Sailing at night – with the wind screeching, or under a friendly moon
Black, just black, with the wind howling in the rigging. Worse, an undercurrent of sound, distinct, a male voice choir singing the same refrain over and over again. For a moment I think It’s the voices of drowned sailors calling to me. No, stop! This way lies madness! But it’s easy to understand why sailors in the old days were such a superstitious lot. There’s something overwhelming about the vastness and power of an angry sea, and your absolute vulnerability before it.
It’s disconcerting too, to be forging ahead, the bow smashing into the waves, into the absolute dark. No headlights to illuminate the path ahead. This is what it must be like for a pilot, flying in dense cloud on instruments alone. You reassure yourself, the wind’s coming from behind, north or a little north easterly, still definitely heading south. Two compasses on deck, both reading roughly 180 degrees. The autopilot says 182. Above all, the chart plotter down below, the screen clearly showing your direction, the bearing required to reach the waypoint that you’ve set. So all is fine, even though it doesn’t feel that it is.
Happily, it’s not always like this. Sail with a clear sky and a full moon and then a wide channel of the sea is lit brightly, the undulations of the water flickering in the light, and the rest of the sea dim rather than dark. The moon is your friend. My Atlantic crossing was well-timed: I left La Palma with a waxing moon. After a week it was full moon, although as I neared my destination, it was waning and rising later and later, shedding little light. By this stage though, I was so used to being in an empty sea that I hardly thought about it. Having a radar and being able to set an alarm should anything come within two nautical miles of us was certainly needed in the English Channel and sailing down the Portuguese coast, but once I left the Canaries I turned it off because it is fairly power-hungry. If you see one ship in seven days, the chance of that ship hitting you is remote to say the least.
Congratulations, Hans! A most impressive achievement. Now you have your sailing colours for sure. Glad you are now in Antigua. You must have been so pleased to have seen land at last. I have just skimmed through your six new postings. Want to read them properly soon, but I think you should be thinking about writing a book – they read so well. Meanwhile I wondered how much you used your motor, and whether you felt you had sufficient fuel? Once I saw you were doing 6 knots with only a 9 knot wind: presumably you were using your motor?
It was certainly a relief to get here! In the final stretch I did use the engine – I wanted control over what time I arrived. Didn’t want to arrive in the dark. But it’s also very possible that the wind info was wrong – a lot of the time the weather forecasts overstated the actual wind, and occasionally understated it.