Storms

from Dave:
Sooner or later, every sailor gets asked what they thought of the film “The Perfect Storm”. I personally haven’t seen it. Tanya Aebi, one of the youngest women ever to solo circumnavigate, wrote of her views on the picture in an article for Latitudes & Attitudes magazine a while back. She was not impressed. She didn’t like the background music.

There is a sound wind makes passing through wire rigging, a sort of yowl you never forget if you’ve ever heard it. This is the sound of a storm to a sailor, not some ominous orchestral music. You listen for that sound. You listen to it. It tells you a lot about what’s happening and what’s about to happen.

Storms at sea are noisy affairs. There is the yowl of wind on wire, the sound of lines and cables banging against things, the creaking of the hull and deck flexing (yes, flexing; a boat is not designed to be rigid. It flexes and gives with the sea.), the hiss and bang of water passing or striking the hull.

Then there are the sounds of the things in the boat shifting about. When we first bought Fiddler, we wondered about the many half-clothespins lying about. Then we put the boat in the water and discovered that they were there to wedge the sliding locker doors to keep them from rattling and keeping us up all night.

You find yourself noticing every unidentified noise and poking around until you can identify it. Most are harmless enough, but it could be the sound of an anchor beginning to work loose or maybe a sail needing attention. Boats in heavy weather are noisy affairs.

We have a low passing us by right now. When we got up, the wind was from the East Northeast at about 25 knots with low clouds and rain. This had been forecast, so we elected to leave the boat inside and load our gear from there rather than track mud all through her in the yard. There is still a bit to do yet, but she’s coming along nicely.

Commander’s Weather, our routing service (see the link on the sidebar) called us this morning to report a big low which may come into the Gulf of Maine around Wednesday and wanting to know our plans. Depending on how bad it looks, we may keep Fiddler on land until it passes and then launch, test and sail as soon as we can after it passes. The thing about sailing is that you have to keep your plans loose to account for the weather.

As Gordon Bok wrote,

“The ways of man are passing strange,
He buys his freedom and he counts his change.
Then he lets the wind his days arrange
And he calls the tide his master.”