Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing by Roger D. Taylor

Author:Roger D. Taylor [Taylor, Roger D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848769519
Publisher: The FitzRoy Press

13

The weather was starting to confuse me; it was impossible to find any discernible pattern or logic in the constant shifts of wind strength and direction. I was used to the tight depressions of the north Atlantic, with their rain-laden south-westerlies followed by clearing skies and a north-westerly change as predictable as it was refreshing. All day we had sailed into a rain-laden south-westerly. By ten that night we had moved out from under the cloud bank but instead of a blustery north-westerly we soon met another belt of rain and a failing wind. We had now spent five days or so struggling along in anything from a flat calm to a full gale; the wind direction too was in constant flux, but within a narrow vector that never strayed too far from south-west. There was something unfamiliar too about the scale and density of each passing agglomeration of cloud. Perhaps it had to do with our distance from the any sizeable land mass, particularly to the west, and the effects of the bigger changes of temperature and surface geography that go with terra firma. There was less interference here, less to break down the atmospheric gyrations into smaller units. In these more southerly latitudes the weather patterns themselves operate on a bigger scale than further north, adapting, no doubt, to the increased circumference of the globe. There was certainly an outlandish sculpted grandeur to the cloud forms we were now meeting, but my attempts to divine what was coming next were increasingly wide of the mark.

By breakfast time we were once more becalmed, but I had still failed to grasp a very simple fact. The ship’s log still rattled on about the imminence of a north-westerly change. It was a constant theme, a madman’s idée fixe. So keenly did I long to be freed up from these stultifying headwinds and regular calms that I was ignoring the plain and palpable evidence above and around me. Here is a prime example of optimism triumphing over rational analysis, lifted verbatim from my log entry of 0830 hours on the morning of Wednesday the eighteenth of June:

Currently becalmed in yesterday’s left-over slop and an up and down wind that I’m sure will become a true NWesterly soon, giving us a lead to Terceira.

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