one on the tail end of one of the squalls we sailed through.
Moonrise Charisma. Nice weather early on.
Got cold when the squalls were coming through.
"Hey, you guys want to come out in the rain with me?"
Yep, more squally weather. I gave Ann and Lisa very explicit instructions when I went to sleep around 2000. “Avoid the lightnings”. Right. I got wakened after an hour or so to consult on (wait for it….) some lightning that was approaching. They had the radar on and we were tracking a really big hit 24 miles off. After watching its direction on the radar, it looked like we should go to the left side and it would swing off to the east of us. Lisa was at the helm and for a while I continued to watch her path on the radar. Each time she turned my thought was; “That’s what I would have done”, so after one or two of those, I went back to sleep. A little while later I had the most vivid dream that Ann was waking me for something that needed looking at on deck. I jumped up, was just climbing the ladder when I thought: “I think that was a dream”. Turns out it was a dream, but a huge squall was just starting to hit. Massive rain, lightning, the whole thing. One thing I thought later was that lightning is awe inspiring to watch when it’s comfortably behind you, but terrifying when it’s in front. This particular squall is on par with the biggest I’ve ever seen. As we were trying to avoid it, it just grew bigger and swallowed us whole. Big, ominous, greasy dark grey inside with slashing lightning ready to tear us apart.
Somehow we got through it, but it wasn’t fun. The end of the squall was the beginning of my watch and Ann and Lisa were glad to dry off and get some sleep. I sat under the dodger waiting for the rain to stop, then finally some stars came out and the rain drifted off behind us. Just then the moon dropped below the clouds on the horizon and the moonlight lit up the rain squall we just passed through and that’s when I saw the rainbow. It was a perfect arch, about a mile across. The only difference with a daytime rainbow is that a moonlit one is shades of grey. There’s no color. It was beautiful in its strangeness.
Other than the squally night, today was a delight. Absolutely clear, ten knots or so of wind, just a nice slide. The only thing that marred the day was the head jammed. It’s stopped working and I can’t fix it while we’re bouncing around like this, so there’s nothing for it but to get out the bucket. Happy days.
It’s now evening, just after dinner and this is the night we have been anticipating the worst weather of our trip, at least according to the gribs I pulled on Monday and again last night. We’re right on the northern edge of a low that is coming across the top of NZ and it’s going to tag us for about 12 or so hours with winds in the high 20’s and low 30’s. That’s what we’re seeing right now. We’re down to a double reef and stays’l and doing 6-7 knots and are able to maintain our preferred course. At least for now. We’re all hoping for this to let up tomorrow. It’s not really bad, just a hassle. The gusts make the sails shudder, and the constant heeling makes it hard to move around much less cook, so canned soup for dinner and hope for better tomorrow. And of course I get to look forward to taking the toilet apart sometime in our future. Oh, yay.
