Water spouts?
The plan for today was to go out for a two and a half hour sail, come in, swap crew and go out for another two and a half hour sail. The wind was light, Bft 2-4, the weather was forecast as cloudy/sunny spells.
We went out for a sail and everything was fine... till suddenly there is a gust and significant wind shift for about a minute then settled down again.
Then another one, but this time we're suddenly knocked about 15-20 degrees... again the significant wind shift… when we'd moved all the crew to the weather side of the boat a few seconds later we're flat again.
As I say the wind was light, about Bft 3 by this stage. The Kingfisher K20+ displaces about 1.5 tonnes and has about 500kg ballast. So we're a light boat.
Then we notice a small spray ring moving across the sea at probably 10 knots. Wow... the start of a water spout. By the time we'd seen the third spray ring and another sudden gust/wind shift, I decided that maybe being out in a small light sailing boat with full sails up was not the wisest thing with water spouts forming.
This was near to the Fishing Village in Larnaca, where some years earlier there had been a sizable mini tornado/water spout while I was helming King Malu and that… a 15-tonne heavy boat… was knocked to 30+ degrees by it. But we did have an asymmetric spinnaker up on that occasion. I remember the wind meter suddenly going to a high number of knots and the direction indicator going 360 two or three times.
Knowing very little about water spouts and whether the spray rings inevitably led to water spouts I decided to head back to the marina. Now having read about it, the cloud line along the coast, with sun on the water and clouds forming over the land that could be the weather for water spouts. I need to talk to more experienced sailors about this…
We went out for a sail and everything was fine... till suddenly there is a gust and significant wind shift for about a minute then settled down again.
Then another one, but this time we're suddenly knocked about 15-20 degrees... again the significant wind shift… when we'd moved all the crew to the weather side of the boat a few seconds later we're flat again.
As I say the wind was light, about Bft 3 by this stage. The Kingfisher K20+ displaces about 1.5 tonnes and has about 500kg ballast. So we're a light boat.
Then we notice a small spray ring moving across the sea at probably 10 knots. Wow... the start of a water spout. By the time we'd seen the third spray ring and another sudden gust/wind shift, I decided that maybe being out in a small light sailing boat with full sails up was not the wisest thing with water spouts forming.
This was near to the Fishing Village in Larnaca, where some years earlier there had been a sizable mini tornado/water spout while I was helming King Malu and that… a 15-tonne heavy boat… was knocked to 30+ degrees by it. But we did have an asymmetric spinnaker up on that occasion. I remember the wind meter suddenly going to a high number of knots and the direction indicator going 360 two or three times.
Knowing very little about water spouts and whether the spray rings inevitably led to water spouts I decided to head back to the marina. Now having read about it, the cloud line along the coast, with sun on the water and clouds forming over the land that could be the weather for water spouts. I need to talk to more experienced sailors about this…
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