July 11th – 1:30am: 16 Deg 42’N, 115 Deg 12’W

The moon is out, the wind is up, and Khulula is ghosting along on an ocean twinkling with phosphoresce. The stars are incredible, and are starting to look more and more like the Southern Hemisphere stars of my childhood. The time is 1:30am and the midnight to 3am watch is mine. On any other evening, I would fall easily into the routine – set the count down alarm for 30 minutes, make some tea, download the midnight weather files, hear the alarm upstairs, climb the companionway stairs, do a 360 degree scan for ships in the night, reset the countdown, update the Khulula log with lat/long and other vital details.

Tonight is different, I skip all the other tasks and spend the whole shift watching the flashes of light on the southern horizon with eerie fascination; a fascination magnified by their location directly over our bow, and that they lay directly between us and where we need to be. It is hard to describe the feeling of loneliness that comes over a crew of three, 1000 miles away from the nearest dry land, when confronted with the idea of passing through a giant thunder and lightning storm at sea. We have not seen any sign of human life for the past few days, not even as much as a ship on the horizon – and it is strange how much comfort even that will give you.

Lightning at sea is not life threatening in itself. Sure, your mast is the highest piece of conductive material for a 1000 miles (similar to walking around on a flat plain with a ladder stuck straight up), but on a sailboat you have the benefit of a nice grounding electrode in the form of a keel. Any current in the mast will immediately ground itself in the ocean. Great right? No, not great. En route to grounding itself in the ocean, the LARGE current will likely toast, or do some damage to most electronics on board. Compass, Radar, Computer, Radio. The former three we could do without, the radio, no way. That single piece of electronics is out lifeline to land. This very email was composed on a computer, converted into packet data by our pactor modem, and then sent on the HF (as apposed to VHF) frequencies via Single Sideband radio. Every evening we check into the pacific sea fareres net, and update them on our position. We have a schedule with Ron from Blue Water cruising every evening at 9 – he updates us on our family, and takes our reports. I talk to Don Anderson at “Summer Passage” every morning at 815 and bounce routing and navigating ideas off him. Long story short, without our radio, we would be alone, completely alone.

You can imagine the trepidation approaching this belt of lightning – how far away are they? I still see stars above us. Are they moving? Which direction is the storm going? Can we plan to try and get in between then? The flashes are coming at least every 30 sec or so, and lighting up all the clouds on the southern horizon. Are they just little thunder and lightning storms, or are we witnessing the birth of a tropical cyclone that has yet to be picked up by weather faxes and forecasters… Either way, it is just plain darn scary, especially alone at watch at 3am.

Today is the 16th July, and looking back on that night shift still sends tingles up and down my spine!

I am going to go now, with our limited bandwidth and all. There will be another blog entry soon describing our adventure to 10 degrees north and our transit of hurricane alley. Shift is over, time for some rest. I need to be up to get our weather routing in less than 5 hours…

Cheers,
Ryan