Red and green should never be seen, so my mother used to tell me it's a fashion faux pas, and more recently I learned it means a ship is headed straight for you (red and green nav lights at the same time)
It also applies to radar images as shown below showing the super squall we encountered during the day today.it was one of the biggest yet and was approximately 12M x 8M in size. No avoiding it so we sailed through and weathered the 35K winds and teaming rain for an hour or so.
Jen and the kids sitting out the rain..
From there things didn't get much better, dodging squalls the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Changing sails and course to try make the best of it, till around midnight something strange happened. Normally the squalls track from 30 degrees to the right of the ground wind. We started having some track in different directions and soon realised we had squalls from the south heading towards us as well as squalls from the north.
The ones in the north looked more ominous as they were constantly lit up with lightning. A nervous few hours with lightning all around us and above us. At one stage Sephina took a near hit and the watermaker turned itself on due to the power surge. Backup nav computer, sat phone and gps were all in the makeshift faraday cage (the oven) in case we lost ships electronics. The electrical storm to the North was an amazing sight. I was watching one cloud 5M distant. It just sat there motionless for over two hours. Big and black, around 10M wide and every minute or so it would release lightning from it's centre. Always the same place, closest to the sea, but not like any lightening I've ever seen. It was more like an ark welder welding metal. A thick yellow line of electricity vertical and it seemed 1/4M thick, turning on for 5 seconds then turning off. Elsewhere in the cloud were the usual fork and sheet lightening which looked tame compared to the arc.
After dealing with squalls and this for 20 hrs I was exhausted and eventually left Sephina in Jen and Aviads hands to slowly motor on course and hope it passes over while I crashed out at 0300. In the morning things cleared and finally we had a great days sailing with Sephina romping along at 8-9K in the 15-20K southerly. I think the strange weather last night was caused by the low pressure system a few hundred miles north of us that had a trough running down to where we were located. Not much fun but the sailing and sunshine today has left that behind us.
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