Location: s/v Liberty, somewhere in the Atlantic
Position: 25 30.19 N 060 23.18 W
It seems some of the most exciting stuff happens on Mark's watch. He's actually seen several bottles, a few fishing floats, some birds, and a packing crate on his watch! This morning was no different.
We'd been playing tag with squalls through the night with occasional rain and a bit of lightning, but no big wind to deal with.
John, Carter, and Mark were all on deck at watch change at 6 am, scanning the horizon periodically, when John said "Will you look at that!"
All eyes East. A waterspout. A tornado on the water. From the deck of the boat, the horizon is about 8 miles away in any direction. We could clearly see the base of the thing spewing out mist, so we know it was less than 8 miles away. Mark ran below, grabbed the camera and woke up Julie so she could see it.
John: "I don't think we want to be anywhere near that"
All the rest of the crew: "Uh...okay."
It lasted about 10 minutes and began to dissipate w/o getting very much closer - understandably to our great relief. As it began to dissipate we noticed more of them along the entire eastern sky - some long and stringy and touching down, some more like cones pointing down from the cloud cover. The whole show lasted about 25-30 minutes.
We spent the next couple of hours trying to guage whether we were going to outrun that particular ominous line of clouds and finally did leave them behind without incident.
Mark & Julies/v Rachel
http://svrachel.blogspot.com/
