NavList:

   

Reply

George Huxtable asked:

> These raise a few question. Have mariners, (perhaps Nav-L members, even) in
> large vessels or small, passed through the eye of a waterspout? What's it
> like in there? Can sails or rigging survive if not furled in time? Do
> published accounts exist?


As to the last of those: The only published account that I can recall
reading is in John Caldwell's account of his Pacific crossing in the
1940s ("Desperate Voyage", Victor Gollancz, 1950 -- my copy is a Corgi
paperback of 1967) . He saw a waterspout and, having often wondered
about them while watching them from the decks of distant merchant ships,
he sailed right into it to see what would happen. (Not necessarily the
brightest thing to do.) The account of it is in his Chapter XI, for
those who want to read it in full.

He described a cold wet fog with a whirling wind of 30 knots at most
(enough to heel his yacht's gunwale underwater, though she was reefed
down at the time). Inside the spout, it was "dark as night", though his
eyes had not had time to adapt to the low light level so perhaps it
wasn't quite that dark. After very little time, the spout moved past and
left him alone. This example was 25 to 30 metres across.

Not a really big deal -- though sailing through waterspouts just for the
experience is still not something to be recommended.


My own direct experience of the phenomenon is limited to once seeing a
watery equivalent of a "dust devil" begin to form on the Derwent River
off Hobart, Tasmania. (That really wasn't enough to be called
"experience" at all.) A rotating body of water droplets formed and began
to lift above the water surface but it died away in moments, without
ever becoming more than barely visible and never reached more than a few
metres in height. The rotational speed was certainly very low.


Trevor Kenchington


--
Trevor J. Kenchington PhD                         Gadus@iStar.ca
Gadus Associates,                                 Office(902) 889-9250
R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour,                     Fax   (902) 889-9251
Nova Scotia  B0J 2L0, CANADA                      Home  (902) 889-3555

                     Science Serving the Fisheries
                      http://home.istar.ca/~gadus

   

Reply