Got the grey matter?

By grey matter I don't mean the unused part of a mans body between his ears, I mean FOG.  Since there seem to be a current theme on the other blogs of "sailing in darkness", I might as well share an embarrassing story of my early days of sailing.

Being top of my class in sailing school and really loving navigation, I got a position on a 36ft yacht as navigator and "jack-of-all-sails".  This was a recreational yacht, so no serious racing, etc , just the Wednesday night regatta and occasional weekend offshore cruising.  

On the first off shore cruise, it was also my first encounter with navigation blindly and relying only on instruments.  We were approaching a small bay, where we would anchor for the evening, and visibility was down to 2 meters.  So  the seasoned skipper decided to reef down the iron sail to a near idle.  

All of a sudden none of the headings on the compass, GPS or chart plotter were the same.  We could here the waves break over on our port side  and to our right I knew were unsafe waters too.  What to do?  One thing we could trust was the traditional compass so we used that for our heading.  The GPS and chart plotter had the same way points, so we used that to track our progress on a old fashioned chart.  Every 2 minutes I would track our progress on the chart and shout to the Skipper 5 degrees to port or 10 degrees to starboard or keep her steady. 

my Picasso inspired art work - "navigation in the grey" 

 

We eventually made it to our anchoring spot, even thou it felt like forever. It was one on the most stressful sailing times of my life and as one would have it, as soon as we anchored, the fog lifted an we were in a beautiful bay drinking sherry.

Lesson learned:  

If you go to slow, your electronic nav systems can't pin point your exact course/heading. So go faster.

Sea Monsters - Fact or Fiction

I remember my first off shore race. Fresh out of Sailing school, with my skipper ticket in hand, I boarded a Bavaria 36 for the Mikonos Off Shore Regatta. Foul Weather gear and all the gadgets a young student could afford. The race there was uneventful with 0 wind. 90% of the fleet hoisting the iron sail and the old diesels purred up the coast to Mykonos. at 8pm the evening we entered the Harbor and looked for our mooring.

The next days bay racing was a different story, winds up to 35knts. Exhausted but still in good spirit the crew and skipper decided to head out to sea as the sun started to set over the horizon. We wanted to anchor at Dassen Island for the evening, only 20 miles away. As we rounded Jutten island the fog set in and so the ocean was starting to play tricks on us.

We were motoring in 35 m of water, 2miles form the coast line. Suddenly the echo sounder's alarm sounded, depth from keel to ocean floor read 2m. Skipper and crew alike started to question the instruments and their own knowledge of the ocean. Out popped a school of Dolphins at the bow and the echo alarm stopped.

Weird how ones mind starts to play tricks on you as the fog rolls in and night creeps nearer. With visibility down to zero, so did our speed. We were doing 3knts, crawling slowly towards the Island and a safe anchorage. In the fog eerie sounds seem to come from nowhere as you can hear whispers on the wind, yachts and trawlers a like sound their fog horns and somewhere in the distance a scream.

That scream was from our own bow. I think it sounded like TORPEDO! But that cant be, we aren't in hostile waters. I make my way to the bow only to see green streaks in the sea darting for our bow. Just as we brace ourselves for impact out jumps a friendly illuminant dolphin covered in phosphor. One of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. They were darting to our bow and jumping for 20 min before we entered house bay at Dassen Island, our anchorage. Relieved and exhausted 1am in the morning the entire crew stood at the stern and wrote their name on the phospor coverd sea.

Out came the bottle of sherry and tales of sea monsters and torpedoes.

Do sea monsters exist, our is it just a bottle of sherry and our imagination?