Author: Ulrich Fingscheidt

I just finished my last bluewater passage.

No summer in this part of the world. Fog and rain. I leave the cabin only for seconds to adjust the sails. Treated myself with a bowl of fresh popcorn, sweet and salty. Delicious.

While my family and friends were asleep I played several rounds of ship tetris. I navigated south of the Trafic Separation Scheme Off Île D’Quessant. The photo shows all the ships lining up south of the TSS. Easy is the black symbol with the blue track. Now I am trying to get some sleep in the Inshore Traffic Zone.

The first thing I saw in the morning was this fishing vessel with no AIS signal on my plotter. I did not expect fishing vessels so far out. Lesson learned: The radar guard zone alarm is continuously activated now.

I called Luzon Strait, this cargo ship on VHF and the officer changed his course to give way to me. All good. The distance between us was 1 nm. My AIS alarm (“dangerous vessel”) went off when he was 9 nm in front of me. Another great tool for me is the AIS-page on the PredictWind App showing me the AIS-positions of most ships. Some class B AIS signals don’t show on this chart when they are too weak to be picked up by satellites. My class A AIS transponder has a higher output power and produces a very reliable signal.

In the afternoon a dense white wall of clouds appeared southeast of me. Further east were these waves, like dunes in the sky. This looked very impressive, but had no effect on the ground wind. I think it was some high wind from the the low #4 hitting a ridge of a high forming in the southwest. The phenomenon dissolved within 20 minutes.

The waves were just too wild last night. With just 2 m² of sail area I was at a safe speed of around 5 kn with the major wave direction 30 degrees from the stern. The wind blew with up to 32 kn all night. I sailed a detour of 65 nm. The ship movements were so vigorous that I could not fall asleep before 7.00 h in the morning. Now I am waiting for the wind to back to west to get back on course towards Brest in France.

These were the first direct sunrays since days this morning. Soon after this moment the day became super grey, dark, rainy, windy and cold.

All is grey outside. I send you a picture when there were still colours around. It was taken one day before I arrived in Horta. At the end of a sunset a green dot can be observed when the horizon is not obstructed by clouds. For quite some time it’s existence has been questioned. This green flash lasts just one second, sometimes even shorter. If you stare at the red setting sun you are likely to miss it since your retina cells become somewhat insensitive to light in the area where the bright sun has been. On June 28th 24, I took a series of pictures and was lucky to capture this phenomenon on camera. The scientific explanation is that the green end of the light spectrum gets bend more when passing the atmosphere. So you can see the green component of the light, while the red part of the upper limb of the sun is already below the horizon. The blue end of the spectrum gets diffracted when passing the atmosphere. That is the reason why the sky is blue.

The morning was nice. Now I’m beating upwind against the waves. This will go on like this for another 14 hrs.