{"id":284,"date":"2021-04-15T00:13:53","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T00:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/?p=284"},"modified":"2021-04-15T00:13:57","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T00:13:57","slug":"284","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/?p=284","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sailing at night &#8211; with the wind screeching, or under a friendly moon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s the voices of drowned sailors calling to me. No, stop! This way lies madness! But it\u2019s easy to understand why sailors in the old days were such a superstitious lot. There\u2019s something overwhelming about the vastness and power of an angry sea, and your absolute vulnerability before it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve set. So all is fine, even though it doesn\u2019t feel that it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Happily, it\u2019s 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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sailing at night &#8211; with the wind screeching, or under a friendly moon Black, just black, with the wind howling&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingmanuka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}