Storms

WIND
We have been watching it build for days, as we twisted to find a way through. The little arrows on the chart are wind direction, each fletch on their tails is ten knots. There’s one there with four fletches. We’re running into it at 17 knots. I am not a mathematician in the sense that a slug is not an eagle, but that would seem to give a relative wind of 57 knots, which is about a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. It sounds like it, and feels like it if you try to poke your head up over the screen on the bridge wing, but it’s not it, because we’re only in the two and a half fletch arrows at the moment. It is wild, though.

WAVES
The weather map lays out the low pressure zones in contours, with waves instead of heights. We had three metres plus today: it may not sound much but they were great pyramids of iron grey. Whenever we dived into one the ship seemed to stop, throwing out wings of lucent blue spray. We have six metres tomorrow, and ten – ten – waiting at the mouth of the Cabot Strait, south of Newfoundland. Two low pressure systems are converging, apparently. Our course will curve over Flemmish Cap, then hook up under Newfoundland, the ice just to the north and the beast to the south. “I have calcualted the vessel can stand six metres,” says the Captain. He carries on humming “Famous Blue Raincoat”. She can certainly stand more, of course, but we are on a deadline. We do not want to slow down and ride it.

EYE
The graph of barometric pressure dropped as we ran into the first storm, then flattened as we crossed its eye. The eye is amazing; eerie blue light and waves rising up from nothing like strange ideas. (Earlier they came on like the first guests at a party, singly, some sliding by. Then they put their arms around each other’s shoulders and were rather harder to miss.) Suddenly the horizon fell back a dozen miles and there was nothing, nothing but the ocean, pearly painted clouds and a darkly loping calm. We are crossing the mid of the mid Atlantic; right through the ‘L’ on the chart.

WAY-AYE
We are secured for heavy weather: chairs are roped to tables; the bins have sprouted cords. I scrounged a sticky mat to keep this laptop on my desk. John, the second mate, loves storms, but then he can sleep in them. He was in one ship which stood on its tail – they thought they were going to go backwards. I don’t think he even counts this as rough. Ah, Geordies. We sat in the pilots’ chairs on the bridge, hanging on, my eyes glued to the black -crested monsters (you can see the big ones coming a way off) while John listed the key errors in Towering Inferno and Diamonds are Foever, and assured me that there is one millisecond of Dead Calm in which you can see that Nicole Kidman’s behind.

OW
Doors slam, containers make dreadful noises, the engine shakes the floor. When they went into a stopper of a wave in the old sailing ships the timbers did indeed shiver. You shut your eyes and lie down but the plunging seems deeper and you wait for the bang as she digs in. The bookshelves in the library are rattling and wrenching as though they mean to jump off the wall and avalanche someone with Ken Follets.

Zzz?
Mark the steward claims fatigue is the key to sleeping; it’s no problem, he says. John says he was in one where the trick was to lock your hands together behind you, under your mattress, no less, and sleep like that – otherwise you would fly forward. “What a way to make a living,” he says, fondly, as we skid down into another trough.